Authors Topics Discover Authors NEW
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Icon Image
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Quotes

A prominent teacher of Advaita Vedanta who is best known for his teachings on non-duality and self-realization. His approach was direct and experiential, encouraging seekers to explore the nature of their own consciousness. His book, "I Am That," is a significant text in the study of Advaita Vedanta, offering profound insights into the nature of the self and reality. His teachings are valued for their simplicity and depth, guiding individuals toward understanding their true essence beyond the mind and ego.

Let the dream unroll itself to its very end. You cannot help it. But you can look at the dream as a dream, refuse it the stamp of reality.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Don't rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Refuse to think in terms of this or that. All pain needs investigation. The mind is nothing else but the self. Assumption obscures reality without destroying it. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false..Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time. The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You know that you are. Don't burden yourself with names, just be. Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There is no 'my self' and 'his self'. There is the Self, the only Self of all. Misled by the diversity of names and shapes, minds and bodies, you imagine multiple selves.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Being oneself is completely beyond all motivation. You cannot be yourself for some reason. You are yourself, and no reason is needed.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

To deal with things knowledge of things is needed. To deal with people, you need insight, sympathy. To deal with yourself, you need nothing. Be what you are--conscious being--and don't stray away from yourself.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Knowledge gives power. In practice it is very simple. To control yourself, know yourself.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

We miss the real by lack of attention, and create the unreal by excess of imagination.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Leave your mind alone, that is all. Do not go along with it. After all, there is no such thing as mind apart from thoughts which come and go obeying their own laws, not yours. They dominate you only because you are interested in them.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You cannot transcend what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Watch your thoughts as you watch the street traffic. People come and go; you register without response. It may not be easy in the beginning, but with some practice you will find that your mind can function on many levels at the same time and you can be aware of them all.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of 'I'.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nothing can trouble you but your own imagination.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Cooperate with your destiny, don't go against it, don't thwart it. Allow it to fulfill itself.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I am dead already. Physical death will make no difference in my case. I am timeless being. I am free of desire or fear, because I do not remember the past or imagine the future. Where there are no names and shapes, how can there be desire and fear? With desirelessness comes timelessness. I am safe, because what is not, cannot touch what is. You feel unsafe, because you imagine danger. Of course, your body as such is complex and vulnerable and needs protection. But not you. Once you realize your own unassailable being, you will be at peace.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

All is a play in consciousness. All divisions are illusory. You can know the false only. The true you must yourself be.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj