The teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj (part 1)

(kam's notes from various books, mostly "I am that")

Have you experience of being born or you just heard about it?

“I don’t know” did it exist before the knowledge “I know.” Whatever you know is impermanent.Why worry about a thing that is not permanent.

That in whom reside all beings and who resides in all beings , who is the giver of grace to all, the Supreme Soul of the universe, the limitless being-I am that.

An experience which you cannot have, of what value is it to you?

Memory creates the illusion of continuity.

Would people know that nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen, they would achieve much more with less expenditure of energy. You may try to trace how a thing happened, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is.

To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes. Look at the net and its many contradictions.You want peace, love happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them- your very seeing them will make them go.

We are slaves to what we do not know.

The unconscious dissolves when brought into the conscious. The dissolution of the unconscious releases energy; the mind feels adequate and becomes quiet. When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as pure witness.

Meditation is a sattvic activity and aims at complete elimination of tamas (inertia) and rajas (motivity). Pure sattva (harmony) is perfect freedom from sloth and restlessness.

Truth, goodness, harmony and beauty manifest spontaneously and effortlessly, when things are left to themselves, are not interfered with, not shunned or wanted or conceptualised, but just experienced in full awareness.

Myself, I don’t live by memory. I see the world as it is, a momentary appearance in consciousness.

The only natural state is uncaused, independent, unrelated, undivided, un-composed, unshakable, unquestionable, unreachable by effort. Every positive definition is from memory and therefore, inapplicable.

It is the nature of the mind to roam about. All you can do is shift the focus of consciousness beyond the mind.

Live your life as it comes but alertly, watchfully, allowing everything to happen as it happens, doing the natural things the natural way, suffering, rejoicing-as life brings.

True happiness cannot be found in things that change and pass away.

It is not your real being that is restless but its reflection in the mind.

Q. I have what I don’t want, and I want what I don’t have.

M. Why don’t you invert it. Want what you have and care not for what you don’t.

By eliminating the intervals of inadvertence during your waking hours you will gradually eliminate the long interval of absent-mindedness, which you call sleep. You will be aware that you are asleep.

If you want peace, deserve it. Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. Those only deserve it, who don’t disturb it. You disturb it by being a slave to your desires and fears.

Take the world to be a dream and be done with it.

Perception, imagination, expectation, anticipation, illusion-all are based on memory.

All are responses of memory.

If you trust me, believe when I tell you that you are the pure awareness that illuminates consciousness and its infinite content. Realise this and live accordingly. If you do not believe me, then go within, enquiring “what am I? Or focus your mind on ‘I am’, which is pure and simple being.

Occasionally an old reaction, emotional or mental, happens in the mind, but it is at once noticed and discarded. After all, as long as one is burdened with a person, one is exposed to its idiosyncrasies and habits.

Q: Are you afraid of death?

M: I am already dead.

Q: In what sense?

M: I am double dead. Not only am I dead to my body, but to my mind too.

M: What is normal? Is your life-obsessed by desires and fears, full of strife and struggle, meaningless and joyless – normal?

The mind should normally be in abeyance - incessant activity is a morbid state.

You can know the false only. The true you must yourself be.

In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits.

Consciousness is most differentiated in the waking state. Less so in dream. Still less in sleep. Homogeneous – the fourth state.

M: That’s the point that it leaves no traces. 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.

M: Once you create for yourself a world in time and space, governed by causality, you are bound to search for and find causes for everything. You put the question and impose an answer.

What do causes matter, when things themselves are transient? Let come what comes and let go what goes – why catch hold of things and enquire about their causes.

There is only light and the light is all.

M: You are confused, because you believe that you are in the world, not the world in you.

Q: All I want to know is how to deal with the world’s sorrows.

M: You have created them out of your own desires and fears, deal with them. All is due to your having forgotten your own being.

You know all about the world but about yourself you know nothing.

M: Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions, which you have created, is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on a misapprehension. He pleads with you to get out of it, by the same way you got into it. You got into it by forgetting what you are and you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are.

M: When you are free of the world, you can do something about it. As long as you are a prisoner of it, you are helpless to change it. On the contrary, whatever you do will aggravate the situation.

M: You and your world are dream states. In dream you may suffer agonies. None knows them and none can help you.

A man willing to die for truth will get it.

Q: Which part of future is real and which is not?

M: The unexpected and unpredictable is real.

M: One is always free. You are both conscious and free to be conscious.

M: What is wrong with being, knowing and acting effortlessly and happily?

The state of craving for anything blocks all deeper experience. Nothing of value can happen to a mind which knows exactly what it wants. For nothing the mind can visualise and want is of much value.

Desirelessness is the highest bliss.

By its very nature pleasure is limited and transitory. Out of pain desire is born, in pain it seeks fulfilment, and it ends in the pain of frustration and despair. Pain is the background of pleasure, all seeking of pleasure is born in pain and ends in pain.

Souls take whatever pleasure they desire and pay for them in tears. Time squares all accounts. The law of balance reigns supreme.

Everything must be scrutinized and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed. Believe me, there cannot be too much destruction. For in reality nothing is of value. Be passionately dispassionate-that is all.

It is the nature of the mind to imagine goals, to strive towards them, to seek out means and ways, to display vision, energy and courage.

Q: When somebody dies what exactly happens?

M: Nothing happens. Something becomes nothing. Nothing was, nothing remains.

Entire universes are imploding and exploding every moment – am I to cry over them?

I don’t get frustrated. I just do the needful. I do not worry about the future. A right response to every situation is in my nature. I do not stop to think what to do. Act and I move on. Results do not affect me. I don’t even care whether they are good or bad.

There is no sense of purpose in my doing anything. Things happen as they happen-not because I make them happen. In reality nothing ever happens.

To know the world you forget the self-to know the self you forget the world. What is world after all? A collection of memories.

Whatever is perceived blissfully is beautiful. Bliss is the essence of beauty.

Q: It seems there are schools of yoga where the student, after illumination, is obliged to keep silent for 7 or 12 or 15 or even 20 years. Even Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi imposed on himself 20 years of silence before he began to teach.

M: Yes, the inner fruit must ripen. Until then the discipline, the living in awareness, must go on. Gradually the practice becomes more and more subtle, until it becomes altogether formless.

It reminds me of the primal Yoga (adhi Yoga) mentioned in the rig-veda. All yogas end in adhi yoga.

When the sense of distinction and separation is absent, you may call it love.

Harmony between the inner and outer is happiness. On the other hand, self-identification with the outer causes is suffering.

The self by its nature knows itself only. For lack of experience whatever it perceives it takes to be itself. Battered, it learns to look out (viveka) and live alone (vairagya). When right behaviour becomes normal, a powerful inner urge makes it seek its source. The candle of the body is lighted and becomes clear and bright.

Q: What is the real cause of suffering?

M: Self-identification with the limited. Sensations as such, however strong, do not cause suffering. It is the mind, bewildered by ideas, addicted to thinking: I am this. I am that, that fears loss and craves gain and suffers when frustrated.

Noble friendship (satsang) is the supreme remedy for all ills, physical and mental.

All suffering is born of desire. True love is never frustrated. What can be frustrated is the desire for expression. Such desire is of the mind. As with all things mental, frustration is inevitable.

It is only a question of incompletion. He who could not complete his yoga for some reason is called failed in yoga. Such failure is only temporary, for there is no defeat in yoga. This battle is always won, for it is a battle between true and false. Of all the innumerable steps there is only the last which brings you to your destination.

In reality each step brings you to your goal, because to be always on the move, learning, discovering, unfolding, is your eternal destiny. Living is life’s only purpose.

Learn to live without self-concern.

Once you know with absolute certainty that nothing can trouble you but your own imagination, you come to disregard your desires and fears, concepts and ideas and live by truth alone.

Nobody ever fails in yoga. It is a matter of the rate of progress. It is slow in the beginning and rapid in the end. When one if fully matured, realisation is explosive. It takes place spontaneously or at the slightest hint. The quick is not better than the slow. Slow ripening and rapid flowering alternate. Both are natural and right. Yet, all this is so in the mind only. In the great mirror of consciousness images arise and disappear and only memory gives them continuity.

M: There is progress all the time. Everything contributes to progress. But this is progress of ignorance. The circles of ignorance may be ever widening, yet it remains a bondage all the same. In due course a guru appears to teach and inspire us to practice yoga and ripening takes place as a result of which the immemorial night of ignorance dissolves before the rising sun of wisdom. But in reality nothing happened. The sun is always there, there is no night to it, the mind blinded by the “I am the body” idea spins out endlessly its thread of illusion.

Q: If all is a part of a natural process, where is the need of effort?

M: Even effort is a part of it. When ignorance becomes obstinate and hard and the character gets perverted, effort and the pain of it become inevitable. In complete obedience to nature, there is no effort. The seed of spiritual life grows in silence and in darkness until its appointed hour.

M: He who knows himself has no doubts about it. Nor does he care whether others recognise his state or not. Rare is the realised man who discloses his realisation and fortunate those who have met him, for he does it for their abiding welfare.

M: You look from outside while I look from within. I do not see a sufferer, I am the sufferer. I know him from within and do what is right spontaneously and effortlessly. I follow no rules nor lay down rules. I flow with life-faithfully and irresistibly.

M: Man alone can destroy in himself the roots of pain. Others can only help with the pain, but not with its cause, which is the abysmal stupidity of mankind.

Q: Will this stupidity ever come to an end?

M: In man-of course. Any moment. In humanity- as we know it-after very many years. In creation – never, for creation itself is rooted in ignorance; matter itself is ignorance. Not to know, and not know that one does not know, is the course of endless suffering.

M: Which world do you want to save? The world of your own projection? What business have you with saving the world, when all the world needs is to be saved from you. Get out of the picture and see whether there is anything left to save.

M: Just like a deficiency disease is cured through supply of the missing factor, so are the diseases of living cured by a good dose of intelligent detachment.

M: The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of your dream and not another. Love all, or none of it, and stop complaining. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done.

M: Everything is a play of ideas. In a state free from ideation (nirvakalpa samadhi) nothing is perceived. The root idea is: ‘I am’. It shatters the state of pure consciousness and is followed by the innumerable sensations and perceptions, feelings and ideas which in their totality constitute God and His world. The ‘I am’ remains as the witness, but it is by the will of god that everything happens.

M: Your sincerity will guide you. Devotion to the goal of freedom and perfection will make you abandon all theories and systems and live by wisdom, intelligence and active love. Theories may be good as starting points, but must be abandoned, the sooner-the better.

M: What else is will but steadiness of heart and mind. Given such steadfastness all can be achieved.

M: We are complex beings, at war within and without. We contradict ourself all the time, undoing today the work of yesterday. No wonder we are stuck. A little integrity would make a lot of difference.

M: It is all due to weakness of the mind and you will find that your thoughts and feelings, words and actions will align themselves in the direction of your will.

M: Weak-mindedness is due to lack of intelligence, of understanding, which again is the result of non-awareness. By striving for awareness you bring your mind together and strengthen it.

M: As long as there is a body and a mind to protect the body, attractions and repulsions will operate. They will be there, out in the field of events, but will not concern you. The focus of your attention will be elsewhere. You will not be distracted.

M: To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor not-living. It is a state of pure awareness, beyond the limitations of space and time. Once the illusion that the body-mind is oneself is abandoned, death loses its terror, it becomes a part of living.

M: All this is temporary, while I am dealing with the eternal. Gods and their universes come and go, avatars follow each other in endless succession, and in the end we are back at the source. I talk only of the timeless source of all the gods with all their universes, past, present and future.

M: At the root of all creation lies desire. Desire and imagination foster and reinforce each other. The fourth state (turiya) is a state of pure witnessing, detached awareness, passionless and wordless. It is like space, unaffected by whatever it contains. Bodily and mental troubles do not reach it-they are outside, ‘there’, while the witness is always ‘here’.

Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours.

M: So far your life was dark and restless (tamas & rajas). Attention, alertness, awareness, clarity, liveliness, vitality, are all manifestations of integrity, oneness with your true nature (sattva). It is in the nature of sattva to reconcile and neutralize tamas and rajas and rebuild the personality in accordance with the true nature of the self. Sattva is the faithful servant of the self, ever attentive and obedient.

M: Do not undervalue attention. It means interest and also love. To know, to do, to discover, or to create you must give your heart to it- which means attention. All the blessings flow from it.

First realise that your world is only a reflection of yourself and stop finding fault with the reflection.

Clarify your mind, purify your heart, sanctify your life-this is the quickest way to change the world.

M: The world of things, of energy and matter? Even if there were such a common world of things and forces, it is not the world in which we live. Ours is a world of feelings and ideas, of attractions and repulsions, of scales of values, of motives and incentives; a mental world altogether. Biologically we need very little; our problems are of a different order. Problems created by desires and fears and wrong ideas can be solved only on the level of the mind. You must conquer your mind and for this you must go beyond.

We live because we crave sensory existence.

The moment I create an institution I become its prisoner. As a matter of fact I am available to all. Common roof and food will not make people more welcome.

Attachment is bondage, detachment is freedom. To crave is to slave.

Man will creates for himself incentives anyhow. He does not know that to grow is in the nature of consciousness. He will progress from motive to motive…When by the laws of his being he finds the way of return (nivritti) he abandons all motive, for his interest in the world is over. He wants nothing - neither from others nor from himself. He dies to all and becomes all. To want nothing and do nothing -that is true creation. To watch the universe emerging and subsiding in one’s heart is a wonder.

Inertia (tamas) and restlessness (rajas) work together and keep clarity and harmony (sattva) down. Tamas and rajas must be conquered before sattva can appear. It will all come in due course, quite spontaneously.

M: When effort is needed, effort will appear. When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. You need not push life about. Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment, which is the dying now to now. For living is dying. Without death life cannot be. Get hold of the main thing that the world and the self are one and perfect. Only your attitude is faulty and needs readjustment. This process or readjustment is what you call sadhana. You come to it by putting an end to indolence and using all energy to clear the way for clarity and charity. But in reality these are all signs of inevitable growth. Don’t be afraid, don’t resist, don’t delay. Be what you are. There is nothing to be afraid of. Trust and try. Experiment honestly. Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret.

M: There will be no end to it, because there is no such thing as peace of mind. Mind means disturbance; restlessness itself is mind. Yoga is not an attribute of mind, nor is it a state of mind. For many years you sought peace of mind. You could not find it, for a thing essentially restless cannot be at peace.

M: The self does not need to be put to rest. It is peace itself, not at peace. Only mind is restless. All it knows is restlessness, with its many modes and grades. What we call progress is merely a change over from the unpleasant to the pleasant. But changes by themselves cannot bring us to the changeless, for whatever has a beginning must have an end.

M: Can there be peace apart from yourself? Are you talking from your own experience or from books only? Your book knowledge is useful to begin with, but soon it must be given up for direct experience, which by its very nature is inexpressible. Words can be used for destruction also; of words images are built, by words they are destroyed. You got yourself into your present state through verbal thinking; you must get out of it the same way.

In life nothing can be had without overcoming obstacles. The obstacles to clear perception of one’s true being are desire for pleasure and fear of pain. It is the pleasure-pain motivation that stands in the way. The very freedom from all motivation, the state in which no desires arise is the natural state.

Ask who desires ? Let each desire bring you back to yourself.

M: 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. But there is happiness which is neither, which is completely beyond.

Realise that your desires and fears, that there root is expectation born of memory – and they will cease to obsess you.

Nothing profits the world as much as the abandoning of profits.

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.

There are no conditions to fulfil. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in the 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.

Stand without desire and fear, relinquishing all control and all responsibility.

I am dead to the world. I want nothing, not even to live. I have nothing to desire for I am complete forever.

All causes are served best by the man who has returned to his source.

There is nothing that cannot be achieved by training.

Words betray their hollowness.

What is the root of pain? Ignorance of yourself. What is the root of desire? The urge to find yourself. All creation toils for its Self and will not rest until it returns to it.

By all means help the world. You will not help much, but the effort will make you grow.

You do not come from somewhere, you do not go anywhere. You are timeless being and awareness.

Pain and pleasure happen, but pain is the price of pleasure, pleasure is a reward of pain. In life too you often please by hurting and hurt by pleasing. To know that pleasure and pain are one is peace.

Pain and pleasure are the crests and valleys of the waves in the ocean of bliss. Deep down there is utter fullness.

Realise that there is no desire outside the mind and stay out.

You are your only obstacle. The way leads through yourself and beyond yourself.

But once you have touched the real within your being, you will find me describing what for you is the nearest and dearest.

To have the direct experience of a country one must go and live there. A man’s spiritual victory no doubt benefits mankind, but to benefit another individual, a close personal relation is required. Such relation is not accidental and not everyone can claim it. On the other hand, the scientific approach is for all. ‘Trust-test-taste’. What more do you need.

The common things of life: I experience them just as you do. The difference lies in what I do not experience. I do not experience fear or greed, hate or anger. I ask nothing, refuse nothing. Keep nothing. In these matters I do not compromise.

Whatever you do for the sake of truth, will take you to truth. Only be earnest and honest. The shape it takes hardly matters. Doing nothing is as good. Mere longing, undiluted by thought and action, pure, concentrated longing, will take you speedily to your goal. It is the true motive that matters not the manner. The very facts of repetition, of struggling on and on and of endurance and perseverance, in spite of boredom and despair and complete lack of conviction are really crucial but they are not important in themselves, but the sincerity behind them is all-important.

As long as the urge for truth affects your daily life, all is well. Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal. It is the art of living, in friendliness and love. The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless.

Be interested, give attention, until a current of mutual understanding is established. Then sharing will be easy. As a matter of fact, all realization is only sharing. You enter a wider consciousness and share in it. Unwillingness to enter and to share is the only hindrance. I never talk of differences, for me there are none.

To go beyond, we must pass through total negation of everything as having independent existence. All things depend.

Where clarity and detachment predominate, the witness-consciousness comes into being.

Not only you know, but you know that you know.

Pain and pleasure are merely symptoms, the results of wrong knowledge and wrong feeling.

Do you know yourself enough to know what you can do and what you cannot? You do not know your own powers. You never investigated. Begin with yourself now.

Every sensation is contemplated in perfect equanimity. There is no desire for it, nor refusal. It is as it is and he looks at it with a smile of affectionate detachment.

There are no important events for a gnani, except when somebody reaches the highest goal. Then only his heart rejoices. All else is of no concern.

What ends in happiness is virtue, what ends in sorrow is sin.

Anything you do for the sake of enlightenment takes you nearer. Anything you do without remembering enlightenment puts you off.

Desire nothing, for you lack nothing.

Love is not a result, it is the very ground of being. Wherever you go, you will find being, consciousness and love. Why and what for make preferences.

Conflict is a characteristic of the old. To what extent are you free from the habitual tendency to create and perpetuate conflicts.

The state that sprouts suddenly and without cause, carries no strain of self; what is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full gory, mysteriously and marvellously, you may call it god. It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain. Because it is without cause, it is without hindrance. It obeys the one law only; the law of freedom. Anything that implies a continuity, a sequence, a passing from stage to stage cannot be real. There is no progress in reality, it is final, perfect, unrelated.

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 and abide there.

It is definitely beyond the mind, but all you can do is to know your mind well. Not that the mind will help you, but by knowing the mind you may avoid your mind disabling you.

Q: What is the difference between the person and the witness?

M: Both are modes of consciousness. In one you desire and fear, on the other you are unaffected by pleasure and pain and are not ruffled by events. You let them come and go.

Experience is of change, it comes and goes. Reality is not an event, it cannot be experienced. It is not perceivable in the same way as an event is perceivable. If you wait for an event to take place, for the coming of reality, you will wait forever, for reality neither comes nor goes. It is to be perceived, not expected. It is not to be prepared for and anticipated. But the very longing and search for reality is the movement, operation, action of reality. All you can do is to grasp the central point, that reality is not an event and does not happen and whatever happens, whatever comes and goes, is not reality. See the event as event only, the transient as transient, experience as mere experience and you have done all that 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.

All is attended to in minutest detail 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 believe.

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

The gnani considers himself to be perfectly normal, true to his real nature.

The words of a gnani have the power of dispelling ignorance and darkness in the mind. It is not the words that matter but the power behind them. The power of conviction, based on personal realisation, on one’s own direct experience.

M: Some are addicted to trances, with their consciousness in abeyance.

Q: Many are practicing samadhis (states of rapturous absorption). In samadhis consciousness is quite intense, yet they do not result in anything.

M: what results do you expect? And why should gnana be the result of anything? One thing leads to another, but gnana is not a thing bound by causes and results. It is beyond causality altogether. It is abidance in the self. The yogi comes to know many wonders, but of the self he remains ignorant. The gnani may look and feel quite ordinary, but the self he knows well.

Q: There are many who strive for self-knowledge earnestly, but with scant results. What may be the cause of it?

M: They have not investigated the sources of knowledge sufficiently, their sensations feelings and thoughts they do not know well enough. this may be one cause of delay. The other: some desires may be still alive. Laziness and restlessness often stand in the way and until they are seen and removed, the progress is slow. Sadhana is accelerated ripening.

No self-definition is valid.

Stay open and quite, that is all. What you seek is so near you, that there is no place for a way.

Don’t concern yourself with others, take care of yourself. You know that you are. Don’t burden yourself with names, just be. Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature.

The desire for truth is the highest of all desires, yet it is still a desire. Alldesires must be given up for the real to be. Remember that you are. This is your working capital. Rotate itand there will be much profit.

When all search ceases , it is the supreme state.

What you gave up is of no importance now. What have you not given up? Find that out and give up that. Sadhana is a search for what to give up. Empty yourself completely.

Stop making use of your mind and see what happens. Do this one thing thoroughly.

See what you are. Don’t ask others, don’t let others tell you about yourself. Look within and see. All the teacher can tell you is only this. There is no need of going from one to another. The same water is in all the wells. You just draw from the nearest. In my case the water is within me and I am the water.

The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. Have a good look at yourself and all these misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve.

God is only an idea in your mind. The fact is you. The only thing you know for sure is: here and now I am.

Examine the motion of change and you will see. What can change while you do not change, can be said to be independent of you. But what is changeless must be one with whatever else is changeless. For, duality implies interaction and interaction means change. In other words, the absolutely material and the absolutely spiritual, the totally objective and the totally subjective are identical, both in substance and essence.

The main point to grasp is that you have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires and fears, and that you have imprisoned yourself in it. Break the spell and be free.

You need not free yourself from a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination. However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. Realise that there is nobody to force it on you, that it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear.

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 is 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.

In each case the value lies in bringing you to the need of seeking within. Playing with various approaches may be due to resistance to going within, to the fear of having to abandon the illusion of being something or somebody in particular. To find water you do not dig small pits all over the place, but drill deep in one place only. Similarly, to find your self you have to explore yourself. When you realise that you are the light of the world, you will also realise that you are the love of it; that to know is to love and to love is to know. Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first. Your love of the world is the reflection of your love of yourself, for your world is your own creation. Light and love are impersonal, but they are reflected in your mind as knowing and wishing oneself well.

Unselfish work leads to silence, for when you work selflessly, you don’t need to ask for help. Indifferent to results, you are willing to work with the most inadequate means. You do not care to be gifted and well equipped. Nor do you ask for recognition and assistance.

You just do what needs to be done, leaving success and failure to the unknown. For everything is caused by innumerable factors, of which your personal endeavour is but one. Yet such is the magic of man’s mind and heart that the most improbable happens when human will and love pull together.

You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.

To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder.

What do youknow about yourself? You can only be what you are in reality; you can only appear what you are not. You have never moved away from perfection. All idea of self-improvement is conventional and verbal. As the sun knows not darkness, so does the self know the not self.

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 one another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. 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.

Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time; you imagine yourself to be at a certain point occupying a certain volume; your personality is due to your self-identification with your body.Your thoughts and feelings exist in succession, they have their span in time and make you imagine yourself, because of memory, as having duration. In reality time and space exist in you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of perception, but they are not the only ones. Time and space are like words written on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a convention. How old are you?

Q 48

M: what makes you say forty-eight? What makes you say: I am here? Verbal habits born of assumptions. The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality. All is here and now, but we do not see it. Truly, all is in me and by me. There is nothing else. The very idea of ‘else’ is a disaster and a calamity.

All you need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences. Once you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will discern it among experiences and you will no longer be misled by names and forms.

Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining.

The world is full of contradictions, hence your search for harmony and peace. These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of chaos. To find order you must search within. The world comes into being only when you are born in a body. No body-no world.First enquire whether you are the body. The understanding of the world will come later.

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. This complete aloofness, unconcerned with mind and body is the best proof that at the core of your being you are neither mind nor body. What happens to the body and the mind may not be within your power to change, but you can always put an end to your imagining yourself to be the body and mind. Whatever happens, remind yourself that only your body and mind are affected, not yourself.

Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfil them it is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well.

To imagine that some little thing-food, sex, power, fame – will make you happy is to deceive yourself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.

Live your life intelligently, with the interests of your deepest self always on your mind. After all, what do you really want? Not perfection; you are already perfect. What you seek is to express in action what you are. For this you have a body and mind. Take them in hand and make them serve you.

The self is universal and its aims are universal. There is nothing personal about the self. Live an orderly life, but don’t make it a goal by itself.

If you are earnest, you don’t need moving about. You are yourself wherever you are and you create your own climate. Locomotion and transportation will not give you salvation. You are not the body and dragging the body from place to place will take you nowhere. Your mind is free to roam the three worlds-make full use of it.

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.

What is done under pressure of society and circumstance does not matter much, for it is mostly mechanica, mere reacting to impacts. It is enough to watch oneself dispassionately to isolate oneself completely from what is going on. The guru demands one thing only: clarity and intensity of purpose, a sense of responsibility to oneself. The very reality of the world must be questioned. He comes to take you to the real; don’t expect him to do anything else.

To him your questions about obedience and discipline do not make sense, for in his eyes the person you take yourself to be does not exist. Your questions are about a non-existing person. Realise that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events; that while all happens, comes and goes, you are alone, the changeless among the changeful, the self-evident among the inferred.

Do your work. When you have a moment free, look within.

Love of one and love of all merge together in love, pure and simple, addressed to none, denied to none. Stay in that love. Go deeper and deeper into it, investigate yourself and love the investigation and you will solve not only your problems but also the problems of humanity.

These moments of quiet will burn out all obstacles without fail.

Virtues and powers are mere tokens for children to play with.

Your body is food transformed. As your food, gross and subtle, so will be your health.

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.

The main thing is to be free from negative emotions-desire, fear etc, the six enemies of the mind. Once the mind is free of them, the rest will come easily.

When you sit quite and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the surface. Do nothing about them, don’t react to them; as they have come so they will go, by themselves. All that matters is mindfulness, total awareness of oneself or rather of one’s mind.

The body is a material thing and needs time to change. The mind is but a set of mental habits, of ways of thinking and feeling, and to change they must be brought to the surface and examined. This also takes time. Just resolve and persevere, the rest will take care of itself.

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 in your way. Just be interested in them, watch them, observe, enquire. Let anything happen-good or bad. But don’t let yourself be submerged by what happens.

The mind must learn that beyond the moving mind there is the background of awareness, which does not change. The mind must come to know the true self and respect it and cease to covering it up. Take no notice of what is not yourself.

While the mind is centred in the body and consciousness is centred in the mind, awareness is free. The body has its urges and mind its pleasures and pains. Awareness is unattached and unshaken. It is lucid, silent, peaceful, alert and unafraid, without desire and fear. Meditate on your true being and try to be in it in your daily life, and you shall realise it in its fullness. By looking tirelessly, I became quite empty and with that emptiness all came back to me except the mind. I find I have lost the mind irretrievably.

I am that infinite ocean of consciousness in which all happens. I am also beyond all existence and cognition, pure bliss of being. There is nothing I feel separate from, hence I am all. No thing is me, so I am nothing.

Destiny refers only to name and shape. Since you are neither body nor mind, destiny has no control over you. You are completely free. There are so many theories devised for explaining things-all are plausible, none is true. For a seeker for reality there is only one meditation-the rigorous refusal to harbour thoughts.

You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quite, keep it quite. 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 there will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognise it.

If you notice imperfections, just keep on noticing; your very attention to them will set your heart and mind and body right.

Take cognisance of the whole of it, not only of the outer symptoms. 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 the causes the effect is bound to depart. Man becomes what he believes himself to be. Abandon all ideas about yourself and you will find yourself to be the pure witness, beyond all that can happen to the body or the mind.

In fact, everything is most wonderfully inexplicable.

The known is the past.

What you never lost can never be found. Your very search for safety and joy keeps you away from them. Stop searching and cease losing. The disease is simple and the remedy equally simple.

As nobody and nothing you are safe and happy. Only in the mind of man there is chaos. The mind does not grasp the whole-its focus is very narrow. It sees fragments only and fails to perceive the picture.

Diversity without separateness is the Ultimate that the mind can touch. Beyond that all activity ceases, because in it all goals are reached and all purposes fulfilled.

The Supreme State is universal, here and now; everybody already shares in it. It is the state of being-knowing and liking. Who does not like to be, or does not know his own existence? But we take no advantage of this joy of being conscious, we do not go into it and purify it of all that is foreign to it. The work of mental self-purification, the cleansing of the psyche, is essential.

To see that all knowledge is a form of ignorance is itself a movement of reality. The witness is not a person.

Death is natural, the manner of dying is man-made. Separateness causes fear and aggression, which again causes violence. Do away with man-made separations and all this horror of people killing each other will surely end. But in reality there is no killing and no dying. The real does not die, the unreal never lived. Set your mind right and all will be right. When you know that the world is one, that humanity is one, you will act accordingly. But first of all you must attend to the way you feel, think and live. Unless there is order in yourself, there can be no order in the world. In reality nothing happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, memories of former projections and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go- light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the picture.

Evil is the stench of a mind that is diseased. Heal your mind and it will cease to project distorted, ugly pictures.

If you disregard all teachings, all books, anything put into words and dive deeply within yourself and find yourself, this alone will solve all your problems and leave you in full mastery of every situation, because you will not be dominated by your ideas about the situations.

Just stop thinking you are bodies and the problems of love and sex will lose their meaning. With all sense of limitations gone, fear, pain and the search for pleasure- all cease. Only awareness remains.