Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Your true meaning cannot be grasped or captured by words. You can never be equated with any words, because you are prior to words.

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

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

When you desire the common good, the whole world desires with you. Make humanity's desire your own and work for it. There you cannot fail.

Nothing can trouble you but your own imagination.

All will come through, not a single soul (jiva) shall be lost.

When you go beyond awareness, there is a state of nonduality, in which there is no cognition, only pure being. In the state of nonduality, all separation ceases.

To go beyond you need alert immobility, quiet attention.

Pain is physical; suffering is mental. Beyond the mind there is no suffering. Pain is essential for the survival of the body, but none compels you to suffer. Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life.

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.

Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. (...) Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret.

Whatever you may have to do, watch your mind. Also you must have moments of complete inner peace and quiet, when your mind is absolutely still. If you miss it, you miss the entire thing. If you do not, the silence of the mind will dissolve and absorb all else.

Stop, look, investigate, ask the right questions, come to the right conclusions and have the courage to act on them and see what happens. The first steps may bring the roof down on your head, but soon the commotion will clear and there will be peace and joy.

There is no second, or higher self to search for. You are the highest self, only give up the false ideas you have about your self.

Love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers.

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 real does not die, the unreal never lived.

Words can bring you only up to their own limit; to go beyond, you must abandon them. Remain as the silent witness only.

Imagine a dense forest full of tigers and you in a strong steel cage. Knowing that you are well protected by the cage, you watch the tigers fearlessly. Next, you find the tigers in the cage and yourself roaming about in the jungle. Last, the cage disappears and you ride the tigers!

To know the self as the only reality and all else as temporal and transient is freedom, peace and joy. It is all very simple. Instead of seeing things as imagined, learn to see them as they are. When you can see everything as it is, you will also see yourself as you are. It is like cleansing a mirror. The same mirror that shows you the world as it is, will also show you your own face. The thought 'I am' is the polishing cloth. Use it.

I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning-it is not as hard as you think.