Papaji – Sri H.L. Poonja Quotes by Remez Sasson

papaji, poonja, quotes
​
Words and Sayings from Papaji

Thoughts are impediments to seeing your own face. Don’t give rise to any thought, and discover who you are.

What is purification of the mind? No thought. This thought-less mind, sattvic mind, no mind, can be called Consciousness itself. Self itself.

If you address the mind with “Who are you?” it will disappear.

Mind is nothing but thought. You can’t separate thought itself from the mind.

When we use the word “I”, there is ego. Then there is the mind, then there is a body, then there are senses, then there are sense objects, and then all manifestation arises.

Who is journeying for freedom? The one who is already free. Just get rid of the concept, “I am the body, separate from the source.” You return to what you always were.

Nothing arises without Self. All existence is one in one’s own Self.

Meditation is to effortlessly turn the mind toward that energy which energizes mind.

The Silence that I speak about is neither meditating nor sitting quiet. The Silence that I speak about has nothing to do with meditation or talking or not talking because then the mind is still running about here and there and everywhere. What I mean by Silence is that should be no thought rising from the mind. No thought rising from your mind is Silence.

Stillness of mind comes from giving up all attachments except that attachment to Self.

When the mind is quiet, all is Self.

When mind moves the world arises, so be still, throw away everything, and be free.

Self is what you are. You are That Fathomlessness in which experience and concepts appear. Self is the Moment that has no coming or going. It is the Heart, Atman, Emptiness. It shines to Itself, by Itself, in Itself.

Self is what gives breath to Life. You need not search for It, It is Here. You are That through which you would search. You are what you are looking for! And That is All it is.

You are the unchangeable Awareness in which all activity takes place.

Nisargadatta discussion group members



"We are the creators and creatures of each other,
causing and bearing each other's burden."

**
I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very
thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become
the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other
focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like.
Love says "I am everything". Wisdom says "I am nothing". Between the two,
my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the
subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am
both, and neither, and beyond both. (269)

**
Unless you make tremendous efforts, you will not be convinced that
effort will take you nowhere. The self is so self-confident that
unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal
conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute
nothingness of the self-image. (523)

**

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your
mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does
self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and
steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles
without any effort on your part. (311)

**
"The world is like a sheet of paper on which something is typed. The
reading and the meaning will vary with the reader, but the paper is
the common factor, always present, rarely perceived. When the ribbon
is removed, typing leaves no trace on the paper. So is my mind - the
impressions keep on coming, but no trace is left."(225)

**
When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing,
seek nothing, expect nothing, then the Supreme State will come to you
uninvited and unexpected. (195)

**
"All that a guru can tell you is:
'My dear Sir, you are quite mistaken aboutyourself.
You are not the person you take yourself to be.'" (443)

**
"There is no such thing as a person.
There are only restrictions and limitations.
The sum total of these defines the person. (...)
The person merely appears to be, like
the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume
and smell of the pot."

**
By all means attend to your duties. Action, in which you are not
emotionally involved and which is beneficial and does not cause
suffering will not bind you. You may be engaged in several directions
and work with enormous zest, yet remain inwardly free and quiet, with
a mirror like mind, which reflects all, without being affected. (50)

**
"To expound and propogate concepts is simple,
to drop all concepts is difficult and rare"

**
"There is nothing to practise. To know yourself, be yourself. To be
yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let
your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking"

I am That PG 259 (Chetana version)

**
The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really
one, seek unity and that is love. (70)

**
In people with devotion,
even with limited intellect,
the intellect is not making mischief,
as it is here.

This is the place where the intellect gets annihilated.

Consciousness and the Absolute, chapter 32

**
There was a house, and in the house there was a person; now the
person is gone and the house is demolished. The sum total is,
whatever experiences you have, whether for a day or for years, it is
all illusion. The experiences begin with knowingness.
What is the most ingrained habit you have? It is to say "I Am'. This
is the root habit. Words and experiences are unworthy of you. This
habit of experiencing will not go until you realize that all this
domain of the five elements, are unreal, This "I Amness" is itself unreal.

Consciousness and the Absolute, pg. 48



Nisargadatta Discussion group



M: Start with the body. From the body you get the knowledge of `I
am'. In this process you become more and more subtle. When you are in
a position to witness the knowledge `I am', you have reach the
highest. In this way you must try to understand, and the seeds of
knowledge will sprout in you.

When you come to the end of material world-knowledge, at that stage
you transcend the observer and the observed. That means that you are
in a true state of being-ness. Thereafter, you enter the state of
transcending being-ness, where the identities of the observer and
observed disappear.

Suppose somebody abuses you and you find out who it is. Is it the
body? It is not the body. Then what could it be? Finally you come to
the conclusion that it is spontaneously happening out of whatever
that body is. You will not attribute it to any individual. When your
individuality is dissolved, you will not see individuals anywhere, it
is just a functioning in consciousness. If it clicks in you, it is
very easy to understand. If it does not, it is most difficult. It is
very profound and very simple, if understood right. What I am saying
is not the general run of common spiritual knowledge.

When you reach a state when body is transcended, mind is transcended
and consciousness is also transcended; from then on all is merely
happening out of consciousness, which is the outcome of the body, and
there is no authority or doer-ship. When a sound is emanating out of
a body, it is not that somebody is talking, it is just words
emanating, just happening, not doing.

If you understand the basis thoroughly,
it will lead you very far, deep into spirituality.

The Absolute alone prevails. There is nothing but the Absolute. The
un-manifest manifested itself, that manifest state is Guru and it is universal.

Who is the one who recognizes this body-mind? This `I Am-ness' which
recognizes the body-mind is without name and form, it is already there.

June 27, 1981 Page 108
Consciousness and the Absolute

**

June 30,1981

Maharaj: All knowledge is like the son of a barren woman.
Presently there are only beingness and functioning.
The individuality and personality are thrown overboard.
There is no personality, so there is no question of birth, life, or death.
What remains is only the consciousness without name or form.
The form needs a name, but when both are not there,
then the consciousness remains only for so long as the body is there,
but without any individuality.
The body is of as much use now as it was prior to birth and after death.
How do you know me?
You know me only the acquisition of body form, name and form.
Do you really see me as I am? I doubt it.
Now the conclusion is that the unborn is enjoying the birth-principle.
That principle that is born took so much time to understand this,
and is it is the unborn only which prevails.
It took so much time for the Self to understand the Self.
We have tied around our necks so many concepts; death, this "I AM",etc.
Similarly, Concepts, of good and evil are unnecessary.
We have developed these concepts and are caught in them.
How does one think about Self-knowledge?
Do you abide in the Self or in the process do you think of something else as the Self?
You are wrapped up and lost in your concepts.
For instance, you have a concept about friendship.
How long do you keep your friends? You keep them so long as they are useful to you.
So long as a friend is of some benefit to you,
that’s how long you would like to keep that friendship.
Now, how can I actually derive benefit out of a friend?
I, as an individual, am not there, so how can there be a question of benefit?
Benefit to whom? How can there be a question of friendship at all.
Anybody, who comes here can sit. I will allow him to sit for some time,
but later on I will say, "You may leave," Why?
Because I have no intention or purpose of having any friendship with that person.
Ordinarily, there is some purpose for deriving certain benefits out of an association with another.
When you meet someone in friendship, there may be some intention to serve one another.
But I have no friends. Even this "I Amness" will not remain as my friend.
I am not able to talk any longer—the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
Previously I used to welcome people but now I am not in a position to welcome them.
They come, they sit and they go by themselves. I cannot even extend my hospitality.
All my knowledge has gone into liquidation. I am unconcerned.

Consciousness and the Absolute 112-114

**
Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you don't
want to suffer, don't go to sleep.

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Selected Quotations From:

I Am That
Talks with Sri NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

Chetana Press., Bombay 1992

www.chetana.com






THEMES;


HOW DO I REALISE WHO I REALLY AM?

A QUIET MIND

THE 'I AM' APPROACH

NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ'S WORLD

THE SUPREME

LOVE

PAIN AND PLEASURE

EARNESTNESS

GUIDANCE

I NEED DO NOTHING

THE PERSON

TRUE HELP

EXPERIENCE

OTHER






HOW DO I REALISE WHO I REALLY AM?

Do understand that you are destined for enlightenment. Co-operate with your destiny, dont go against it, dont thwart it. Allow it to fulfil itself. All you have to do is to give attention to the obstacles created by the foolish mind. p.311

There are no conditions to fulfil. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in results of your efforts-the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration-all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it. p.148

Try to be, only to be. The all-important word is 'try'. Allot enough time daily for sitting quietly and trying, just trying, to go beyond the personality, with its addictions and obsessions. Don't ask how, it cannot be explained. You just keep on trying until you succeed. If you persevere, there can be no failure. What matters supremely is sincerity, earnestness; you must really have had surfeit of being the person you are, now see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits. This steady resistance against the unnecessary is the secret of success. p.509

You need not get at it (Enlightenment), for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly slip into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realisation that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love - worthy and lovable. p.3

acceptance - letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. p.6

Discover all you are not. Body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, time, space, being and not being, this or that - nothing concrete or abstract you can point out to is you. You must watch yourself continuously - particularly your mind - moment by moment, missing nothing. This witnessing is essential for the separation of the self from the not-self ........be aware of that state which is only, simply being, without being this or that or the other. p.27

I see what you too could see, here and now, but for the wrong focus of attention. You give no attention to your self. Your mind is all with things, people and ideas, never with your self. Bring yourself into focus, become aware of your own existence. See how you function, watch the motives and the results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself, by inadvertence. By knowing what you are not, you come to know your self. The way back to your self is through refusal and rejection. One thing is certain: the real is not imaginary, it is not a product of the mind. Even the sense 'I am' is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer: it shows where to seek, but not what to seek. Just have a good look at it. Once you are convinced that you cannot say truthfully about yourself anything except 'I am', and that nothing can be pointed at can be yourself, the need for the 'I am' is over - you are no longer intent on verbalising what you are. (NM did this practise only in the early part of his 3 years of change) All you need is to get rid of the tendency to define your self. All definitions apply to the body only and to its expressions. Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly. p.5

When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you. p.54

Don't look for quick results, there may be none within your noticing. Unknown to you, your psyche will under go a change, there will be more clarity in your thinking and feeling, purity in your behaviour. You need not aim at these - you will witness the change all the same. p.125

Whenever a thought or emotion of desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn away from it......just refuse attention......just turn away.....look between the thoughts....when you do not resist, you meet with no resistance......turn away from your desires and fears and from the thoughts they create and you are at once in your natural state. p.349

The Supreme is the easiest to reach for it is your very being. It is enough to stop thinking and desiring anything, but the Supreme. p.66

Humility and silence are essential, however advanced. p.99

Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal. p.173

What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory, mysteriously and marvelously, you may call that 'god' It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain....You can do nothing to bring it about, but you can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there. p.188

You have to be very alert, or else your mind will play false with you. It is like watching a thief - not that you expect anything from a thief, but you do not want to be robbed. In the same way you give a lot of attention to the mind without expecting anything from it. p.189

Treating everything as a dream liberates. p.189

By giving attention to your living, feeling and thinking, you free yourself from them and go beyond them. Your personality dissolves and only the witness remains. Then you go beyond the witness. Do not ask how it happens. Just search within yourself....In one [person] you desire and fear, in the other [witness] you are unaffected by pleasure and pain and are not ruffled by events. You let them come and go. p.189

See the event as event only, the transient as transient, experience as mere experience and you have done all you can. Then you are vulnerable to reality, no longer armoured against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and experiences. But as soon as there is some like or dislike, you have drawn a screen. p.190

When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing then the Supreme State will come to you uninvited and unexpected! p.195

The desire for truth is the highest of all desires, yet, it is still a desire. All desires must be given up for the real to be.....When all search ceases, it is the Supreme State. p.196

Give up all ideas about yourself and simply be. p.197

Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realise that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear. p.201

All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.....Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. p.204

Having never left the house you asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining.....Don't rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether. p.206

To know that you are neither body nor mind, watch yourself steadily and live unaffected by your body and mind, completely aloof, as if you were dead. It means you have no vested interests, either in the body or in the mind.....Whatever happens, remind yourself that only your body and mind are affected, not yourself. p.210

Do what you feel like doing. Don't bully yourself. Violence will make you hard and rigid. Do not fight with what you take to be obstacles on your way. Just be interested in them, watch them, observe, enquire. let anything happen - good or bad. But dont let yourself be submerged by what happens. p.220

What you need will come to you, if you do not ask for what you do not need. Yet only few people reach this state of complete dispassion and detachment. It is a very high state, the very threshold of liberation. p.249

Awareness, being lucid harmony in action, dissolves dullness and quietens the restlessness of the mind and gently, but steadily changes its very substance. This change need not be spectacular; it may be hardly noticeable; yet it is deep and fundamental shift from darkness to light, from inadvertence to awareness. p.272

Just give full attention to what in you is crude and primitive, unreasonable and unkind, altogether childish, and you will ripen. It is the maturity of heart and mind that is essential. It comes effortlessly when the main obstacle is removed - inattention, unawareness. In awareness you grow. p.296

Ask yourself such questions as: 'Was I really born?' 'Am I really so-and-so? 'How do I know that I exist?' 'Who are my parents?' 'Have they created me, or have I created them?' 'Must I believe all I am told about myself?' 'Who am I, anyhow?' p.296

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. p.302

Realise that what you are cannot be born nor die and with the fear gone all suffering ends. p.302

If in the state of witnessing you ask yourself, 'Who am I?', the answer comes at once, though it is wordless and silent. p.303

As long as you are pleased with the lesser, you cannot have the highest. Whatever pleases you, keeps you back. p.304

It is the 'I-am-the-body' idea that is so calamitous. It blinds you completely to your real nature. Even for a moment do not think that you are the body. Give yourself no name, no shape. In the darkness and the silence reality is found. p.305

But unselfish action, free from all concern with the body and its interests will carry you into the very heart of Reality. p.305

You must be extreme to reach the supreme. p.310

It is your mind that has separated the world outside your skin from the world inside and put them in opposition. This created fear and hatred and all the miseries of living. p.310

It is useless to search for the truth, when the mind is blind to the false. It must be purged of the false completely before truth can dawn on it. p.314

All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. p.317

Whatever is conceived by the mind must be false, for it is bound to be relative and limited. p.315

If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human, should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.
It does not mean that you must be brainless and foolhardy, improvident or indifferent: only the basic anxiety for oneself must go. You need some food, clothing and shelter for you and yours, but this will not create problems as long as greed is not taken for a need. Live in tune with things as they are and not as they are imagined. p.316

Either you remain forever hungry and thirsty, longing, searching, grabbing, holding, ever losing and sorrowing, or go out wholeheartedly in search of the state of timeless perfection to which nothing can be added, from which nothing - taken away. In it all desires and fears are absent, not because they were given up, but because they have lost their meaning. p.331

The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly and without return. p.332

Leave it (knowledge) all behind you. Forget it. Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs. Abandon all verbal structures, all relative truth, all tangible objectives. The absolute can be reached by absolute devotion only. Don't be half-hearted. p.340

To be, you must be nobody. To think yourself to be something, or somebody, is death and hell. p.371

Pure awareness is a state of pure witnessing, without the least attempt to do anything about the event witnessed. Your thoughts and feelings, words and actions may also be a part of the event, you watch all unconcerned in the full light of clarity and understanding.....once you are in it, you will find that you love what you see, whatever may be its nature. This choiceless love is the touchstone of awareness. If it is not there, you are merely interested - for some personal reasons. p.382

Learn to look at your consciousness as a sort of fever, personal and private, in which you are enclosed like a chick in its shell, out of this very attitude will come the crisis which will break the shell. p.382

Begin with the admission that you do not know and start from there.....The very admission:'I am ignorant' is the dawn of knowledge. p.384

You are like the man in the cinema house, laughing and crying with the picture, though knowing fully well that the is all the time in his seat and the picture is but the play of light. It is enough to shift attention from the screen to oneself to break the spell......without waiting for the death of the body - it is enough to shift attention to the Self and keep it there. All happens as if there is a mysterious power that creates and moves everything. Realise that you are not the mover, only the observer, and you will be at peace. p.389

Just as every wave subsides into the ocean, so does every moment return to its source. Realisation consists in discovering the source and abiding there. p.411

To know that you are a prisoner of your mind, that you live in an imaginary world of your own creation is the dawn of wisdom. p.426

It is only when you are satiated with the changeable and long for the unchangeable, that you are ready for the turning round and stepping into what can be described, when seen from the level of the mind, as emptiness and darkness. For the mind craves for content and variety, while reality is, to the mind contentless and invariable. p.436

Take note of the peculiar nature of pure awareness, its natural self-identity, without the least trace of self-consciousness, and go to the root of it and you will soon realise that awareness is your true nature and nothing you may be aware of, you can call your own. p.437

But if you stay with the idea that you are not the body nor the mind, not even their witness, but altogether beyond, your mind will grow in clarity, your desires - in purity, your actions - in charity and that inner distillation will take you to another world, a world of truth and fearless love. Resist your old habits of feeling and thinking; keep on telling yourself: 'No, not so, it cannot be so; I am not like this, I do not need it, I do not want it', and a day will surely come when the entire structure of error and despair will collapse and the ground will be free for a new life. p.443

Once you have understood that nothing perceivable, or conceivable can be yourself, you are free of your imaginations. To see everything as imagination, born of desire, is necessary for self-realisation. We miss the real by lack of attention and create the unreal by excess of imagination. p.489

For this (finding reality) you need a well-ordered and quiet life, peace of mind and immense earnestness. At every moment whatever comes to you unasked, comes from God and will surely help you, if you make the fullest use of it. It is only what you strive for, out of your own imagination and desire, that gives you trouble. p.491

Keep quiet, undisturbed, and the wisdom and the power will come on their own. You need not hanker. Wait in silence of the heart and mind. It is very easy to be quiet, but willingness is rare. You people want to be supermen overnight. Stay without ambition, without the least desire, exposed, vulnerable, unprotected, uncertain and alone, completely open to and welcoming life as it happens, without the selfish conviction that all must yield you pleasure or profit, material or so-called spiritual. p.494

Refuse attention, let things come and go. Desires and thoughts are also things. Disregard them. Since time immemorial the dust of events was covering the clear mirror of your mind, so that only only memories you could see. Brush off the dust before it has time to settle; this will lay bare the old layers until the true nature of your mind is discovered. p.494

The experience (of self-realisation) is unique and unmistakable. it will dawn on you suddenly, when the obstacles are removed to some extent. It is like a frayed rope snapping. Yours is to work at the strands. The break is bound to happen. It can be delayed, but not prevented. p.502

A level of mental maturity is reached when nothing external is of any value and the heart is ready to relinquish all. Then the real has a chance and it grasps it. Delays, if any, are caused by the mind being unwilling to see or to discard. p.514

Relinquish your habits and addictions, live a simple and sober life, don't hurt a living being; this is the foundation of Yoga. p.515

Once you have understood that you are nothing perceivable or conceivable, that whatever appears in the field of consciousness cannot be your self, you will apply yourself to the eradication of all self-identification, as the only way that can take you to a deeper realisation of your self. You literally progress by rejection - a veritable rocket. p.518


A QUIET MIND

When the mind is kept away from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never known; and yet you recognise it at once as your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience, you will never be the same man again; the unruly mind may break its peace and obliterate its vision; but its bound to return, provided the effort is sustained; until the day when all bonds are broken delusions and attachments end and life becomes supremely concentrated in the present. p.308

Look at your mind dispassionately; this is enough to calm it. When it is quiet, you can go beyond it. Do not keep it busy all the time. stop it - and just be. If you give it a rest, it will settle down and recover its purity and strength. Constant thinking makes it decay. p.311

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. p.311

Pay no attention [to your thoughts]. Don't fight them. Just do nothing about them, let them be, whatever they are. Your very fighting them gives them life. just disregard. Look through. p.241

If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events. Its your restlessness that causes chaos. p.247

As long as you are a beginner certain formalised meditations, or prayers may be good for you. But for a seeker for reality there is only one meditation - the rigorous refusal to harbour thoughts. To be free from thoughts is itself meditation....You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Don't get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it....Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognise it. p.224f

When thus the mind becomes completely silent, it shines with a new light and vibrates with new knowledge. It all comes spontaneously, you need only hold on to the 'I am' p.332

The silence is one and without it the words could not have been heard. It is always there - at the back of the words. Shift your attention from the words to silence and you will hear it. p.359

Do understand that the mind has its limits: to go beyond, you must consent to silence. p.370

To see reality is as simple as to see one's face in a mirror. Only the mirror must be clear and true. A quiet mind, undistorted by desires and fears, free from ideas and opinions, clear on all levels, is needed to reflect the reality. Be clear and quiet - alert and detached, all else will happen by itself. p.397

The unchangeable can only be realised in silence. Once realised, it will deeply affect the changeable, itself remaining unaffected. p.437

To go beyond the mind, you must be silent and quiet. Peace and silence, silence and peace - this is the way beyond. p.450

Abandon all desires, keep your mind silent and you shall discover. p.453

What you see as false, dissolves. It is the very nature of illusion to dissolve on investigation. Investigate - that is all. You cannot destroy the false, for you are creating it all the time. Withdraw from it, ignore it, go beyond, and it will cease to be. p.455

This attitude of silent observation is the very foundation of yoga. You see the picture, but you are not the picture. p.469

You cannot see the true unless you are at peace. A quiet mind is essential for right perception, which again is required for self-realisation. p.481

In peace and silence the skin of the 'I' dissolves and the inner and the outer become one. The real spiritual practise is effortless. p.483

When the mind is quiet it reflects reality. When it is motionless through and through, it dissolves and only reality remains. p.484

Keep very quiet and watch what comes to the surface of the mind. Reject the known, welcome the so far unknown and reject it in its turn. Thus you come to a state in which there is no knowledge, only being, in which being itself is knowledge. p.486

When you are not in a hurry and the mind is free from anxieties, it becomes quiet and in the silence something may be heard which is ordinarily too fine and subtle for perception. The mind must be open and quiet to see. p.508

You need not worry about your worries. Just be. Do not try to be quiet; do not make 'being quiet' into a task to be performed. Don't be restless about 'being quiet', miserable about 'being happy'. Just be aware that you are and remain aware - dont say: 'yes, I am; what next?' There is no 'next' in 'I am'. it is a timeless state. p.508



THE 'I AM' APPROACH

The sense of 'I am' is your own. You cannot part with it, but you can impart it to anything, as in saying: I am young, I am rich etc. But such self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage. p.65

I trusted my Guru..........He told me to concentrate on ìI Am - I did. He told me that I am beyond all perceivables and conceivables - I believed. I gave him my heart and soul, my entire attention and the whole of my spare time (I had to work to keep my family alive). As a result of faith and earnest application, I realised my self within three years. p. 52

My guru ordered me to attend to the sense 'I Am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed, I did not follow any particular course of breathing or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I Am'....Keep empty, keep available, resist not what comes uninvited. In the end you reach a state of non-grasping, of joyful non-attachment, of inner ease and freedom, indescribable, yet wonderfully real. p.375

Just keep in mind the feeling ìI Am; merge in it, until your mind and feelings become one. By repeated attempts, you will stumble on the right balance of attention and affection and your mind will be firmly established in the thought-feeling ìI Am. Whatever you think, say or do, this sense of immutable and affectionate being remains as the ever-present background of the mind. p. 48 .

Give up all questions except one ìWho am I? p.70

Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. p.199

Even the sense ìI am is composed of the pure light and the sense of being. The 'I' is there even without the 'am'. So is the pure light there whether you say 'I' or not. Become aware of that pure light and you will never lose it. The beingness in being, the awareness in consciousness, the interest in every experience - that is not describable, yet perfectly accessible, for there is nothing else. p.201

First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then realise that immense ocean of pure awareness which is both mind and matter and beyond both. p.205

I did not condition my mind by thinking: 'I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond'. I simply followed his instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am'. and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with, nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all - embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared - myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence. p.239

By being with yourself, the 'I am'; by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. p.278

In the very beginning I was giving some attention and time to the sense 'I am', but only in the beginning. p.398

Q.Can it happen that the mind is clear and quiet and yet no reflection [of reality] appears? NM. There is destiny to consider. The unconscious is in the grip of destiny: it is destiny, in fact. One may have to wait. But however heavy may be the hand of destiny, it can be lifted by patience and self-control. Integrity and purity remove the obstacles and the vision of reality appears in the mind. p.399

Step back from action to consciousness, leave action to the body and the mind; it is their domain. Remain as pure witness, till even witnessing dissolves in the Supreme..... It is like washing printed cloth. First the design fades, then the background and in the end the cloth is white. The personality gives place to the witness, then the witness goes and pure awareness remains. p.401

As long as there is consciousness, its witness is also there. The two appear and disappear together. p.423

Keep the 'I am' in focus of awareness, remember that you are, watch yourself ceaselessly and the unconscious will flow into the conscious without any special effort on your part. Wrong desires and fears, false ideas, social inhibitions are blocking and preventing its free interplay with the conscious. Once free to mingle, the two become one and the one becomes all. The person merges into the witness, the witness into awareness, awareness into pure being, yet identity is not lost. It is transfigured, and becomes the real Self, the eternal friend and guide. You cannot approach it in worship. No external activity can reach the inner self; worship and prayer remain on the surface only; to go deeper meditation is essential, the striving to go beyond the states of sleep, dream and waking. In the beginning the attempts are irregular, then they recur more often, become regular, then continuous and intense, until all obstacles are conquered. p.447

'I am' is a tiny seed which will grow into a mighty tree - quite naturally, without a trace of effort. p.510



NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ'S WORLD

When I met my Guru, he told me: 'You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense 'I am', find your real self. I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon! It took only three years to realise my true nature. My Guru died soon after I met him, but it made no difference. I remembered what he told me and persevered. p.301

If you imagine yourself as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. I do not see the world as separate from me and so there is nothing for me to desire, or fear. p.123

The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused. Just like gold made into ornaments has no advantage over gold dust, except when the mind makes it so, so are we are in being - we differ only in appearance. We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.


Pleasure and pain lost their sway over me. I was free from desire and fear. I found myself full, needing nothing. p.30

To me it is 'a body', not 'my body', 'a mind'. not 'my mind'. The mind looks after the body all right, I need not interfere. p.31

Whatever is done, is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they all are real to the man in bondage; to me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself. p.179

To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless, immovable, rock-like, unassailable; a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity. p.191

All is attended to in minutest details and yet there is a sense of unreality about it all. So is the case with me. All happens as it needs, yet nothing happens. I do what seems to be necessary, but at the same time I know that nothing is necessary, that life itself is only a make-belief. p.191

There was discovery and it was sudden. Just as at birth you discover the world suddenly, as suddenly I discovered my real being. p.191f

I am neither conscious nor unconscious. I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions....A person is a set pattern of desires and thoughts and resulting actions; there is no pattern in my case. There is nothing I desire or fear - how can there be a pattern. p.222

I see as you see, hear as you hear, taste as you taste, eat as you eat. I also feel thirst and hunger and expect my food on time. When starved or sick, my body and mind go weak. All this I perceive quite clearly, but somehow I am not in it. I feel myself as if floating over it, aloof and detached.....as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them were somewhere far out on the horizon. I am like a cinema screen - clear and empty - the pictures pass over it and disappear, leaving it as clear and empty as before. In no way is the screen affected by the pictures, nor are the pictures affected by the screen. p.267

Having realised that I am one with, and yet beyond the world, I became free from all desire and fear. I did not reason out that I should be free - I found myself free - unexpectedly, without the least effort. This freedom from desire and fear remained with me since then. Another thing I noticed was that I do not need to make an effort; the deed follows the thought, without delay and friction. I have also found that thoughts become self-fulfilling; things would fall in place smoothly and rightly. The main change was in the mind; it became motionless and silent, responding quickly, but not perpetuating the response. Spontaneity became a way of life, the real became natural and the natural became real. And above all, infinite affection, love, dark and quiet, radiating in all directions, embracing all, making all interesting and beautiful, significant and auspicious. p.269

Q.But when you look at yourself, what do you see? NM. It depends how I look. When I look through the mind, I see numberless people. When I look beyond the mind, I see the witness. Beyond the witness there is the infinite intensity of emptiness and silence. p.355

Once my Guru told me: 'You are the Supreme Reality', I ceased having visions and trances and became very quiet and simple. I found myself desiring and knowing less and less, until I could say in utter astonishment: 'I know nothing, I want nothing.' p.391

There was never any journey. I am, as I always was. p.392

I look, but I do not see in the sense of creating images clothed with judgements. I do not describe nor evaluate. I look, I see you, but neither attitude nor opinion cloud my vision. And when I turn my eyes away, my mind does not allow memory to linger; it is at once free and fresh for the next impression. p.445

All three states (waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep) are sleep to me. My waking state is beyond them. As I look at you, you all seem asleep, dreaming up words of your own. I am aware, for I imagine nothing. It is not samadhi (peaceful trance state), which is but a kind of sleep. It is just a state of mind unaffected by the mind, free from past and future....To be a person is to be asleep. p.453

In my world the seeds of suffering, desire and fear are not sown and suffering does not grow. p.485

It ('I am') enables me to become a person when required. Love creates its own necessities, even of becoming a person. p.488

They (self-realised people) may laugh and cry according to circumstances, but inwardly they are cool and clear, watching detachedly their own spontaneous reactions. Appearances are misleading and more so in the case of a self-realised people. p.529

THE SUPREME

There are no steps to self-realisation. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible....Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realisation you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind. p.331

The world and the mind are states of being. The supreme is not a state. It pervades all states, but it is not a state of something else. It is entirely uncaused, independent, complete in itself, beyond time and space, mind and matter. ........There is nothing to recognise it by. It must be seen directly, by giving up all search for signs and approaches. When all names and forms have been given up, the real is with you. You need not seek it. Plurality and diversity are the play of the mind only. Reality is one. P. 38.

The real does not begin; it only reveals itself as beginningless and endless, all-pervading, all-powerful, immovable prime mover, timelessly changeless. p.142

What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory, mysteriously and marvelously, you may call that 'god' It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain....You can do nothing to bring it about, but you can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there. p.188

Reality is not an event, it cannot be experienced....reality neither comes nor goes. There is no such thing as an expression of reality.....Only reality is, there is nothing else. p.190f

Reality is the ultimate destroyer. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one - this is the ultimate solution of every conflict......As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. p.205

To locate a thing you need space, to place an event you need time; but the timeless and spaceless defies handling. It makes everything perceivable, yet itself is beyond perception. The mind cannot know what is beyond the mind, but the mind is known by what is beyond it. p.361


LOVE

When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realise the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self - realisation can break it. Go for it resolutely. p.213

In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all. Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds; love in freedom is love of all....When you are love itself, you are beyond time and numbers. In loving one you love all, in loving all, you love each. One and all are not exclusive. p.258

All the universe will be your concern; every living thing you will love and help most tenderly and wisely. p.309

In love there is not the one even, how can there be two? Love is the refusal to separate, to make distinctions. Before you can think of unity, you must first create duality. When you truly love, you do not say: 'I love you; where there is mentation, there is duality. p.352

PAIN, PLEASURE and DESIRE

The obstacles to the clear perception of one's true being are desire for pleasure and fear of pain. Its the pleasure-pain motivation that stands in the way......Giving up desire after desire is a lengthy process with the end never in sight. Leave alone your desires and fears, give your entire attention to the subject, to him who is behind the experience of desire and fear. Ask: who desires? Let each desire bring you back to yourself. p.144

.....pleasures lose their tang and pains their barb when the self is known. Both are seen as they are-conditional responses, mere reactions, plain attractions and repulsions, based on memories or preconceptions. Usually pleasure and pain are experienced when expected. p.145

Pain and pleasure go always together. Freedom from one means freedom from both. If you do not care for pleasure, you will not be afraid of pain. p.145

When you realise that you are beyond both pain and pleasure, aloof and unassailable, then the pursuit of happiness ceases and the resultant sorrow too. For pain aims at pleasure and pleasure ends in pain, relentlessly. p.147

Happiness depends on something or other and can be lost; freedom from everything depends on nothing and cannot be lost. Freedom from sorrow has no cause and, therefore, cannot be destroyed. Realise that freedom. p.147

Go to the source of both pain and pleasure, of desire and fear. Observe, investigate, try to understand. p.121

....for the sake of pleasure you are committing many sins. And the fruits of sin are suffering and death. p.82

Pain and pleasure happen, but pain is the price of pleasure, pleasure is the reward of pain...To know that pain and pleasure are one is peace. p.165

You imagine that without cause there can be no happiness. To me dependence on anything for happiness is utter misery. Pleasure and pain have causes, while my state is my own, totally uncaused, independent, unassailable. p.179

But when the discriminative mind comes into being and creates distinctions, pleasure and pain arise. p.181

In one [person] you desire and fear, in the other [witness] you are unaffected by pleasure and pain and are not ruffled by events. You let them come and go. p.189

Sex is an acquired habit. Go beyond. As long as your focus is on the body, you will remain in the clutches of food and sex, fear and death. Find yourself and be free. p.217

You are always seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, always after happiness and peace. Don't you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable? Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking, nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which 'I am' is timelessly present. Soon you will realise that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels, that disturbs. p.240

- desires fulfilled breed more desires. Keeping away from all desires and contentment in what comes by itself is a very fruitful state - a precondition to the state of fulness...freedom from desires is bliss. p.249

When you know that you lack nothing, that all there is, is you and yours, desire ceases. p.259

Whatever may be the situation, if it is acceptable, it is pleasant. If it is not acceptable, it is painful. p.277

As the acceptance of pain is the denial of the self, and the self stands in the way of true happiness, the wholehearted acceptance of pain releases the springs of happiness. p.278

Don't anticipate and don't regret, and there will be no pain. It is memory and imagination that cause suffering. p.279

A man's desire for a woman is innocence itself compared to the lusting for an everlasting personal bliss. p.299

You must unlearn everything. God is the end of all desire and knowledge....All desires must be given up, because by desiring you take the shape of your desires. When no desires remain, you revert to your natural state. p.336

Q. How am I to practise desirelessness?
NM. No need to practice. No need of any acts of renunciation. Just turn your mind away, that is all. Desire is merely the fixation of the mind on an idea. Get it out of its groove by denying it attention. p.338

Whatever you think about with desire or fear appears before you as real. p.344

To understand suffering, you must go beyond pain and pleasure. p.383

Cease from looking for happiness and reality in a dream and you will wake up. You need not know all the 'why' and 'how', there is no end to questions. Abandon all desires, keep your mind silent and you shall discover. p.453

It is desire that causes repetition. There is no recurrence where desire is not. p.454

Desire is of the past, fear is of the future. p.454

Each pleasure is wrapped in pain. p.455

The right state and use of the body and the mind are intensely pleasant. It is the search for pleasure that is wrong. Do not try to make yourself happy, rather question your very search for happiness. It is because you are not happy that you want to be happy. Find out why you are unhappy. p.468

....pleasure is a distraction and a nuisance, for it merely increases the false conviction that one needs to have and to do things to be happy when in reality it is just the opposite. p.486f

Do not be afraid of freedom from desire and fear. It enables you to live a life so different from all you know, so much more intense and interesting, that, truly, by losing all you gain all. p.505

When the centre of selfishness is no longer, all desires for pleasure and fear of pain cease; there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy, the ecstasy of giving from a perennial source. p.511

Desirelessness is the highest bliss. p.49



EARNESTNESS

Whatever work you have undertaken-complete it. Do not take up new tasks, unless it is called for by a concrete situation of suffering and relief from suffering. Find yourself first, and endless blessings will follow. Nothing profits the world as much as the abandoning of profits. p.145f

Go within, without swerving, without ever looking outward. p.145

When you are dead earnest, you bend every incident, every second of your life to your purpose. You do not waste time and energy on other things. p.119

Whatever you do for the sake of truth, will take you to truth. Only be earnest and honest. The shape it takes hardly matters....Mere longing, undiluted by thought and action, pure, concentrated longing, will take you speedily to your goal. It is the motive that matters, not the manner....Who has not the daring will not accept the real even when offered. Unwillingness born out of fear is the only obstacle p.172

If the seeker is earnest, the light can be given. The light is for all and always there, but the seekers are few, and among those few, those who are ready are very few, and among those few, those who are ready are very rare. Ripeness of heart and mind is indispensable. p.194

Assiduously investigate everything that crosses your field of attention. With practice the field will broaden and investigation deepen, until they become spontaneous and limitless. p.379

There must be immense longing for truth, or absolute faith in the Guru. Believe me, there is no goal, nor a way to reach it (Truth is a pathless land - JK) You are the way and the goal, there is nothing else to reach except yourself. p.380

Compassion is the foundation of earnestness. Compassion for yourself and others, born of suffering, your own and others. p.433

Earnestness, not perfection, is a precondition to self-realisation. Virtues and powers come with realisation, not before. p.434

Earnestness is not a yearning for the fruits of one's endeavours. It is an expression of an inner shift of interest away from the false, the unessential, the personal. p.456

GUIDANCE

The greatest Guru is your inner self. Truly, he is the supreme teacher. He alone can take you to your goal and he alone meets you at the end of the road. Confide in him and you need no outer Guru. But again you must have the strong desire to find him and do nothing that will create obstacles and delays. p.149

Meet your own self. Be with your own self, listen to it, obey it, cherish it, keep it in mind ceaselessly. You need no other guide. As long as the urge for truth affects your daily life, all is well with you. p.173

To rise in consciousness from one dimension to another, you need help. The help may not always be in the shape of a human person, it may be a subtle presence, or a spark of intuition, but help must come. The inner Self is watching and waiting for the son to return to his father. At the right time he arranges everything affectionately and effectively. Where a messenger is needed, or a guide, he sends the Guru to do the needful. p.274

Self-awareness tells you at every step what needs be done. When all is done, the mind remains quiet. p.427

I NEED DO NOTHING

Just realise the One Mover behind all that moves and leave all to Him. If you do not hesitate, or cheat, this is the shortest way to reality. Stand without desire and fear, relinquishing all control and all responsibility.... What is wrong in letting go the illusion of personal control and personal responsibility? Both are in the mind only. p.151


It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in results of your efforts-the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration-all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it. p.148

You give reality to concepts, while concepts are distortions of reality. Abandon all conceptualisation and stay silent and attentive. Be earnest about it and all will be well with you. p.154

Nothing is done by me, everything just happens. I do not expect, I do not plan, I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal. p.191

All will happen by itself. You need not do anything, only don't prevent it. p.242

If you just try to keep quiet, all will come - the work, the strength for work, the right motive. Must you know everything beforehand? Don't be anxious about your future - be quiet now and all will fall into place. p.248

Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in. p.260

Deepen and broaden your awareness of yourself and all the blessings will flow. You need not seek anything, all will come to you most naturally and effortlessly. p.261

The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage. p.298

In the light of calm and steady self-awareness inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. p.311

Just turn away from all that occupies the mind; do whatever work you have to complete, but avoid new obligations; keep empty, keep available, resist not what comes uninvited. p.375



THE PERSON

The memory of the past unfulfilled desires traps energy, which manifests itself as a person. When its charge gets exhausted, the person dies. Unfulfilled desires are carried over into the next birth. Self-identification with the body creates ever fresh desires and there is no end to them, unless this mechanism of bondage is clearly seen. It is clarity that is liberating, for you cannot abandon desire, unless its causes and effects are clearly seen. I did not say the same person is reborn. It dies for good. But its memories remain and their desires and fears. They supply the energy for a new person. The real takes no part in it, but makes it possible by giving it the light. p.381

Q. How does the error of being a person originate? NM A bundle of memories and mental habits attracts attention, awareness gets focalised and a person suddenly appears. Remove the light of awareness, go to sleep or swoon away - and the person disappears. p.255

When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realisation the person ceases. p.37


That which does not exist cannot have a cause. There is no such thing as a separate person....How does the personality come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves. p.206

You are not in the body, the body is in you! The mind is in you. They happen to you. They are there because you find them interesting. p.212

You are too much concerned with past and future. It is all due to your longing to continue, to protect yourself against extinction. And as you want to continue, you want others to keep you company, hence your concern with their survival. But what you call survival is but the survival of a dream. p.259

The person is merely the result of misunderstanding. In reality, there is no such thing. Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession, leaving traces in the brain and creating an illusion of continuity. A reflection of the watcher in the mind creates the sense of 'I am' and the person acquires an apparently independent existence. In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying himself with the 'I' and the 'mine'. The teacher tells the watcher: you are not this, there is nothing of yours in this, except the little point of 'I am', which is the bridge between the watcher and his dream. ìI am this, I am that' is dream, while pure 'I am' has the stamp of reality on it. You have tasted so many things - all came to naught. Only the sense 'I am' persisted - unchanged. Stay with the changeless among the changeful, until you are able to go beyond. p.343

Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person. p.343

Q. After liberation what remains of the person? NM A vague memory remains, like the memory of a dream, or early childhood. After all, what is there to remember? A flow of events, mostly accidental and meaningless. A sequence of desires and fears and inane blunders. Is there anything worth remembering? The person is but a shell imprisoning you. Break the shell. p.343

Doership is a myth born from the illusion of 'me' and 'the mine'. p.376

Having seen that you are a bundle of memories held together by attachment, step out and look from the outside. You may perceive for the first time something which is not memory. You cease to be Mr-so-and-so, busy about his own affairs. You are at last at peace. You realise that nothing was ever wrong with the world - you alone were wrong and now it is all over. p.390

In reality you were never born and never shall die.....In fact, there is no body, nor a world to contain it; there is only a mental condition, a dream-like state, easy to dispel by questioning its reality. p.427

All you know is the person, the identity - which is not a person - you do not know, for you never doubted, never asked yourself the crucial question - 'Who am I'. The identity is the witness of the person and the practise consists in shifting the emphasis from the superficial and changeful person to the immutable and ever - present witness. p.442
To be a person is to be asleep. p.453

Until we can look at fear and accept it as the shadow of personal existence, as persons we are bound to be afraid. p.454



TRUE HELP

The only help worth giving is freeing from the need for further help. Repeated help is no help at all....You can help another by precept and example and, above all, by your being. p.146

What is in the world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world, you must step out of it. p.207

If you really want to help a person, keep away. If you are emotionally committed to helping, you will fail to help....A man is really helped when he is no longer in need of help. All else is just futility. p.260

Of course, if you have a chance to help somebody, by all means do it and promptly too, don't keep him waiting till you are perfect. But do not become a professional do-gooder. p.345

First be free of suffering yourself and then only hope of helping others. [free in the moment - ACIM] You do not even need to hope - your very existence will be the greatest help a man can give his fellowmen. p.280

Only the people who have gone beyond the world can change the world. p.326


EXPERIENCE

You need not gather any more (experience), rather you must go beyond experience. p.313

Experience leaves only memories behind and adds to the burden which is heavy enough. You need no more experiences....Learn from the sorrows of others and save yourself your own. It is not experience that you need, but the freedom from an experience. p.317

But experience is the denial of Reality, which is neither sensory nor conceptual, neither of the body, nor of the mind, though it includes and transcends both. p.317f

Unless we revolt against this craving for experience and let go the manifested altogether, there can be no relief. We shall remain trapped. p.328

The only trouble is that you are addicted to experience and you cherish your memories. In reality it is the other way round; what is remembered is never real; the real is now. p.430


OTHER

As soon as the mind is ready the sun shines on it. p.54

All illness begins in the mind. Take care of the mind first, by tracing and eliminating all wrong ideas and emotions. Then live and work disregarding illness and think no more of it. With the removal of causes the effect is bound to depart. p.226

The real does not die, the unreal never lived. p.234

Heal your mind and it will cease to project distorted, ugly pictures. p.234

A prolonged ecstasy will burn out your brain, unless it is extremely pure and subtle. p.242

When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence. p.242

Consciousness can only become more subtle and refined and that is what happens after death. p.263

Man's fivefold body (physical etc) has potential powers beyond our wildest dreams.....Some of the powers can be developed by specialised training, but the man who flaunts such powers is still in bondage. p.270

There is the body and there is the Self. Between them is the mind, in which the Self is reflected as 'I am'.....When the mind merges in the Self, the body presents no problems. It remains what it is, an instrument of cognition and action, the tool and the expression of the creative fire within. p.274

If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you, you need not wait to be what you are. p.316

The true refuge is only in the unmanifested. p.325

Fearlessness is the door to the Supreme. p.353

Disregard names and shapes, don't be attached to them; your attachment is your bondage. p.353

The trinity: mind, self and spirit, when looked into, become unity. p.363

Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go everything. The giving up is the first step. But the real giving up is in realising that there is nothing to give up. p.363f

Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own....Stand still , be quiet. p.371

Q.What is the value of spiritual books? NM. They help in dispelling ignorance. They are useful in the beginning, but become a hindrance in the end. One must know when to discard them. p.376

Karma is only a store of unspent energies, of unfulfilled desires and fears not understood. The store is being constantly replenished by new desires and fears. p.411

Most of our karma is collective. We suffer for the sins of others, as others suffer for ours. Humanity is one. p.465

How can a person limited in time and space, a mere body-mind, a gasp of pain between birth and death, be happy? The very conditions of its arising make happiness impossible. p.430

Consciousness is like a cloud in the sky and the water drops are the content. The cloud needs the sun to become visible, and consciousness needs being focussed in awareness. p.437

Reflected awareness, the sense: 'I am aware' is the witness, while pure awareness is the essence of reality. Reflection of the sun in a drop of water is a reflection of the sun, no doubt, but not the sun itself. Between awareness reflected in consciousness as the witness and pure awareness there is a gap, which the mind cannot cross. p.438

Put your awareness to work, not your mind. The mind is not the right instrument for this task. The timeless can be reached only by the timeless. Your body and your mind are born subject to time; only awareness is timeless, even in the now. p.439f

A shadow on your neighbour's face, the immense and all pervading sorrow of existence is a constant factor in your life, but you refuse to take notice. p.442

The sun of awareness must rise first - all else will follow. p.448

Once you realise that all happens by itself, (call it destiny, or the will of God or mere accident), you remain as witness only, understanding and enjoying, but not perturbed. p.451

Remain as the silent witness only. p.451

For, without memory and expectation there can be no time. p.452

And you cannot fight with your interests. You must go with them, see through them and watch them reveal themselves as mere errors of judgement and appreciation. p.456

You are never alone. There are powers and presences who serve you all the time most faithfully. You may not perceive them, nevertheless they are real and active. p.457

Q. What are the signs of progress in spiritual life? NM. Freedom from all anxiety; a sense of ease and joy; deep peace within and abundant energy without. p.462

Q. What is wrong with suicide? NM. Nothing wrong, if it solves the problem. What, if it does not? Suffering caused by extraneous factors - some painful and incurable disease, or unbearable calamity - may provide some justification, but where wisdom and compassion are lacking, suicide can not help. A foolish death means foolishness reborn. p.465

It is very often so with Americans and Europeans. After a stretch of spiritual practice they become charged with energy and frantically seek an outlet. They organise communities, become teachers of Yoga, marry, write books - anything except keeping quiet and turning their energies within, to find the source of the inexhaustible power and learn the art of keeping it under control. p.466

But disease and suffering are not natural. p.471

It is memory and anticipation that create problems of attainment or avoidance, coloured by like and dislike. p.475

There is no place for effort in reality. It is selfishness, due to a self-identification with the body, that is the main problem and the cause of all other problems. And selfishness cannot be removed by effort, only by clear insight into its causes and effects. p.476

Go beyond 'I-am-the-body' idea and you will find that space and time are in you and not you in space and time. p.476

No such (yoga) school is valueless, nor indispensable; in each one can progress up to the point when all desire for progress must be abandoned to make further progress possible. Then all schools are given up, all effort ceases; in solitude and darkness the last step is made which ends ignorance and fear forever. p.477

Self-surrender is the surrender of all self-concern. It cannot be done, it happens when you realise your true nature. p.478

Your desire just happens to you along with its fulfilment, or non-fulfilment. You can change neither. You may believe that you exert yourself, strive and struggle. Again, it all merely happens, including the fruits of the work. Nothing is by you and for you....Freedom is freedom from worry. Having realised that you cannot influence the results, pay no attention to your desires and fears. Let them come and go. Don't give them the nourishment of interest and attention. p.481

Everything affects everything. In this universe, when one thing changes, everything changes (all minds are joined). Hence the great power of man in changing the world by changing himself. p.490

But often people come with their bodies, brain and minds so mishandled, perverted and weak, that the state of formless attention is beyond them. In such cases, some simpler token of earnestness is appropriate. The repetition of a mantra, or gazing at a picture will prepare their body and mind for a deeper and more direct search. p.482

Know yourself as you are - against fear there is no other remedy. p.485

A personal problem cannot be solved on its own level. The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow. p.485

True happiness is uncaused and this cannot disappear for lack of stimulation. It is not the opposite of sorrow, it includes all sorrow and suffering..... Pleasure depends on things, happiness does not. p.486

Accept life as it comes and you will find a blessing. p.491

Ashrams are not made, they happen. You cannot start nor prevent them...p.491

The preparation alone is gradual, the change itself is sudden and complete. Gradual change does not take you to a new level of conscious being. You need courage to let go. p.492

Action delayed is action abandoned. There may be other chances for other actions, but the present moment is lost - irretrievably lost. All preparation is for the future - you cannot prepare for the present.... Clarity is now, action is now p.493

The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it will destroy the world in which you live. But if your motive is love of truth and life, you need not be afraid. p.495

Once you can say with confidence born from direct experience; 'I am the world, the world is myself', you are free from desire and fear on one hand and become totally responsible for the world on the other. The senseless sorrow of mankind becomes your sole concern. p.496

As long as you feel competent and confident, reality is beyond your reach. Unless you accept inner adventure as a way of life, discovery will not come to you. p.499

When ignorance, the mother of sin, dissolves, destiny, the compulsion to sin again, ceases. p.503

You can be happy in the world only when you are free of it....To believe that you depend on things and people for happiness is due to ignorance of your true nature; to know that you need nothing to be happy, except self-knowledge, is wisdom. p.504

The world appears to you so overwhelmingly real, because you think of it all the time; cease thinking of it and it will dissolve into thin mist. p.505

Once you have seen that you are dreaming, you shall wake up. But you do not see, because you want the dream to continue. A day will come when you will long for the ending of the dream, with all your heart and mind, and be willing to pay any price; the price will be dispassion and detachment, the loss of interest in the dream itself. p.506

For some time the mental habits may linger in spite of the new vision, the habit of longing for the known past and fearing the unknown future. p.509

It is only when you realise fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found. p.509

'Nothing is me', is the first step. 'Everything is me' is the next. p.518

You take remembering to be knowledge. True knowledge is ever fresh, new, unexpected. p.519

Why bother at all to change? ...There is nothing to seek and find, for there is nothing lost. Relax and watch the 'I am'. Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet, keep silent; it will emerge, or, rather, it will take you in. p.520f

Only when the very idea of changing is seen as false and abandoned, the changeless can come into its own..... All change affects the mind only. To be what you are, you must go beyond the mind, into your own being. It is immaterial what is the mind that you leave behind, provided you leave it behind for good. p.521

The first steps in self-acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight. One needs all the courage to go further. What helps is silence. Look at yourself in total silence, do not describe yourself. p.526

Mind must be free of desires and relaxed. It comes with understanding, not with determination...p.526

Q. How does maturity come about? NM. By keeping your mind clear and clean, by living your life in full awareness of every moment as it happens, by examining and dissolving one's desires and fears as soon as they arise. p.528


Cease being fascinated by the content of your consciousness. When you reach the deep layers of your true being, you will find that the mind's surface-play affects you very little. p.531

from I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
Published by Chetana, Bombay. 1992

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Selected Quotations From:

I Am That
Talks with Sri NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

Chetana Press., Bombay 1992

www.chetana.com






THEMES;


HOW DO I REALISE WHO I REALLY AM?

A QUIET MIND

THE 'I AM' APPROACH

NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ'S WORLD

THE SUPREME

LOVE

PAIN AND PLEASURE

EARNESTNESS

GUIDANCE

I NEED DO NOTHING

THE PERSON

TRUE HELP

EXPERIENCE

OTHER






HOW DO I REALISE WHO I REALLY AM?

Do understand that you are destined for enlightenment. Co-operate with your destiny, dont go against it, dont thwart it. Allow it to fulfil itself. All you have to do is to give attention to the obstacles created by the foolish mind. p.311

There are no conditions to fulfil. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in results of your efforts-the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration-all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it. p.148

Try to be, only to be. The all-important word is 'try'. Allot enough time daily for sitting quietly and trying, just trying, to go beyond the personality, with its addictions and obsessions. Don't ask how, it cannot be explained. You just keep on trying until you succeed. If you persevere, there can be no failure. What matters supremely is sincerity, earnestness; you must really have had surfeit of being the person you are, now see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits. This steady resistance against the unnecessary is the secret of success. p.509

You need not get at it (Enlightenment), for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly slip into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realisation that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love - worthy and lovable. p.3

acceptance - letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. p.6

Discover all you are not. Body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, time, space, being and not being, this or that - nothing concrete or abstract you can point out to is you. You must watch yourself continuously - particularly your mind - moment by moment, missing nothing. This witnessing is essential for the separation of the self from the not-self ........be aware of that state which is only, simply being, without being this or that or the other. p.27

I see what you too could see, here and now, but for the wrong focus of attention. You give no attention to your self. Your mind is all with things, people and ideas, never with your self. Bring yourself into focus, become aware of your own existence. See how you function, watch the motives and the results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself, by inadvertence. By knowing what you are not, you come to know your self. The way back to your self is through refusal and rejection. One thing is certain: the real is not imaginary, it is not a product of the mind. Even the sense 'I am' is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer: it shows where to seek, but not what to seek. Just have a good look at it. Once you are convinced that you cannot say truthfully about yourself anything except 'I am', and that nothing can be pointed at can be yourself, the need for the 'I am' is over - you are no longer intent on verbalising what you are. (NM did this practise only in the early part of his 3 years of change) All you need is to get rid of the tendency to define your self. All definitions apply to the body only and to its expressions. Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly. p.5

When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you. p.54

Don't look for quick results, there may be none within your noticing. Unknown to you, your psyche will under go a change, there will be more clarity in your thinking and feeling, purity in your behaviour. You need not aim at these - you will witness the change all the same. p.125

Whenever a thought or emotion of desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn away from it......just refuse attention......just turn away.....look between the thoughts....when you do not resist, you meet with no resistance......turn away from your desires and fears and from the thoughts they create and you are at once in your natural state. p.349

The Supreme is the easiest to reach for it is your very being. It is enough to stop thinking and desiring anything, but the Supreme. p.66

Humility and silence are essential, however advanced. p.99

Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal. p.173

What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory, mysteriously and marvelously, you may call that 'god' It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain....You can do nothing to bring it about, but you can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there. p.188

You have to be very alert, or else your mind will play false with you. It is like watching a thief - not that you expect anything from a thief, but you do not want to be robbed. In the same way you give a lot of attention to the mind without expecting anything from it. p.189

Treating everything as a dream liberates. p.189

By giving attention to your living, feeling and thinking, you free yourself from them and go beyond them. Your personality dissolves and only the witness remains. Then you go beyond the witness. Do not ask how it happens. Just search within yourself....In one [person] you desire and fear, in the other [witness] you are unaffected by pleasure and pain and are not ruffled by events. You let them come and go. p.189

See the event as event only, the transient as transient, experience as mere experience and you have done all you can. Then you are vulnerable to reality, no longer armoured against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and experiences. But as soon as there is some like or dislike, you have drawn a screen. p.190

When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing then the Supreme State will come to you uninvited and unexpected! p.195

The desire for truth is the highest of all desires, yet, it is still a desire. All desires must be given up for the real to be.....When all search ceases, it is the Supreme State. p.196

Give up all ideas about yourself and simply be. p.197

Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realise that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear. p.201

All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.....Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. p.204

Having never left the house you asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining.....Don't rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether. p.206

To know that you are neither body nor mind, watch yourself steadily and live unaffected by your body and mind, completely aloof, as if you were dead. It means you have no vested interests, either in the body or in the mind.....Whatever happens, remind yourself that only your body and mind are affected, not yourself. p.210

Do what you feel like doing. Don't bully yourself. Violence will make you hard and rigid. Do not fight with what you take to be obstacles on your way. Just be interested in them, watch them, observe, enquire. let anything happen - good or bad. But dont let yourself be submerged by what happens. p.220

What you need will come to you, if you do not ask for what you do not need. Yet only few people reach this state of complete dispassion and detachment. It is a very high state, the very threshold of liberation. p.249

Awareness, being lucid harmony in action, dissolves dullness and quietens the restlessness of the mind and gently, but steadily changes its very substance. This change need not be spectacular; it may be hardly noticeable; yet it is deep and fundamental shift from darkness to light, from inadvertence to awareness. p.272

Just give full attention to what in you is crude and primitive, unreasonable and unkind, altogether childish, and you will ripen. It is the maturity of heart and mind that is essential. It comes effortlessly when the main obstacle is removed - inattention, unawareness. In awareness you grow. p.296

Ask yourself such questions as: 'Was I really born?' 'Am I really so-and-so? 'How do I know that I exist?' 'Who are my parents?' 'Have they created me, or have I created them?' 'Must I believe all I am told about myself?' 'Who am I, anyhow?' p.296

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. p.302

Realise that what you are cannot be born nor die and with the fear gone all suffering ends. p.302

If in the state of witnessing you ask yourself, 'Who am I?', the answer comes at once, though it is wordless and silent. p.303

As long as you are pleased with the lesser, you cannot have the highest. Whatever pleases you, keeps you back. p.304

It is the 'I-am-the-body' idea that is so calamitous. It blinds you completely to your real nature. Even for a moment do not think that you are the body. Give yourself no name, no shape. In the darkness and the silence reality is found. p.305

But unselfish action, free from all concern with the body and its interests will carry you into the very heart of Reality. p.305

You must be extreme to reach the supreme. p.310

It is your mind that has separated the world outside your skin from the world inside and put them in opposition. This created fear and hatred and all the miseries of living. p.310

It is useless to search for the truth, when the mind is blind to the false. It must be purged of the false completely before truth can dawn on it. p.314

All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. p.317

Whatever is conceived by the mind must be false, for it is bound to be relative and limited. p.315

If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human, should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.
It does not mean that you must be brainless and foolhardy, improvident or indifferent: only the basic anxiety for oneself must go. You need some food, clothing and shelter for you and yours, but this will not create problems as long as greed is not taken for a need. Live in tune with things as they are and not as they are imagined. p.316

Either you remain forever hungry and thirsty, longing, searching, grabbing, holding, ever losing and sorrowing, or go out wholeheartedly in search of the state of timeless perfection to which nothing can be added, from which nothing - taken away. In it all desires and fears are absent, not because they were given up, but because they have lost their meaning. p.331

The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly and without return. p.332

Leave it (knowledge) all behind you. Forget it. Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs. Abandon all verbal structures, all relative truth, all tangible objectives. The absolute can be reached by absolute devotion only. Don't be half-hearted. p.340

To be, you must be nobody. To think yourself to be something, or somebody, is death and hell. p.371

Pure awareness is a state of pure witnessing, without the least attempt to do anything about the event witnessed. Your thoughts and feelings, words and actions may also be a part of the event, you watch all unconcerned in the full light of clarity and understanding.....once you are in it, you will find that you love what you see, whatever may be its nature. This choiceless love is the touchstone of awareness. If it is not there, you are merely interested - for some personal reasons. p.382

Learn to look at your consciousness as a sort of fever, personal and private, in which you are enclosed like a chick in its shell, out of this very attitude will come the crisis which will break the shell. p.382

Begin with the admission that you do not know and start from there.....The very admission:'I am ignorant' is the dawn of knowledge. p.384

You are like the man in the cinema house, laughing and crying with the picture, though knowing fully well that the is all the time in his seat and the picture is but the play of light. It is enough to shift attention from the screen to oneself to break the spell......without waiting for the death of the body - it is enough to shift attention to the Self and keep it there. All happens as if there is a mysterious power that creates and moves everything. Realise that you are not the mover, only the observer, and you will be at peace. p.389

Just as every wave subsides into the ocean, so does every moment return to its source. Realisation consists in discovering the source and abiding there. p.411

To know that you are a prisoner of your mind, that you live in an imaginary world of your own creation is the dawn of wisdom. p.426

It is only when you are satiated with the changeable and long for the unchangeable, that you are ready for the turning round and stepping into what can be described, when seen from the level of the mind, as emptiness and darkness. For the mind craves for content and variety, while reality is, to the mind contentless and invariable. p.436

Take note of the peculiar nature of pure awareness, its natural self-identity, without the least trace of self-consciousness, and go to the root of it and you will soon realise that awareness is your true nature and nothing you may be aware of, you can call your own. p.437

But if you stay with the idea that you are not the body nor the mind, not even their witness, but altogether beyond, your mind will grow in clarity, your desires - in purity, your actions - in charity and that inner distillation will take you to another world, a world of truth and fearless love. Resist your old habits of feeling and thinking; keep on telling yourself: 'No, not so, it cannot be so; I am not like this, I do not need it, I do not want it', and a day will surely come when the entire structure of error and despair will collapse and the ground will be free for a new life. p.443

Once you have understood that nothing perceivable, or conceivable can be yourself, you are free of your imaginations. To see everything as imagination, born of desire, is necessary for self-realisation. We miss the real by lack of attention and create the unreal by excess of imagination. p.489

For this (finding reality) you need a well-ordered and quiet life, peace of mind and immense earnestness. At every moment whatever comes to you unasked, comes from God and will surely help you, if you make the fullest use of it. It is only what you strive for, out of your own imagination and desire, that gives you trouble. p.491

Keep quiet, undisturbed, and the wisdom and the power will come on their own. You need not hanker. Wait in silence of the heart and mind. It is very easy to be quiet, but willingness is rare. You people want to be supermen overnight. Stay without ambition, without the least desire, exposed, vulnerable, unprotected, uncertain and alone, completely open to and welcoming life as it happens, without the selfish conviction that all must yield you pleasure or profit, material or so-called spiritual. p.494

Refuse attention, let things come and go. Desires and thoughts are also things. Disregard them. Since time immemorial the dust of events was covering the clear mirror of your mind, so that only only memories you could see. Brush off the dust before it has time to settle; this will lay bare the old layers until the true nature of your mind is discovered. p.494

The experience (of self-realisation) is unique and unmistakable. it will dawn on you suddenly, when the obstacles are removed to some extent. It is like a frayed rope snapping. Yours is to work at the strands. The break is bound to happen. It can be delayed, but not prevented. p.502

A level of mental maturity is reached when nothing external is of any value and the heart is ready to relinquish all. Then the real has a chance and it grasps it. Delays, if any, are caused by the mind being unwilling to see or to discard. p.514

Relinquish your habits and addictions, live a simple and sober life, don't hurt a living being; this is the foundation of Yoga. p.515

Once you have understood that you are nothing perceivable or conceivable, that whatever appears in the field of consciousness cannot be your self, you will apply yourself to the eradication of all self-identification, as the only way that can take you to a deeper realisation of your self. You literally progress by rejection - a veritable rocket. p.518


A QUIET MIND

When the mind is kept away from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never known; and yet you recognise it at once as your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience, you will never be the same man again; the unruly mind may break its peace and obliterate its vision; but its bound to return, provided the effort is sustained; until the day when all bonds are broken delusions and attachments end and life becomes supremely concentrated in the present. p.308

Look at your mind dispassionately; this is enough to calm it. When it is quiet, you can go beyond it. Do not keep it busy all the time. stop it - and just be. If you give it a rest, it will settle down and recover its purity and strength. Constant thinking makes it decay. p.311

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. p.311

Pay no attention [to your thoughts]. Don't fight them. Just do nothing about them, let them be, whatever they are. Your very fighting them gives them life. just disregard. Look through. p.241

If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events. Its your restlessness that causes chaos. p.247

As long as you are a beginner certain formalised meditations, or prayers may be good for you. But for a seeker for reality there is only one meditation - the rigorous refusal to harbour thoughts. To be free from thoughts is itself meditation....You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Don't get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it....Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognise it. p.224f

When thus the mind becomes completely silent, it shines with a new light and vibrates with new knowledge. It all comes spontaneously, you need only hold on to the 'I am' p.332

The silence is one and without it the words could not have been heard. It is always there - at the back of the words. Shift your attention from the words to silence and you will hear it. p.359

Do understand that the mind has its limits: to go beyond, you must consent to silence. p.370

To see reality is as simple as to see one's face in a mirror. Only the mirror must be clear and true. A quiet mind, undistorted by desires and fears, free from ideas and opinions, clear on all levels, is needed to reflect the reality. Be clear and quiet - alert and detached, all else will happen by itself. p.397

The unchangeable can only be realised in silence. Once realised, it will deeply affect the changeable, itself remaining unaffected. p.437

To go beyond the mind, you must be silent and quiet. Peace and silence, silence and peace - this is the way beyond. p.450

Abandon all desires, keep your mind silent and you shall discover. p.453

What you see as false, dissolves. It is the very nature of illusion to dissolve on investigation. Investigate - that is all. You cannot destroy the false, for you are creating it all the time. Withdraw from it, ignore it, go beyond, and it will cease to be. p.455

This attitude of silent observation is the very foundation of yoga. You see the picture, but you are not the picture. p.469

You cannot see the true unless you are at peace. A quiet mind is essential for right perception, which again is required for self-realisation. p.481

In peace and silence the skin of the 'I' dissolves and the inner and the outer become one. The real spiritual practise is effortless. p.483

When the mind is quiet it reflects reality. When it is motionless through and through, it dissolves and only reality remains. p.484

Keep very quiet and watch what comes to the surface of the mind. Reject the known, welcome the so far unknown and reject it in its turn. Thus you come to a state in which there is no knowledge, only being, in which being itself is knowledge. p.486

When you are not in a hurry and the mind is free from anxieties, it becomes quiet and in the silence something may be heard which is ordinarily too fine and subtle for perception. The mind must be open and quiet to see. p.508

You need not worry about your worries. Just be. Do not try to be quiet; do not make 'being quiet' into a task to be performed. Don't be restless about 'being quiet', miserable about 'being happy'. Just be aware that you are and remain aware - dont say: 'yes, I am; what next?' There is no 'next' in 'I am'. it is a timeless state. p.508



THE 'I AM' APPROACH

The sense of 'I am' is your own. You cannot part with it, but you can impart it to anything, as in saying: I am young, I am rich etc. But such self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage. p.65

I trusted my Guru..........He told me to concentrate on ìI Am - I did. He told me that I am beyond all perceivables and conceivables - I believed. I gave him my heart and soul, my entire attention and the whole of my spare time (I had to work to keep my family alive). As a result of faith and earnest application, I realised my self within three years. p. 52

My guru ordered me to attend to the sense 'I Am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed, I did not follow any particular course of breathing or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I Am'....Keep empty, keep available, resist not what comes uninvited. In the end you reach a state of non-grasping, of joyful non-attachment, of inner ease and freedom, indescribable, yet wonderfully real. p.375

Just keep in mind the feeling ìI Am; merge in it, until your mind and feelings become one. By repeated attempts, you will stumble on the right balance of attention and affection and your mind will be firmly established in the thought-feeling ìI Am. Whatever you think, say or do, this sense of immutable and affectionate being remains as the ever-present background of the mind. p. 48 .

Give up all questions except one ìWho am I? p.70

Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. p.199

Even the sense ìI am is composed of the pure light and the sense of being. The 'I' is there even without the 'am'. So is the pure light there whether you say 'I' or not. Become aware of that pure light and you will never lose it. The beingness in being, the awareness in consciousness, the interest in every experience - that is not describable, yet perfectly accessible, for there is nothing else. p.201

First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then realise that immense ocean of pure awareness which is both mind and matter and beyond both. p.205

I did not condition my mind by thinking: 'I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond'. I simply followed his instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am'. and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with, nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all - embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared - myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence. p.239

By being with yourself, the 'I am'; by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. p.278

In the very beginning I was giving some attention and time to the sense 'I am', but only in the beginning. p.398

Q.Can it happen that the mind is clear and quiet and yet no reflection [of reality] appears? NM. There is destiny to consider. The unconscious is in the grip of destiny: it is destiny, in fact. One may have to wait. But however heavy may be the hand of destiny, it can be lifted by patience and self-control. Integrity and purity remove the obstacles and the vision of reality appears in the mind. p.399

Step back from action to consciousness, leave action to the body and the mind; it is their domain. Remain as pure witness, till even witnessing dissolves in the Supreme..... It is like washing printed cloth. First the design fades, then the background and in the end the cloth is white. The personality gives place to the witness, then the witness goes and pure awareness remains. p.401

As long as there is consciousness, its witness is also there. The two appear and disappear together. p.423

Keep the 'I am' in focus of awareness, remember that you are, watch yourself ceaselessly and the unconscious will flow into the conscious without any special effort on your part. Wrong desires and fears, false ideas, social inhibitions are blocking and preventing its free interplay with the conscious. Once free to mingle, the two become one and the one becomes all. The person merges into the witness, the witness into awareness, awareness into pure being, yet identity is not lost. It is transfigured, and becomes the real Self, the eternal friend and guide. You cannot approach it in worship. No external activity can reach the inner self; worship and prayer remain on the surface only; to go deeper meditation is essential, the striving to go beyond the states of sleep, dream and waking. In the beginning the attempts are irregular, then they recur more often, become regular, then continuous and intense, until all obstacles are conquered. p.447

'I am' is a tiny seed which will grow into a mighty tree - quite naturally, without a trace of effort. p.510



NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ'S WORLD

When I met my Guru, he told me: 'You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense 'I am', find your real self. I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon! It took only three years to realise my true nature. My Guru died soon after I met him, but it made no difference. I remembered what he told me and persevered. p.301

If you imagine yourself as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. I do not see the world as separate from me and so there is nothing for me to desire, or fear. p.123

The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused. Just like gold made into ornaments has no advantage over gold dust, except when the mind makes it so, so are we are in being - we differ only in appearance. We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.


Pleasure and pain lost their sway over me. I was free from desire and fear. I found myself full, needing nothing. p.30

To me it is 'a body', not 'my body', 'a mind'. not 'my mind'. The mind looks after the body all right, I need not interfere. p.31

Whatever is done, is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they all are real to the man in bondage; to me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself. p.179

To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless, immovable, rock-like, unassailable; a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity. p.191

All is attended to in minutest details and yet there is a sense of unreality about it all. So is the case with me. All happens as it needs, yet nothing happens. I do what seems to be necessary, but at the same time I know that nothing is necessary, that life itself is only a make-belief. p.191

There was discovery and it was sudden. Just as at birth you discover the world suddenly, as suddenly I discovered my real being. p.191f

I am neither conscious nor unconscious. I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions....A person is a set pattern of desires and thoughts and resulting actions; there is no pattern in my case. There is nothing I desire or fear - how can there be a pattern. p.222

I see as you see, hear as you hear, taste as you taste, eat as you eat. I also feel thirst and hunger and expect my food on time. When starved or sick, my body and mind go weak. All this I perceive quite clearly, but somehow I am not in it. I feel myself as if floating over it, aloof and detached.....as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them were somewhere far out on the horizon. I am like a cinema screen - clear and empty - the pictures pass over it and disappear, leaving it as clear and empty as before. In no way is the screen affected by the pictures, nor are the pictures affected by the screen. p.267

Having realised that I am one with, and yet beyond the world, I became free from all desire and fear. I did not reason out that I should be free - I found myself free - unexpectedly, without the least effort. This freedom from desire and fear remained with me since then. Another thing I noticed was that I do not need to make an effort; the deed follows the thought, without delay and friction. I have also found that thoughts become self-fulfilling; things would fall in place smoothly and rightly. The main change was in the mind; it became motionless and silent, responding quickly, but not perpetuating the response. Spontaneity became a way of life, the real became natural and the natural became real. And above all, infinite affection, love, dark and quiet, radiating in all directions, embracing all, making all interesting and beautiful, significant and auspicious. p.269

Q.But when you look at yourself, what do you see? NM. It depends how I look. When I look through the mind, I see numberless people. When I look beyond the mind, I see the witness. Beyond the witness there is the infinite intensity of emptiness and silence. p.355

Once my Guru told me: 'You are the Supreme Reality', I ceased having visions and trances and became very quiet and simple. I found myself desiring and knowing less and less, until I could say in utter astonishment: 'I know nothing, I want nothing.' p.391

There was never any journey. I am, as I always was. p.392

I look, but I do not see in the sense of creating images clothed with judgements. I do not describe nor evaluate. I look, I see you, but neither attitude nor opinion cloud my vision. And when I turn my eyes away, my mind does not allow memory to linger; it is at once free and fresh for the next impression. p.445

All three states (waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep) are sleep to me. My waking state is beyond them. As I look at you, you all seem asleep, dreaming up words of your own. I am aware, for I imagine nothing. It is not samadhi (peaceful trance state), which is but a kind of sleep. It is just a state of mind unaffected by the mind, free from past and future....To be a person is to be asleep. p.453

In my world the seeds of suffering, desire and fear are not sown and suffering does not grow. p.485

It ('I am') enables me to become a person when required. Love creates its own necessities, even of becoming a person. p.488

They (self-realised people) may laugh and cry according to circumstances, but inwardly they are cool and clear, watching detachedly their own spontaneous reactions. Appearances are misleading and more so in the case of a self-realised people. p.529

THE SUPREME

There are no steps to self-realisation. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible....Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realisation you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind. p.331

The world and the mind are states of being. The supreme is not a state. It pervades all states, but it is not a state of something else. It is entirely uncaused, independent, complete in itself, beyond time and space, mind and matter. ........There is nothing to recognise it by. It must be seen directly, by giving up all search for signs and approaches. When all names and forms have been given up, the real is with you. You need not seek it. Plurality and diversity are the play of the mind only. Reality is one. P. 38.

The real does not begin; it only reveals itself as beginningless and endless, all-pervading, all-powerful, immovable prime mover, timelessly changeless. p.142

What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory, mysteriously and marvelously, you may call that 'god' It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain....You can do nothing to bring it about, but you can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there. p.188

Reality is not an event, it cannot be experienced....reality neither comes nor goes. There is no such thing as an expression of reality.....Only reality is, there is nothing else. p.190f

Reality is the ultimate destroyer. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one - this is the ultimate solution of every conflict......As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. p.205

To locate a thing you need space, to place an event you need time; but the timeless and spaceless defies handling. It makes everything perceivable, yet itself is beyond perception. The mind cannot know what is beyond the mind, but the mind is known by what is beyond it. p.361


LOVE

When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realise the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self - realisation can break it. Go for it resolutely. p.213

In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all. Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds; love in freedom is love of all....When you are love itself, you are beyond time and numbers. In loving one you love all, in loving all, you love each. One and all are not exclusive. p.258

All the universe will be your concern; every living thing you will love and help most tenderly and wisely. p.309

In love there is not the one even, how can there be two? Love is the refusal to separate, to make distinctions. Before you can think of unity, you must first create duality. When you truly love, you do not say: 'I love you; where there is mentation, there is duality. p.352

PAIN, PLEASURE and DESIRE

The obstacles to the clear perception of one's true being are desire for pleasure and fear of pain. Its the pleasure-pain motivation that stands in the way......Giving up desire after desire is a lengthy process with the end never in sight. Leave alone your desires and fears, give your entire attention to the subject, to him who is behind the experience of desire and fear. Ask: who desires? Let each desire bring you back to yourself. p.144

.....pleasures lose their tang and pains their barb when the self is known. Both are seen as they are-conditional responses, mere reactions, plain attractions and repulsions, based on memories or preconceptions. Usually pleasure and pain are experienced when expected. p.145

Pain and pleasure go always together. Freedom from one means freedom from both. If you do not care for pleasure, you will not be afraid of pain. p.145

When you realise that you are beyond both pain and pleasure, aloof and unassailable, then the pursuit of happiness ceases and the resultant sorrow too. For pain aims at pleasure and pleasure ends in pain, relentlessly. p.147

Happiness depends on something or other and can be lost; freedom from everything depends on nothing and cannot be lost. Freedom from sorrow has no cause and, therefore, cannot be destroyed. Realise that freedom. p.147

Go to the source of both pain and pleasure, of desire and fear. Observe, investigate, try to understand. p.121

....for the sake of pleasure you are committing many sins. And the fruits of sin are suffering and death. p.82

Pain and pleasure happen, but pain is the price of pleasure, pleasure is the reward of pain...To know that pain and pleasure are one is peace. p.165

You imagine that without cause there can be no happiness. To me dependence on anything for happiness is utter misery. Pleasure and pain have causes, while my state is my own, totally uncaused, independent, unassailable. p.179

But when the discriminative mind comes into being and creates distinctions, pleasure and pain arise. p.181

In one [person] you desire and fear, in the other [witness] you are unaffected by pleasure and pain and are not ruffled by events. You let them come and go. p.189

Sex is an acquired habit. Go beyond. As long as your focus is on the body, you will remain in the clutches of food and sex, fear and death. Find yourself and be free. p.217

You are always seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, always after happiness and peace. Don't you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable? Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking, nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which 'I am' is timelessly present. Soon you will realise that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels, that disturbs. p.240

- desires fulfilled breed more desires. Keeping away from all desires and contentment in what comes by itself is a very fruitful state - a precondition to the state of fulness...freedom from desires is bliss. p.249

When you know that you lack nothing, that all there is, is you and yours, desire ceases. p.259

Whatever may be the situation, if it is acceptable, it is pleasant. If it is not acceptable, it is painful. p.277

As the acceptance of pain is the denial of the self, and the self stands in the way of true happiness, the wholehearted acceptance of pain releases the springs of happiness. p.278

Don't anticipate and don't regret, and there will be no pain. It is memory and imagination that cause suffering. p.279

A man's desire for a woman is innocence itself compared to the lusting for an everlasting personal bliss. p.299

You must unlearn everything. God is the end of all desire and knowledge....All desires must be given up, because by desiring you take the shape of your desires. When no desires remain, you revert to your natural state. p.336

Q. How am I to practise desirelessness?
NM. No need to practice. No need of any acts of renunciation. Just turn your mind away, that is all. Desire is merely the fixation of the mind on an idea. Get it out of its groove by denying it attention. p.338

Whatever you think about with desire or fear appears before you as real. p.344

To understand suffering, you must go beyond pain and pleasure. p.383

Cease from looking for happiness and reality in a dream and you will wake up. You need not know all the 'why' and 'how', there is no end to questions. Abandon all desires, keep your mind silent and you shall discover. p.453

It is desire that causes repetition. There is no recurrence where desire is not. p.454

Desire is of the past, fear is of the future. p.454

Each pleasure is wrapped in pain. p.455

The right state and use of the body and the mind are intensely pleasant. It is the search for pleasure that is wrong. Do not try to make yourself happy, rather question your very search for happiness. It is because you are not happy that you want to be happy. Find out why you are unhappy. p.468

....pleasure is a distraction and a nuisance, for it merely increases the false conviction that one needs to have and to do things to be happy when in reality it is just the opposite. p.486f

Do not be afraid of freedom from desire and fear. It enables you to live a life so different from all you know, so much more intense and interesting, that, truly, by losing all you gain all. p.505

When the centre of selfishness is no longer, all desires for pleasure and fear of pain cease; there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy, the ecstasy of giving from a perennial source. p.511

Desirelessness is the highest bliss. p.49



EARNESTNESS

Whatever work you have undertaken-complete it. Do not take up new tasks, unless it is called for by a concrete situation of suffering and relief from suffering. Find yourself first, and endless blessings will follow. Nothing profits the world as much as the abandoning of profits. p.145f

Go within, without swerving, without ever looking outward. p.145

When you are dead earnest, you bend every incident, every second of your life to your purpose. You do not waste time and energy on other things. p.119

Whatever you do for the sake of truth, will take you to truth. Only be earnest and honest. The shape it takes hardly matters....Mere longing, undiluted by thought and action, pure, concentrated longing, will take you speedily to your goal. It is the motive that matters, not the manner....Who has not the daring will not accept the real even when offered. Unwillingness born out of fear is the only obstacle p.172

If the seeker is earnest, the light can be given. The light is for all and always there, but the seekers are few, and among those few, those who are ready are very few, and among those few, those who are ready are very rare. Ripeness of heart and mind is indispensable. p.194

Assiduously investigate everything that crosses your field of attention. With practice the field will broaden and investigation deepen, until they become spontaneous and limitless. p.379

There must be immense longing for truth, or absolute faith in the Guru. Believe me, there is no goal, nor a way to reach it (Truth is a pathless land - JK) You are the way and the goal, there is nothing else to reach except yourself. p.380

Compassion is the foundation of earnestness. Compassion for yourself and others, born of suffering, your own and others. p.433

Earnestness, not perfection, is a precondition to self-realisation. Virtues and powers come with realisation, not before. p.434

Earnestness is not a yearning for the fruits of one's endeavours. It is an expression of an inner shift of interest away from the false, the unessential, the personal. p.456

GUIDANCE

The greatest Guru is your inner self. Truly, he is the supreme teacher. He alone can take you to your goal and he alone meets you at the end of the road. Confide in him and you need no outer Guru. But again you must have the strong desire to find him and do nothing that will create obstacles and delays. p.149

Meet your own self. Be with your own self, listen to it, obey it, cherish it, keep it in mind ceaselessly. You need no other guide. As long as the urge for truth affects your daily life, all is well with you. p.173

To rise in consciousness from one dimension to another, you need help. The help may not always be in the shape of a human person, it may be a subtle presence, or a spark of intuition, but help must come. The inner Self is watching and waiting for the son to return to his father. At the right time he arranges everything affectionately and effectively. Where a messenger is needed, or a guide, he sends the Guru to do the needful. p.274

Self-awareness tells you at every step what needs be done. When all is done, the mind remains quiet. p.427

I NEED DO NOTHING

Just realise the One Mover behind all that moves and leave all to Him. If you do not hesitate, or cheat, this is the shortest way to reality. Stand without desire and fear, relinquishing all control and all responsibility.... What is wrong in letting go the illusion of personal control and personal responsibility? Both are in the mind only. p.151


It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in results of your efforts-the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration-all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it. p.148

You give reality to concepts, while concepts are distortions of reality. Abandon all conceptualisation and stay silent and attentive. Be earnest about it and all will be well with you. p.154

Nothing is done by me, everything just happens. I do not expect, I do not plan, I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal. p.191

All will happen by itself. You need not do anything, only don't prevent it. p.242

If you just try to keep quiet, all will come - the work, the strength for work, the right motive. Must you know everything beforehand? Don't be anxious about your future - be quiet now and all will fall into place. p.248

Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in. p.260

Deepen and broaden your awareness of yourself and all the blessings will flow. You need not seek anything, all will come to you most naturally and effortlessly. p.261

The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage. p.298

In the light of calm and steady self-awareness inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. p.311

Just turn away from all that occupies the mind; do whatever work you have to complete, but avoid new obligations; keep empty, keep available, resist not what comes uninvited. p.375



THE PERSON

The memory of the past unfulfilled desires traps energy, which manifests itself as a person. When its charge gets exhausted, the person dies. Unfulfilled desires are carried over into the next birth. Self-identification with the body creates ever fresh desires and there is no end to them, unless this mechanism of bondage is clearly seen. It is clarity that is liberating, for you cannot abandon desire, unless its causes and effects are clearly seen. I did not say the same person is reborn. It dies for good. But its memories remain and their desires and fears. They supply the energy for a new person. The real takes no part in it, but makes it possible by giving it the light. p.381

Q. How does the error of being a person originate? NM A bundle of memories and mental habits attracts attention, awareness gets focalised and a person suddenly appears. Remove the light of awareness, go to sleep or swoon away - and the person disappears. p.255

When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realisation the person ceases. p.37


That which does not exist cannot have a cause. There is no such thing as a separate person....How does the personality come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves. p.206

You are not in the body, the body is in you! The mind is in you. They happen to you. They are there because you find them interesting. p.212

You are too much concerned with past and future. It is all due to your longing to continue, to protect yourself against extinction. And as you want to continue, you want others to keep you company, hence your concern with their survival. But what you call survival is but the survival of a dream. p.259

The person is merely the result of misunderstanding. In reality, there is no such thing. Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession, leaving traces in the brain and creating an illusion of continuity. A reflection of the watcher in the mind creates the sense of 'I am' and the person acquires an apparently independent existence. In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying himself with the 'I' and the 'mine'. The teacher tells the watcher: you are not this, there is nothing of yours in this, except the little point of 'I am', which is the bridge between the watcher and his dream. ìI am this, I am that' is dream, while pure 'I am' has the stamp of reality on it. You have tasted so many things - all came to naught. Only the sense 'I am' persisted - unchanged. Stay with the changeless among the changeful, until you are able to go beyond. p.343

Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person. p.343

Q. After liberation what remains of the person? NM A vague memory remains, like the memory of a dream, or early childhood. After all, what is there to remember? A flow of events, mostly accidental and meaningless. A sequence of desires and fears and inane blunders. Is there anything worth remembering? The person is but a shell imprisoning you. Break the shell. p.343

Doership is a myth born from the illusion of 'me' and 'the mine'. p.376

Having seen that you are a bundle of memories held together by attachment, step out and look from the outside. You may perceive for the first time something which is not memory. You cease to be Mr-so-and-so, busy about his own affairs. You are at last at peace. You realise that nothing was ever wrong with the world - you alone were wrong and now it is all over. p.390

In reality you were never born and never shall die.....In fact, there is no body, nor a world to contain it; there is only a mental condition, a dream-like state, easy to dispel by questioning its reality. p.427

All you know is the person, the identity - which is not a person - you do not know, for you never doubted, never asked yourself the crucial question - 'Who am I'. The identity is the witness of the person and the practise consists in shifting the emphasis from the superficial and changeful person to the immutable and ever - present witness. p.442
To be a person is to be asleep. p.453

Until we can look at fear and accept it as the shadow of personal existence, as persons we are bound to be afraid. p.454



TRUE HELP

The only help worth giving is freeing from the need for further help. Repeated help is no help at all....You can help another by precept and example and, above all, by your being. p.146

What is in the world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world, you must step out of it. p.207

If you really want to help a person, keep away. If you are emotionally committed to helping, you will fail to help....A man is really helped when he is no longer in need of help. All else is just futility. p.260

Of course, if you have a chance to help somebody, by all means do it and promptly too, don't keep him waiting till you are perfect. But do not become a professional do-gooder. p.345

First be free of suffering yourself and then only hope of helping others. [free in the moment - ACIM] You do not even need to hope - your very existence will be the greatest help a man can give his fellowmen. p.280

Only the people who have gone beyond the world can change the world. p.326


EXPERIENCE

You need not gather any more (experience), rather you must go beyond experience. p.313

Experience leaves only memories behind and adds to the burden which is heavy enough. You need no more experiences....Learn from the sorrows of others and save yourself your own. It is not experience that you need, but the freedom from an experience. p.317

But experience is the denial of Reality, which is neither sensory nor conceptual, neither of the body, nor of the mind, though it includes and transcends both. p.317f

Unless we revolt against this craving for experience and let go the manifested altogether, there can be no relief. We shall remain trapped. p.328

The only trouble is that you are addicted to experience and you cherish your memories. In reality it is the other way round; what is remembered is never real; the real is now. p.430


OTHER

As soon as the mind is ready the sun shines on it. p.54

All illness begins in the mind. Take care of the mind first, by tracing and eliminating all wrong ideas and emotions. Then live and work disregarding illness and think no more of it. With the removal of causes the effect is bound to depart. p.226

The real does not die, the unreal never lived. p.234

Heal your mind and it will cease to project distorted, ugly pictures. p.234

A prolonged ecstasy will burn out your brain, unless it is extremely pure and subtle. p.242

When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence. p.242

Consciousness can only become more subtle and refined and that is what happens after death. p.263

Man's fivefold body (physical etc) has potential powers beyond our wildest dreams.....Some of the powers can be developed by specialised training, but the man who flaunts such powers is still in bondage. p.270

There is the body and there is the Self. Between them is the mind, in which the Self is reflected as 'I am'.....When the mind merges in the Self, the body presents no problems. It remains what it is, an instrument of cognition and action, the tool and the expression of the creative fire within. p.274

If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you, you need not wait to be what you are. p.316

The true refuge is only in the unmanifested. p.325

Fearlessness is the door to the Supreme. p.353

Disregard names and shapes, don't be attached to them; your attachment is your bondage. p.353

The trinity: mind, self and spirit, when looked into, become unity. p.363

Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go everything. The giving up is the first step. But the real giving up is in realising that there is nothing to give up. p.363f

Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own....Stand still , be quiet. p.371

Q.What is the value of spiritual books? NM. They help in dispelling ignorance. They are useful in the beginning, but become a hindrance in the end. One must know when to discard them. p.376

Karma is only a store of unspent energies, of unfulfilled desires and fears not understood. The store is being constantly replenished by new desires and fears. p.411

Most of our karma is collective. We suffer for the sins of others, as others suffer for ours. Humanity is one. p.465

How can a person limited in time and space, a mere body-mind, a gasp of pain between birth and death, be happy? The very conditions of its arising make happiness impossible. p.430

Consciousness is like a cloud in the sky and the water drops are the content. The cloud needs the sun to become visible, and consciousness needs being focussed in awareness. p.437

Reflected awareness, the sense: 'I am aware' is the witness, while pure awareness is the essence of reality. Reflection of the sun in a drop of water is a reflection of the sun, no doubt, but not the sun itself. Between awareness reflected in consciousness as the witness and pure awareness there is a gap, which the mind cannot cross. p.438

Put your awareness to work, not your mind. The mind is not the right instrument for this task. The timeless can be reached only by the timeless. Your body and your mind are born subject to time; only awareness is timeless, even in the now. p.439f

A shadow on your neighbour's face, the immense and all pervading sorrow of existence is a constant factor in your life, but you refuse to take notice. p.442

The sun of awareness must rise first - all else will follow. p.448

Once you realise that all happens by itself, (call it destiny, or the will of God or mere accident), you remain as witness only, understanding and enjoying, but not perturbed. p.451

Remain as the silent witness only. p.451

For, without memory and expectation there can be no time. p.452

And you cannot fight with your interests. You must go with them, see through them and watch them reveal themselves as mere errors of judgement and appreciation. p.456

You are never alone. There are powers and presences who serve you all the time most faithfully. You may not perceive them, nevertheless they are real and active. p.457

Q. What are the signs of progress in spiritual life? NM. Freedom from all anxiety; a sense of ease and joy; deep peace within and abundant energy without. p.462

Q. What is wrong with suicide? NM. Nothing wrong, if it solves the problem. What, if it does not? Suffering caused by extraneous factors - some painful and incurable disease, or unbearable calamity - may provide some justification, but where wisdom and compassion are lacking, suicide can not help. A foolish death means foolishness reborn. p.465

It is very often so with Americans and Europeans. After a stretch of spiritual practice they become charged with energy and frantically seek an outlet. They organise communities, become teachers of Yoga, marry, write books - anything except keeping quiet and turning their energies within, to find the source of the inexhaustible power and learn the art of keeping it under control. p.466

But disease and suffering are not natural. p.471

It is memory and anticipation that create problems of attainment or avoidance, coloured by like and dislike. p.475

There is no place for effort in reality. It is selfishness, due to a self-identification with the body, that is the main problem and the cause of all other problems. And selfishness cannot be removed by effort, only by clear insight into its causes and effects. p.476

Go beyond 'I-am-the-body' idea and you will find that space and time are in you and not you in space and time. p.476

No such (yoga) school is valueless, nor indispensable; in each one can progress up to the point when all desire for progress must be abandoned to make further progress possible. Then all schools are given up, all effort ceases; in solitude and darkness the last step is made which ends ignorance and fear forever. p.477

Self-surrender is the surrender of all self-concern. It cannot be done, it happens when you realise your true nature. p.478

Your desire just happens to you along with its fulfilment, or non-fulfilment. You can change neither. You may believe that you exert yourself, strive and struggle. Again, it all merely happens, including the fruits of the work. Nothing is by you and for you....Freedom is freedom from worry. Having realised that you cannot influence the results, pay no attention to your desires and fears. Let them come and go. Don't give them the nourishment of interest and attention. p.481

Everything affects everything. In this universe, when one thing changes, everything changes (all minds are joined). Hence the great power of man in changing the world by changing himself. p.490

But often people come with their bodies, brain and minds so mishandled, perverted and weak, that the state of formless attention is beyond them. In such cases, some simpler token of earnestness is appropriate. The repetition of a mantra, or gazing at a picture will prepare their body and mind for a deeper and more direct search. p.482

Know yourself as you are - against fear there is no other remedy. p.485

A personal problem cannot be solved on its own level. The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow. p.485

True happiness is uncaused and this cannot disappear for lack of stimulation. It is not the opposite of sorrow, it includes all sorrow and suffering..... Pleasure depends on things, happiness does not. p.486

Accept life as it comes and you will find a blessing. p.491

Ashrams are not made, they happen. You cannot start nor prevent them...p.491

The preparation alone is gradual, the change itself is sudden and complete. Gradual change does not take you to a new level of conscious being. You need courage to let go. p.492

Action delayed is action abandoned. There may be other chances for other actions, but the present moment is lost - irretrievably lost. All preparation is for the future - you cannot prepare for the present.... Clarity is now, action is now p.493

The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it will destroy the world in which you live. But if your motive is love of truth and life, you need not be afraid. p.495

Once you can say with confidence born from direct experience; 'I am the world, the world is myself', you are free from desire and fear on one hand and become totally responsible for the world on the other. The senseless sorrow of mankind becomes your sole concern. p.496

As long as you feel competent and confident, reality is beyond your reach. Unless you accept inner adventure as a way of life, discovery will not come to you. p.499

When ignorance, the mother of sin, dissolves, destiny, the compulsion to sin again, ceases. p.503

You can be happy in the world only when you are free of it....To believe that you depend on things and people for happiness is due to ignorance of your true nature; to know that you need nothing to be happy, except self-knowledge, is wisdom. p.504

The world appears to you so overwhelmingly real, because you think of it all the time; cease thinking of it and it will dissolve into thin mist. p.505

Once you have seen that you are dreaming, you shall wake up. But you do not see, because you want the dream to continue. A day will come when you will long for the ending of the dream, with all your heart and mind, and be willing to pay any price; the price will be dispassion and detachment, the loss of interest in the dream itself. p.506

For some time the mental habits may linger in spite of the new vision, the habit of longing for the known past and fearing the unknown future. p.509

It is only when you realise fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found. p.509

'Nothing is me', is the first step. 'Everything is me' is the next. p.518

You take remembering to be knowledge. True knowledge is ever fresh, new, unexpected. p.519

Why bother at all to change? ...There is nothing to seek and find, for there is nothing lost. Relax and watch the 'I am'. Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet, keep silent; it will emerge, or, rather, it will take you in. p.520f

Only when the very idea of changing is seen as false and abandoned, the changeless can come into its own..... All change affects the mind only. To be what you are, you must go beyond the mind, into your own being. It is immaterial what is the mind that you leave behind, provided you leave it behind for good. p.521

The first steps in self-acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight. One needs all the courage to go further. What helps is silence. Look at yourself in total silence, do not describe yourself. p.526

Mind must be free of desires and relaxed. It comes with understanding, not with determination...p.526

Q. How does maturity come about? NM. By keeping your mind clear and clean, by living your life in full awareness of every moment as it happens, by examining and dissolving one's desires and fears as soon as they arise. p.528


Cease being fascinated by the content of your consciousness. When you reach the deep layers of your true being, you will find that the mind's surface-play affects you very little. p.531

from I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
Published by Chetana, Bombay. 1992

www.chetana.com

Quotes About Tolstoy Quotes tagged as "tolstoy" (showing 1-30 of 38)



“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

tags: change, tolstoy

7389 likes

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“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

tags: anna-karenina, love, tolstoy

561 likes

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“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
― Woody Allen

tags: humor, reading, speed-reading, tolstoy

312 likes

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“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology

tags: disappointment, humor, moroseness, russia, satire, sorrow, tolstoy

252 likes

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“Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

tags: beauty, kindness, tolstoy

81 likes

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“if they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it.”
― Leo Tolstoy

tags: anna, dying, karenina, leo, levin, tolstoy

38 likes

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“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

tags: admiration, anna-karenina, avoiding, flattery, gaze, love, stare, sun, tolstoy

36 likes

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“And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

tags: anna-karenina, dishonesty, intellect, pride, stupidity, tolstoy, trickery

33 likes

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“Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.”
― Leo Tolstoy

tags: autumn, inner-light, letter-to-strakhov, light, tolstoy

24 likes

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“In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

tags: novels, tolstoy, warhol

18 likes

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“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”)”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

tags: christ, heresy, heretics, tolstoy

11 likes

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“If laughter came in paste format you could squeeze out of a tube, I’ll bet nine out of ten dentists would recommend comedy before bed. The tenth doctor, having just read Tolstoy as deliberately mistranslated by Dora J. Arod, would probably recommend reading Russian literature before bed.
”
― Jarod Kintz, At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.

tags: bed, comedy, deliberate, dentists, dora-j-arod, fraction, laughter, mistranslation, paste, recommend, recommendation, tolstoy, translated, translation, tube

11 likes

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“Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

tags: alcohol, american-indians, humor, tolstoy

11 likes

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“The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

tags: anna-karenina, day, labor, lord, rewards, tolstoy

10 likes

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“There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.”
― Louis Menand

tags: agents, decisions, fate, history, individuals, predestination, tolstoy

9 likes

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“Anna Karenina is sheer perfection as a work of art. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it. Furthermore, the idea underlying it shows that it is ours, ours, something that belongs to us alone and that is our own property, our own national 'new word'or, at any rate, the beginning of it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

tags: anna-karenina, dostoyevsky, tolstoy

8 likes

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“An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

tags: anna-karenina, dostoyevsky, tolstoy

7 likes

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“Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.”
― Leo Tolstoy

tags: tolstoy

7 likes

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“Art is bad when ‘you see the intent and get put off.’ (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself.
from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy”
― Joel Carmichael

tags: anna, art, goethe, karenina, leo, tolstoy

6 likes

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“In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

tags: anna-karenina, economics, government, salaries, supply-and-demand, tolstoy

4 likes

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“Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

tags: anna-karenina, romance, tolstoy

3 likes

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“...Tolstoy's characters seem to come forward to meet you, very conscious of the impression they are making on one another and on the reader.”
― Stephen Spender

tags: literary-style, tolstoy

3 likes

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“I was nothing more than a thug with Tolstoy in my pocket.”
― David Adams Richards, Mercy Among the Children

tags: tolstoy

2 likes

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“...Tolstoy, one of the most interesting men who ever lived, explains that mystery of "interestingness" and how it passes from writer to reader. It is an *infection*. And it is *immediate*. ”
― Brenda Euland

tags: interest, tolstoy, writing

2 likes

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“They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.”
― Lev Shestov, In Job's Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths

tags: mad, madness, tolstoy

1 likes

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“And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to happen”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

tags: peace, tolstoy, war

1 likes

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“One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.”
― C.P. Snow, Variety of Men

tags: albert-einstein, archimedes, bradman-class, cambridge, count-lev-nikolayevich-tolstoy, einstein, g-h-hardy, godfrey-hardy, godfrey-harold-hardy, isaac-newton, lenin, leo-tolstoy, lev-nikolayevich-tolstoy, literature, newton, politics, science, shakespeare, tolstoy, vladimir-ilyich-lenin, vladimir-lenin, william-shakespeare

1 likes

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“You’re trying to help them… that’s a good thing. But you can’t always count on seeing their gratitude,” he said wanting to comfort her before he added a grain of salt. “You know what Tolstoy said… if you are unhappy with your life, you can change it in two ways… either improve the conditions you live in or improve your inner spiritual state. The first isn’t always possible but the second is… In the end, Alex, people need to go directly to the source of Grace for themselves.”
― Paul Alkazraji, The Silencer

tags: better-life, grace-of-god, tolstoy

1 likes

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“God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman. ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections. ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature!”
― Knut Hamsun, Mysteries

tags: hypocrisy, tolstoy

0 likes

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“From across the bar, she winked at me, so I did what anybody else would do—I told the bartender to deliver her a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
”
― Jarod Kintz, Sleepwalking is restercise

Siddhartha Quotes (showing 1-30 of 208)

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: communication, foolishness, knowledge, sharing, teaching, wisdom

564 likes

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“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: siddhartha

420 likes

like

“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

311 likes

like

“It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: choices, focus, humility, judgement, judgemental, self, tolerance

268 likes

like

“It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: admiration, hermann-hesse, love, philosophy, respect, world

261 likes

like

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: buddhism

245 likes

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“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: destiny, fate, fortune, learning-process, meaning, value

201 likes

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“Words do not express thoughts very well. they always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

172 likes

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“Your soul is the whole world.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

140 likes

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“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: love, making-love, pleasure, respect, sensuality, sex, touch

139 likes

like

“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

114 likes

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“He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

111 likes

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“And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

109 likes

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“I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: enlightenment

93 likes

like

“I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: hesse, knowledge, question, siddhartha

83 likes

like

“I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: depression, despair, grace, suicide

83 likes

like

“. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

82 likes

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“One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: self, wisdom

70 likes

like

“Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: dreams, hesse, restlessness, siddhartha, soul

68 likes

like

“Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

66 likes

like

“One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: love

57 likes

like

“The river is everywhere.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: flow, life, omnipresence, river

49 likes

like

“The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing--I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. I was seeking Atman, I was seeking Brahman, I was determined to dismember myself and tear away its layers of husk in order to find in its unknown innermost recess the kernel at the heart of those layers, the Atman, life, the divine principle, the ultimate. But in so doing, I was losing myself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: losing-myself

48 likes

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“And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

48 likes

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“Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: action, life, speech, thought

48 likes

like

“No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the Divine.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: finding-yourself, seeker

45 likes

like

“He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha: An Indian Tale

tags: loss, personhood

43 likes

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“Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

tags: hesse, life, siddhartha, uncertainty, unity

43 likes

like

“Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

41 likes

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“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Henry David Thoreau quotes (showing 1-30 of 991) “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

6482 likes

like

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

tags: truth, values

3083 likes

like

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: writing

2709 likes

like

“The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: inspiration, summer

1556 likes

like

“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: inspirational

1466 likes

like

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

1415 likes

like

“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: inspirational, regret, retrospect

1325 likes

like

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...”
― Henry David Thoreau

1261 likes

like

“be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: ataraxy, be-yourself, expression, yourself

1236 likes

like

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”
― Henry David Thoreau

1139 likes

like

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

tags: life, self-actualization, unrealized-potential

1118 likes

like

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

tags: books

1028 likes

like

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
― Henry David Thoreau

1023 likes

like

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: morality, usefulness

996 likes

like

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: carpe-diem, live-in-the-moment

907 likes

like

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

tags: aspirations, castles-in-the-air, dreams, foundations, futility, goals, security, work-lost

877 likes

like

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

tags: simplicity

807 likes

like

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

tags: reading

790 likes

like

“I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

tags: companions, company, privacy, solitude

730 likes

like

“All good things are wild and free.”
― Henry David Thoreau

697 likes

like

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: friendship

671 likes

like

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: friendship

669 likes

like

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: autumn, fall, solitude

631 likes

like

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: confidence, dreams, inspirational, life

617 likes

like

“I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: happiness, inspirational

586 likes

like

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: dreams, truth

567 likes

like

“There is no remedy for love, but to love more.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: love-remedy

566 likes

like

“I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
― Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

tags: force, human-nature, individuality, liberty, strength, uniqueness

522 likes

like

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: disobedience, freedom, liberty, obedience, protest, slave, slavery, slaves

505 likes

like

“Not till we are completely lost or turned around... do we begin to find ourselves.”
― Henry David Thoreau

Walt Whitman quotes (showing 1-30 of 398) “Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

tags: poetry

3963 likes

like

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: poetry

2053 likes

like

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: activism, service

1885 likes

like

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: change

1576 likes

like

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: advice-for-daily-living, inspirational, positive-attitude

1129 likes

like

“We were together. I forget the rest.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: cute, euphoria, nostalgic

1094 likes

like

“I am large, I contain multitudes”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

958 likes

like

“Be curious, not judgmental.”
― Walt Whitman

789 likes

like

“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: soul, truth

765 likes

like

“I have learned that to be with those I like is enough”
― Walt Whitman

tags: companionship, contentment, family

711 likes

like

“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

tags: autonomy, journey, self-reliance

705 likes

like

“Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: carpe-diem, live-in-the-moment

585 likes

like

“I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best. ”
― Walt Whitman

538 likes

like

“Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

tags: american-poetry

506 likes

like

“Do anything, but let it produce joy.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

tags: carpe-diem, enjoy-life, live-life

486 likes

like

“I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.”
― Walt Whitman

440 likes

like

“And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
― Walt Whitman

415 likes

like

“I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.”
― Walt Whitman

394 likes

like

“I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

tags: poetry

366 likes

like

“When I give, I give myself.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: inspirational

362 likes

like

“Peace is always beautiful.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

tags: peace, poetry

356 likes

like

“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: art

326 likes

like

“Re-examine all you have been told...
Dismiss what insults your Soul.”
― Walt Whitman

326 likes

like

“Be not ashamed women, ... You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: body, gates, inspirational, soul, women

277 likes

like

“I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: animals

272 likes

like

“If you done it, it ain't bragging.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: boastfulness

262 likes

like

“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.”
― Walt Whitman

259 likes

like

“I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.”
― Walt Whitman

247 likes

like

“Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: beginnings

241 likes

like

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

32. I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
They do not make me sick discussiong their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

52. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Jack London quotes (showing 1-30 of 267) “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”
― Jack London

1815 likes

like

“I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.”
― Jack London, The Turtles of Tasman

1587 likes

like

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

tags: inspiration, on-writing, writing

1449 likes

like

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

tags: joy, life, nature

957 likes

like

“Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.”
― Jack London

tags: club, inspiration

677 likes

like

“A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.”
― Jack London

tags: charity, dogs, sharing

621 likes

like

“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.”
― Jack London

tags: life, meteor

562 likes

like

“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”
― Jack London

tags: bluffing, making-do, poker

350 likes

like

“Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.”
― Jack London

tags: character, tattoo, tattoos

243 likes

like

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

tags: alive, ecstasy, life

150 likes

like

“And how have I lived? Frankly and openly, though crudely. I have not been afraid of life. I have not shrunk from it. I have taken it for what it was at its own valuation. And I have not been ashamed of it. Just as it was, it was mine.”
― Jack London

134 likes

like

“The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.”
― Jack London, White Fang

130 likes

like

“To be able to forget means sanity.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

tags: forget, forgetting, sanity

122 likes

like

“Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. ”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

110 likes

like

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
― Jack London

tags: days, existence, function, living, mankind, wasting-time

104 likes

like

“But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

97 likes

like

“It's better to stand by someone's side than by yourself”
― Jack London

85 likes

like

“As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

tags: hurt, suffering, weak, weakness

71 likes

like

“Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!...Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it...and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!”
― Jack London

tags: cycling, sports

62 likes

like

“He had learned well the law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back from a foe he had started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

58 likes

like

“Why, if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.”
― Jack London, The Sea Wolf

53 likes

like

“Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

48 likes

like

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

45 likes

like

“White Fang knew the law well: to oppress the weak and obey the strong.”
― Jack London, White Fang

tags: law-of-the-jungle

45 likes

like

“But I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

44 likes

like

“A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.”
― Jack London

tags: dogs, wolves

42 likes

like

“His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be. The cub's fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.”
― Jack London, White Fang

40 likes

like

“He was a silent fury who no torment could tame.”
― Jack London, White Fang

tags: fury, tame, torment

39 likes

like

“This expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust, he reserved for the master alone.”
― Jack London, White Fang

35 likes

like

“He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

Anthony de Mello quotes (showing 1-30 of 39) “Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness

tags: awareness, happiness, love

173 likes

like

“These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: awareness, compassion, learning, politics, relegion, spirituality, work

111 likes

like

“‎"I have no fear of losing u, for you aren't an object of my property, or anyone else's. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: love

87 likes

like

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: awakening, ideology, meaning-of-life, spirituality

85 likes

like

“You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. ”
― Anthony de Mello

75 likes

like

“People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: reasoning, thinking

66 likes

like

“When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

tags: guilt, sin

59 likes

like

“Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

tags: ignorance, self-awareness, wisdom

56 likes

like

“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils."

Said Diogenes, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: money, voluntarysimplicity

55 likes

like

“When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding... you can be yourself. Relaxed. You'll no longer be driving with your brakes on.”
― Anthony de Mello

50 likes

like

“If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else.” “I know. An overwhelming passion for it.” “No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: awakening, truth, wisdom

49 likes

like

“Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don't you experience it? Because you've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness

tags: happiness

45 likes

like

“Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: awakening, bitterness, dying, harmony, spirituality, truth

42 likes

like

“the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.”
― Anthony de Mello

38 likes

like

“When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

tags: ignorance, wisdom

37 likes

like

“Don't ask the world to change....you change first.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness

36 likes

like

“People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

tags: awakening, progress, spirituality

35 likes

like

“Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

tags: god, knowledge, mysticism, unknowing

34 likes

like

“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.”
― Anthony de Mello

30 likes

like

“I have no fear of losing you, for you aren’t an object of my property, or anyone else’s. I love you as you are, without attachment, without fears, without conditions, without egoism, trying not to absorb you. I love you freely because I love your freedom, as well as mine”
― Anthony de Mello

29 likes

like

“The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness

tags: happiness, wisdom

28 likes

like

“Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

tags: awareness, concepts, thought

24 likes

like

“You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: stories-life

22 likes

like

“Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: enlightenment, inspirational, spirituality

20 likes

like

“the greatest learning of the ages lies in accepting life exactly as it comes to us.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Prayer Of The Frog, Vol. 1

tags: inspirational

17 likes

like

“The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awakening: Conversations with the Masters

tags: analysis, god, knowledge, soul

16 likes

like

“The Master made it his task to destroy systematically every
doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these
things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now
being taken as descriptions.

He loved to quote the Eastern saying "When the sage points
to the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: belief, doctrine, unknowing

14 likes

like

“The world is right because I feel good.
p. 83, Awareness, copyright 1990”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: awareness

14 likes

like

“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.”
― Anthony de Mello

tags: stories-life

12 likes

like

“Mintalah hati yang damai, walau dalam keadaan apa pun juga.”
― Anthony de Mello

Self-Reliance Quotes Rate this book

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Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Self-Reliance Quotes (showing 1-30 of 36)

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

tags: greatness

2318 likes

like

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: integrity, mind

386 likes

like

“Envy is ignorance,
Imitation is Suicide.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: inspirational

352 likes

like

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

tags: inspirational

252 likes

like

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: self-confidence, self-reliance, self-trust, trust

239 likes

like

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: consistency, foolish, little-minds, philosophers

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“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson on Self Reliance

tags: self-reliance

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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: consistency, greatness, misunderstood

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“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preéstablishcd harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give hint no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: self-reliance

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“Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: fearlessness, honesty, speaking-your-mind

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“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: individualism, self-reliance, self-trust

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“My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

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“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: appearances, institutions, labels, values

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“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

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“Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

tags: greatness

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“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

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“Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: greed, materialism, possessions, property, values

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“These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

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“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: best

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“To be great is to be misunderstood...”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: inspirational, truth

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“Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: essay, transcendentalism

18 likes

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“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide...”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: kindlehighlight

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“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: truth

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“Its the not the Destination, It's the journey.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

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“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

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“God will not have his work made manifest by cowards”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: individualism, inspirational

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“The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

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“Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: emerson, transcendentalism

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“though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

tags: kindlehighlight

9 likes

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“Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance