I Am That

I wanted to share some more quotes from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, from the book of his collected talks, "I Am That".

You must know your own true being as indomitable, fearless, ever victorious. 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.

All division is in the mind; there is none in reality.

Separation is an appearance. Just as the dream is not apart from the dreamer, the knowledge is the knower, the distinction is merely verbal.

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. [...] It is the mind, bewildered by wrong ideas, addicted to thinking: “I am this”, “I am that”, that fears loss and craves gain and suffers when frustrated.

Living is life’s only purpose. The self does not identify with success or failure - the very idea of becoming this or that is unthinkable. The self understands that success and failure are relative and related, that they are the very warp and weft of life. Learn from both and go beyond.

In the great mirror of consciousness, images arise and disappear and only memory gives them continuity. On such flimsy foundations we build a sense of personal existence - vague, intermittent, dreamlike. This vague persuasion: “I-am-so-and-so”, obscures the changeless state of pure awareness and makes us believe that we are born to suffer and die.

Ours is a world of feelings and ideas, of attractions and repulsions, of scales and 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 it.

Just remember yourself. “I am” is enough to heal your mind and take you beyond.

You give reality to concepts, while concepts are distortions of reality. Abandon all conceptualisation and stay silent and attentive.

There is only reality, in which no “thing” has any being on its own. Like waves inseparable from the ocean, so is all existence rooted in being.

Wisdom lies in never forgetting the self as the ever-present source of both the experiencer and his experience.

There is no such thing as peace of mind. Mind means disturbance; restlessness itself is mind.

Instead of searching for something for what you do not have, find what it is that you have never lost? That which is there before the beginning and after the ending of everything; that to which there is no birth, nor death. That immovable state, which is not affected by the birth or death of a body or a mind, that state you must perceive.

When you have understood that all existence, in separation and limitation, is painful, and when you are willing to live integrally, in oneness with all life, as pure being, you have gone beyond all need of help. You can help another by precept and example and, above all, by your being. You cannot give what you do not have and you don’t have what you are not. You can only give what you are - and of that you can give limitlessly.