Quotes of Nisargadatta Maharaj
Give up all questions except one ‘who am I?’ After all the only fact you are sure of is that you ‘are’. The ‘I am’ is certain, the ‘I am this’ is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
When “I am” arises, everything appears; when “I am” subsides everything subsides. Now this what I am trying to tell you, but you want something else. You want something about your future, something which is part of manifestation, but I am trying to hit at it.
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All I can say is “I am”, all else is inference. But the inference has become a habit. Destroy all habits of thinking and sleeping. The sense “I am” is a manifestation of a deeper cause, which you may call self, God, Reality or by any other name. The “I am” is in the world but it is the key which can open the door out of the world.
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The “I am” and the Absolute are not two. In the Absolute the “I amness” comes and then the experience takes place. Whatever is happening, from the Absolute standpoint, without the knowledge “I am”, is very profound, unlimited, and expansive.
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The knowledge “I am” is the first ignorance and whatever knowledge you acquire with it is ignorance. Go back to the source of your ignorance.
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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.
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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 is the domain of five elements, and the experiences in the five elements, are unreal. This “I amness” itself is unreal.
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Consciousness is the sense of knowingness “I am” without words, and it appeared unknowingly and unsolicited. Only in the realm of knowingness ‘I am” “the consciousness” can a world be, and so also an experience. Hold on to this knowingness “I am” and the fount of knowledge will well up within you, revealing the mystery of the Universe; of your body and psyche; of the play of the five elements, the three “gunas” and “prakriti-purusha”; and of everything else. In the process of this revelation, your individualistic personality confined to the body shall expand into the manifested universe, and it will be realized that you permeate and embrace the entire cosmos as your “body” only. This is known as the “Pure Superknowledge” “Shuddhavijnana”.
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Once you subside into the consciousness, the factual state of Reality shall be revealed to you with the knowledge that will emanate out of you intuitively, like spring water. This will enable you to discern not what is real and unreal, but, most importantly, to realize what ‘I am’. And who could be that one? Surely not an individual who is trapped in the mind-shell, but that one is the knowledge ‘I am’ – the consciousness.
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The capacity of consciousness is something astounding. I didn’t know I was, and then suddenly I knew ‘I am’. This ‘I amness’ is the power of ‘Maya’.
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This attitude of silent observation is the very foundation of yoga. You see the picture, but you are not the picture.
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Quotes of Nisargadatta Maharaj 