Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes about Reality

Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelled, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear.

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.

To see Reality is as simple as to see one’s face in a mirror. Only, the mirror must be clear and true. A quiet mind, undistorted by desires and fears, free from ideas and opinions, clear on all the levels, is needed to reflect the Reality. Be clear and quiet; alert and detached, all else will happen by itself.

Once you understand that the false needs time and what needs time is false, you are nearer the Reality, which is timeless, ever in the NOW.

The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realisation the person ceases.

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.

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it.

Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being.

With self-awareness you grow more intelligent. In awareness you learn, in self-awareness you learn about yourself. Of course, you can only learn what you are not. To know what you are, you must go beyond the mind. Awareness is the point at which the mind reaches out beyond itself into reality. In awareness you seek not what pleases, but what is true.

Leave greatness to others. Become so small that no one can see you. This conviction results from growing devotion to the supreme reality.

In your world everything must have a beginning and an end. If it does not, you call it eternal. In my view, there is no such thing as beginning and end - these are all related to time. Timeless being is entirely in the now. Being and not-being alternate and their reality is momentary. The immutable Reality lies beyond space and time.

Awareness neither dies nor is re-born. It is the changeless reality itself.

The window is the absence of the wall, and it gives air and light because it is empty. Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in.

You want to know yourself. For this keep steadily in the focus of consciousness, the only clue you have: your certainty of being. Be with it, play with it, ponder over it, delve deeply into it, till the shell of ignorance breaks open and you emerge into the realm of reality.

Even for a moment do not think that you are the body. Give yourself no name, no shape. In the darkness and the silence reality is found.

You take yourself to be limited, but you are not. Discover this. Stay silent and attentive. Be earnest about it. Just be aware of your being here and now. Reality will find you.

Whatever comes and goes, is not reality. See the event as event only. Then you are vulnerable to reality, no longer armoured against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and experiences.

To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something [the Reality] 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.

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.

In reality there are no others, and -helping yourself you help everybody else.

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.

In reality, time and space exist in you. You do not exist in them.