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advaita | vedanta | devikalottara | supreme wisdom | atma sakshatkar | direct awareness of the self | vichara mani mala | jewel garland of enquiry
avadhuta gita | ever-free | ashtavakra gita | purest expression of truth | ribhu gita | heart | wisdom | bhagavad gita | essence | the song celestial
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seng tsan | faith mind | gaudapada | mandukya karika | katha upanishad | death as teacher | yoga vasistha | dispassion | seeker's behaviour | essence
ramakant maharaj | reality has nothing to do with words | lama guendune rinpoché | free and easy | ellam ondre | all is one | william samuel | now

NISARGADATTA  MAHARAJ

WORDS



Let there be peace and love among all beings of the universe. OM Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.

"To expound and propagate concepts is simple.
But to drop all concepts is difficult and rare.
"


  SEE  what you too could see, here and now, but for the wrong focus of your attention you give no attention to Self. Your mind is busy with things, people and ideas, never with Self. Bring your Self into focus, become aware of your own existence.


As all living beings desire to be happy always, without misery, as in the case of everyone there is observed supreme love for oneself, and as happiness alone is the cause for love, in order to gain that happiness which is one's nature and which is experienced in the state of deep sleep where there is no mind, one should know oneself. For that, the path of knowledge, the enquiry of the form "Who am I?", is the principal means.

2. How little does man know of his Self [the one, immortal, formless substratum of all that exists], how he takes the most absurd statements about himself for holy Truth. He is told that he is the body, was born, will die, has parents, duties; learns to like what others like and fear what others fear. Totally a creature of heredity and society, he lives by memory and acts by habits. Ignorant of his Self and his true nature, he pursues false aims and is always frustrated. His life and death are meaningless and painful, and there seems to be no way out.

3. Without Self-knowledge all is trouble. If you want to live sanely, creatively, and happily, and have infinite riches to share, search for what you are. Without it you will be consumed by desires and fears, repeating themselves meaninglessly in endless suffering. Most of the people do not know that there can be an end to pain. But once they have heard the good news, obviously going beyond all strife and struggle is the most urgent task that can be. You know that you can be free and now it is up to you.

4. Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them – your very seeing will make them go.

5. How do you go about finding anything? By keeping your mind and heart on it. Interest there must be and steady remembrance. To remember what needs to be remembered is the secret of success. You come to it through earnestness.

6. What is supremely important is to be free from contradictions: the goal and the way must not be on different levels; life and light must not quarrel; behaviour must not betray belief. Call it honesty, integrity, wholeness; you must not go back, undo, uproot, abandon the conquered ground. Tenacity of purpose and honesty in pursuit will bring you to your goal.

7. Consciousness does not shine by itself. It shines by a light beyond it. Having seen the dreamlike quality of consciousness, look for the light in which it appears, which gives it being. There is the content of consciousness as well as the awareness of it.

8. Remain as you are prior to beingess; you are totally unknown to your Self.

9. It is not so much the matter of levels as of qualities [gunas]. Meditation is a pure activity and aims at complete elimination of inertia and restlessness. Pure harmony is perfect freedom from sluggishness and restlessness.



10. 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.


11. Refuse all thoughts except one: the thought "I am". The mind will rebel in the beginning, but with patience and perseverance it will yield and keep quiet.

12. The teaching is simple: when the "I am" arises, everything appears, and when "I am" subsides everything disappears. Onto your absoluteness, which is without form or shape, came this sence "I am", which is also without shape and form.

13.
This "I am" has spontaneously "appeared" on your absolute state, therefore it is an illusion. The feeling "I am" is itself an illusion, therefore whatever is seen through this illusion cannot be real.

14. This "I am" has come out of the state prior to it and now is the cause of all suffering. Before the "I am" came you were happy, so revert.

15. Be alert. Question, observe, investigate, learn all you can about confusion, how it operates, what it does to you and others. By being clear about confusion you become clear of confusion.

16. By eliminating the intervals of inadvertence during the waking hours you will gradually eliminate the long interval of absent-mindedness, which you call sleep. You will be aware that you are asleep.

17. By no effort of logic or imagination can you change the "I am" into "I am not". In the very denial of your being you assert it. Once you realise that the world is your own projection, you are free of it.

18. All these sufferings are man-made and it is within man's power to put an end to them. God helps by facing man with the results of his actions and demanding that the balance should be restored. Karma is the law that works for righteousness; it is the healing hand of God.

19. Use your mind. Remember. Observe. You are not different from others. Most of their experiences are valid for you too. Think clearly and deeply, go into the structure of your desires and their ramifications. They are a most important part of your mental and emotional make-up and powerfully affect your actions. Remember, you cannot abandon what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself. Whatever you come across, go beyond.

20. Purify yourself by a well-ordered and useful life. Watch over your thoughts, feelings, words and actions. This will clear your vision.

21. Ultimately, you are the proof that God exists, not the other way around. For before any question about God can be put, you must be there to put it.

22. Before the mind – I am. "I am" is not a thought in the mind; the mind happens to me, I do not happen to the mind. And since time and space are in the mind, I am beyond time and space, eternal and omnipresent.

23. Since it is awareness that makes consciousness possible, there is awareness in every state of consciousness. Therefore, the very consciousness of being conscious is already a movement in awareness. Interest in your stream of consciousness takes you to awareness. It is not a new state. It is at once recognised as the original, basic existence, which is life itself, and also love and joy.

24. Realisation is but the opposite of ignorance. To take the world as real and one's Self as unreal is ignorance, the cause of sorrow. 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 your Self 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.

25. Devotion to your goal makes you live a clean and orderly life, given to the search for Truth and to helping people, and realisation makes noble virtue easy and spontaneous, by removing for good the obstacles in the shape of desires and fears and wrong ideas.

26. The entire purpose of a clean and well-ordered life is to liberate man from the thaldrom of chaos and the burden of sorrow.

27. In reality, only the Ultimate is. The rest is a matter of name and form. And as long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing.

28. All will happen as you want it, provided you really want it.

29. Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions, which you have created, is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on a misapprehension. He pleads with you to get out of it, by the same way by which you got into it. You got into it by forgetting what you are and you will get out of it by knowing your Self as you are.

30. Why not turn away from the experience to the experiencer and realise the full import of the only true statement you can make: "I am"?

31. To you, you get born and die, while to me the world appears and disappears. You see yourself in the world, while I see the world in myself. You cling to the idea that you were born into a world of pain and sorrow; I know that the world is a child of love.

32. Harmony between the inner and the outer is happiness. On the other hand, self-identification with the outer causes suffering.

33. At the root of everything is the feeling "I am". The state of mind, "There is a world" is secondary, for to be I do not need the world, the world needs me.

34. Seeing the false as false, is meditation. This must go on all the time.

35. Deliberate daily exercise in discrimination between the True and the false and renunciation of the false is meditation.

36. When I met my Guru, he told me, "You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense "I am", find your real Self." I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon!

37. Establish yourself firmly in the awareness of "I am" and reject all that does not go with it. This is the beginning and also the end of all endeavour.

38. Meditation will help you to find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings.

39. To solve a problem you must trace it to its source. Only in the dissolution of the problem in the universal solvents of enquiry and dispassion, can its right solution be found.

40. Why don't you enquire how real are the world and the person?

41. You have a purpose only as long as you are not complete; until then completeness, perfection, is the purpose. But when you are complete in your Self, fully integrated within and without, then you enjoy the universe; you do not labour at it.

42. To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not. And to know what you are not you must watch yourself carefully, rejecting all that does not necessarily go with the basic fact: "I am". The ideas: I am born at a given place, at a given time, from my parents and now I am so-and-so, living at, married to, father of, employed by, and so on, are not inherent in the sense "I am". Our usual attitude is of "I am this". Separate consistently and perseveringly the "I am" from "this" or "that", and try to feel what it means to be, just to be, without being "this" or "that". All our habits go against it and the task of fighting them is long and hard sometimes, but clear understanding helps a lot. The clearer you understand that on the level of the mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker you will come to the end of your search and realise your limitless being.

43. When things repeatedly happen together, we tend to see a causal link between them. It creates a mental habit, but a habit is not a necessity.

44. False ideas about this "I am" lead to bondage, right knowledge leads to freedom and happiness.

45. Pleasure and pain alternate. Happiness is unshakeable. What you can seek and find is not the real thing. Find what you have never lost, find the inalienable.

46. The sense "I am" is your own. You cannot part with it, but you can impart it to anything, as in saying: "I am young, I am rich, etc." But such self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage.

47. Final Reality is prior to consciousness, prior to Self.

48. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself as a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream. Enquiry also wakes you up.

49. Truth is simple and open to all. Why do you complicate? Truth is loving and loveable. It includes all, accepts all, purifies all. It is untruth that is difficult and a source of trouble. It always wants, expects, demands. Being false, it is empty, always in search of confirmation and reassurance. It is afraid of and avoids enquiry. It identifies itself with any support, however weak and momentary. Whatever it gets, it loses and asks for more.

50. What is your happiness worth when you have to strive and labour for it? True happiness is spontaneous and effortless.

51. "I am" itself is God. The seeking itself is God. In seeking you discover that you are neither the body nor the mind, and the love of the Self in you is for the Self in all. The two are one. The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.

52. Your personal universe does not exist by itself. It is merely a limited and distorted view of the Real. It is not the universe that needs improving, but your way of looking.

53. All desire has its source in the Self. It is all a matter of choosing the right desire.

54. All questions arise from your believing yourself to be a person. Go beyond the personal and see.

55. 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.

56. Whatever you do against your better knowledge is sin.

57. Remembering your Self is virtue, forgetting your Self is sin.

58. The sense"I am" is the birth principle. Investigate it and you will finally stabilise in final Reality.

59. Steady faith is stronger than destiny. Destiny is the result of causes, mostly accidental, and is therefore loosely woven. Confidence and good hope will overcome it easily.

60. We discover the Self by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.

61. On your true state has arisen this subtle principle "I am", which is the cause of all mischief.

62. See your world as it is, not as you imagine it to be. Discrimination will lead to detachment; detachment will ensure right action, right action will build the inner bridge to your real being. Action is proof of earnestness. Do what you are told diligently and faithfully and all obstacles will dissolve.

63. Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically, scrutinise every idea about it; that will do.

64. The entire universe of pain is born of desire. Give up the desire for pleasure and you will not even know what is pain.

65. By its very nature pleasure is limited and transient. Out of pain desire is born, in pain it seeks fulfilment, and it ends in the pain of frustration and despair. Pain is the background of pleasure, all seeking of pleasure if born in pain and ends in pain.

66. Sorting out and discarding are absolutely necessary. Everything must be scrutinised and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed. Believe me, there cannot be too much destruction. For, in reality, nothing is of value. Be passionately dispassionate – that is all.

67. When through the practice of discrimination and detachment, you lose sight of sensory and mental states, pure being emerges as the natural state.

68. To be a living being is not the ultimate state: there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor not-living. It is a state of pure awareness, beyond limitations of space and time..

69. Dive deep within your Self and you will find it easily and simply. Go in the direction of "I am".

70. To know the world you forget the Self – to know the Self you forget the world. What is the world after all? A collection of memories. Cling to one thing, that matters, hold on to "I am" and let go all else. This is sadhana.

71. All the three states of waking, dreaming and sleeping are contained within the life bubble in consciousness called "I". The real world lies beyond the self.

72. Be fully aware of your own being and you will be in bliss consciously. Because you take your mind off your Self and make it dwell on what you are not, you lose your sense of well-being, of being well.

73. Delayed response is wrong response. Thought, feeling and action must be one and simultaneous with the situation that calls for them.

74. My experience is that everything is bliss. But the desire for bliss creates pain. Thus, bliss becomes the seed of pain. the entire universe of pain is born of desire. Give up the desire for pleasure and you will not even know what pain is.

75. As you are now, the personality is only an obstacle. Self-identification with the body may be good for an infant, but true growing up depends on getting the body out of the way. Normally, one should outgrow body-based desires early in life. Even the bhogi [worldly enjoyer], who does not refuse worldly enjoyments, need not hanker after the ones he has tasted. Habit, desire for repetition, frustrates both the yogi and the bhogi.

76. The very desire to live is the messenger of death, just as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow.

77. There are so many who take the dawn for the noon, a momentary experience for full realisation and destroy even the little they gain by excess of pride. Humility and silence are essential for an aspirant, however advanced. Only a fully ripened Self-realised being [jnani] can allow himself complete spontaneity.

78. There are no distinctive marks of Self-realisation [jnana]. Only ignorance can be recognised, not jnana. Nor does a jnani claim to be something special. All those who proclaim their own greatness and uniqueness are not jnanis. They are mistaking some unusual development for realisation. The jnani shows no tendency to proclaim himself to be a jnani. He considers himself to be perfectly normal, true to his real nature. Proclaiming oneself to be an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent deity is a clear sign of ignorance.

79. Be attentive, enquire ceaselessly. That is all.

80. A spark of Truth can burn up a mountain of lies. The opposite is also true. The sun of Truth remains hidden behind the cloud of self-identification with the body.

81. In your world I would be most miserable. To wake up, to eat, to talk, to sleep again – what a bother!

82. The yogi is narrow as the sharp edge of the knife. He has to be to cut deep and smoothly, to penetrate unerringly the many layers of the false. The worldly enjoyer [bhogi] worships at many altars; the yogi serves none but his own true Self.

83. Your own Self is your ultimate teacher. The outer teacher is merely a milestone. It is only your inner teacher that will walk with you to the goal, for he is the goal.

84. There are no others to help. The only thing that can help is to wake up from the dream.

85. Seek within. Your own Self is your best friend.

86. The self by its nature knows itself only. For lack of experience whatever it perceives it takes to be itself. Battered, it learns to look out and to live alone. When right behaviour becomes normal, a powerful inner urge makes it seek its source. The candle of the body is lighted and all becomes clear and bright.

87. Those who know only scriptures know nothing. To know is to be.

88. As long as we delude ourselves by what we imagine ourselves to be, to know, to have, to do, we are in a sad plight indeed. Only in complete self-negation there is a chance to discover our real being.

89. The false self must be abandoned before the real Self can be found.

90. Perceptions based on sensations and shaped by memory imply a perceiver, whose nature you never cared to examine. Give it your full attention, examine it with loving care and you will discover heights and depths of being which you did not dream of, engrossed as you are in your puny image of yourself.

91. You must be serious, intent, truly interested. You must be full of goodwill for yourself.

92. By all means be selfish – the right way. Wish yourself well, labour at what is good for you. Destroy all that stands between you and happiness. Be all, love all, be happy, make happy.

93. All kinds of experiences may come to you – remain unmoved in the knowledge anything perceivable is transient and only the "I am" endures.

94. Without love all is evil. Life itself without love is evil.

95. You are love itself when you are not afraid.

96. In the great mirror of consciousness images arise and disappear, and only memory gives them continuity. And memory is material – destructible, perishable, transcient. On such flimsy foundations we build a sense of personal existence – vague, intermittent, dream-like. 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.

97. There is progress all the time. Everything contributes to progress. But this is the progress of ignorance. The circles of ignorance may be ever widening, yet it remains a bondage all the same. In due course a Guru appears to teach and inspire us to practise Yoga and a ripening takes place as a result of which the immemorial night of ignorance dissolves before the rising sun of wisdom.

98. When ignorance becomes obstinate and hard and the character gets perverted, effort and the pain of it become inevitable.

99. Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real freedom.

100. You mean to say everybody's life is totally determined at his birth? What a strange idea! Were it so, the power that determines would see to it that nobody should suffer.

101. Pay no attention to your thoughts. Don't fight them. Just do nothing about them, let them be, whatever they are. Your very fighting them gives them life. Just disregard. Look through. Remember to remember: "Whatever happens, happens because I am." All reminds you that "you are". Take full advantage of the fact that to experience you must "be". You need not stop thinking. Just cease being interested. It is disinterestedness that liberates. Don't hold on, that is all. The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you. Give up your addictions. There is nothing else to give up. Stop your routine of acquisitiveness, your habit of looking for results and the freedom of the universe is yours. Be effortless.

102. Not to know, and not to know that one does not know, is the cause of endless suffering.

103. What business have you with saving the world, when all the world needs is to be saved from you? Get out of the picture and see whether there is anything left to save.

104. Just like a deficiency disease is cured through the supply of the missing factor, so are the diseases of living cured by a good dose of intelligent detachment.

105. Remove the sense of separateness and there will be no conflict.

106. The whole world is an ever-changing state. No form is permanent. All you have to do is see the dream as a dream... you are the formless, timeless, Unborn. I ask you to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on.

107. Whatever name you give it: will, or steady purpose, or one-pointedness of mind, you come back to earnestness, sincerity, honesty. When you are in dead earnest, you bend every incident, every second of your life to your purpose. You do not waste time and energy on other things. You are totally dedicated, call it will, or love, or plain honesty. We are complex beings, at war within and without. We contradict ourselves all the time, undoing today the work of yesterday. No wonder we are stuck. A little of integrity would make a lot of difference.

108. Collect and strengthen your mind and you will find that your thoughts and feelings, words and actions will align themselves in the direction of your will.

109. Weak-mindedness is due to lack of intelligence, of understanding, which again is the result of non-awareness. By striving for awareness you bring your mind together and strengthen it.

110. Nothing of value can happen to a mind which knows exactly what it wants.

111. Go to the source of both pain and pleasure, of desire and fear. Observe, investigate, try to understand.

112. Once the illusion that the body-mind is oneself is abandoned, death loses its terror, it becomes a part of living.

113. Find the permanent in the fleeting, the one constant factor in every experience.

114. First purify your vision. Learn to see instead of staring. Also you must be eager to see. You need to both clarity and earnestness for Self-knowledge. You need purity of heart and mind, which comes through earnest application in daily life of whatever life you have understood. There is no such thing as compromise in Yoga.

115. Nothing can block you so effectively as compromise, for it shows lack of earnestness, without which nothing can be done.

116. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours.

117. Go on pondering, wondering, being anxious to find a way. Be conscious of yourself, watch your mind, give it your full attention. Don't look for quick results; there may be none within your noticing. Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change, there will be more clarity in your thinking, charity in your feeling, purity in your behaviour. You need not aim at these – you will witness the change all the same. For, what you are now is the result of inattention and what you become will be the fruit of attention.

118. Do not undervalue attention. It means interest and also love. To know, to do, to discover, or to create you must give your heart to it, which means attention. All blessings flow from it.

119. When you are free of the world, you can do something about it.

120. Correct your attitude to your body and leave it alone. Don't pamper, don't torture. Just keep it going, most of the time below the threshold of conscious attention.

121. The nature of the perfect mirror is such that you cannot see it. Whatever you can see is bound to be a stain. Turn away from it, give it up, know it as unwanted.

122. Is not meanness also a form of madness? And is not madness the misuse of the mind? Humanity's problem lies in this misuse of the mind only. All treasures of nature and spirit are open to man who will use his mind rightly.

123. Fear and greed cause the misuse of the mind. The right use of mind is the service of love, of life, of beauty, of Truth.

124. Attend to yourself, set yourself right, mentally and emotionally. Leave alone the reforms and mind the reformer.

125. All you need is to stop searching outside what can be found only within. Set your vision right before you operate. You are suffering from acute misapprehension. Clarify your mind, purify your heart, sanctify your life – this is the quickest way to a change of your world.

126. Problems created by desires and fears and wrong ideas can be solved only on the level of the mind. You must conquer your own mind and for this you must go beyond it.

127. To go beyond the mind, you must have your mind in perfect order. You cannot leave a mess behind and go beyond. The mess will bog you up. "Pick up your rubbish" seems to be the universal law. And a just law too.

128. Just remember your Self. "I am" is enough to heal your mind and take you beyond. Just have some trust. Common-sense too will tell you that to fulfil a desire you must keep your mind on it. If you want to know your true nature, you must have your Self in mind all the time, until the secret of your being stands revealed.

129. Desire the good of all and the universe will work with you. But if you want your own pleasure, you must earn it the hard way. Before desiring, deserve.

130. It is not the worship of the person that is crucial, but the steadiness and depth of your devotion to the task. Remember, wonder, ponder, live with it, love it, grow into it, grow with it, make it your own – the word of your Guru, outer or inner. Put in all and you will get all. I was doing it. All my time I was giving to my Guru and to what he told me.

131. It is easy, if you are earnest.

132. When you are concerned with Truth, with Reality, you must question every thing, your very life. By asserting the necessity of sensory and intellectual experience you narrow down your enquiry to search for comfort.

133. Question every urge, hold no desire legitimate. Empty of possession, physical and mental, free of all self-concern, be open for discovery.

134. My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense "I am" and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense "I am", it may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked! Obedience is a powerful solvent of all desires and fears.

135. You can not speak of a beginning of consciousness. The very ideas of beginning and time are within consciousness. To talk meaningfully of the beginning of anything, you must step out of it. And the moment you step out, you realise that there is no such thing and never was.

136. The illusion of being the body-mind is there, only because it is not investigated. Non-investigation is the thread on which all the states of mind are strung. All states of mind, all names and forms of existence are rooted in non-enquiry, non-investigation, in imagination and credulity. It is right to say "I am", but to say "I am this", "I am that" is a sign of not enquiring, not examining, of mental weakness or lethargy.

137. When we are absorbed in other things, in the not-self, we forget the Self.

138. Practice [sadhana] consists in reminding oneself forcibly of one's pure beingness, of not being anything in particular, nor a sum of particulars, not even the totality of particulars, which make up a universe.

139. Enquire what is permanent in the transient, real in the unreal. This is sadhana.

140. Think of yourself by all means. Only don't bring the idea of a body into the picture.

141. Attachment is bondage, detachment is freedom. To crave is to slave.

142. Inertia and restlessness [tamas and rajas] work together and keep clarity and harmony [sattva] down. Tamas and rajas must be conquered before sattva can appear.

143. You come to it by putting an end to indolence and using all your energy to clear the way for clarity and charity. Don't be afraid, don't resist, don't delay. There is nothing to be afraid of. Trust and try. Experiment honestly.

144. That immovable state, which is not affected by the birth and death of a body or a mind, that state you must perceive.

145. In life nothing can be had without overcoming obstacles. The obstacles to the clear perception of one's true being are desire for pleasure and the fear of pain. It is the pleasure-pain motivation that stands in the way.

146. Leave alone your desires and fears, give your entire attention to the subject, to Him who is behind the experience of desire and fear. Ask: who desires? Let each desire bring you back to your Self.

147. It would be a grievous mistake to identify yourself with something external.

148. The desire to find the Self will surely be fulfilled, provided you want nothing else. But you must be honest with yourself and really want nothing else. If in the meantime you want many other things and are engaged in their pursuit, your main purpose may be delayed until you grow wiser and cease being torn between contradictory urges. Go within, without swerving, without ever looking outward.

149. The world and the mind are states of being. The Supreme is not a state. It pervades all states, but it is not a state of something else.

150. Whatever work you have undertaken, complete it. Do not take up new tasks, unless it is called for by a concrete situation of suffering and relief from suffering. Find your Self first, and endless blessings will follow. Nothing profits the world as much as the abandoning of profits. A man who no longer thinks in terms of loss and gain is truly the non-violent man, for he is beyond all conflict.

151. Primarily, ahimsa means what is says, "Don't hurt". It is not doing good that comes first, but ceasing to hurt, not adding to suffering. Pleasing others is not ahimsa.

152. The only help worth giving is freeing from the need of further help. Repeated help is no help at all. Do not talk of helping another, unless you can put him beyond all need of help.

153. When you have understood that all existence, in separation and limitation, is painful, and when you are willing and able to live integrally, in oneness with all life, as pure being, you have gone beyond the 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.

154. You can only cease to be as you seem to be now. There is nothing cruel in what I say. To wake up a man from a nightmare is compassion. You came here because you are in pain, and all I say is: wake up, know your Self, be your Self. The end of pain lies not in pleasure. When you realise that you are beyond both pain and pleasure, aloof and unassailable, the the pursuit of happiness ceases and the resultant sorrow too. For pain aims at pleasure and pleasure ends in pain, relentlessly.

155. By being clear about confusion, you become clear of confusion.

156. What is birth and death but the beginning and the ending of a stream of events in consciousness? Because of the idea of separation and limitation they are painful. Momentary relief from pain we call pleasure – and we build castles in the air hoping for endless pleasure which we call happiness. It is all misunderstanding and misuse. Wake up, go beyond, live really.

157. Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person. To be a person is to be asleep.

158. Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. Simply look at whatever happens and know you are beyond it.

159. All you need to do is to cease taking yourself to be within the field of consciousness. Unless you have already considered these matters carefully, listening to me once will not do.

160. Of all the people the knower of the Self, the liberated man, is the most trustworthy. But merely to trust is not enough. You must also desire. Without desire for freedom of what use is the confidence that you can acquire freedom? Desire and confidence must go together. The stronger your desire, the easier comes the help. The greatest Guru is helpless as long as the disciple is not eager to learn. Eagerness and earnestness are all-important. Confidence will come with experience. Be devoted to your goal and devotion to him who can guide you will follow. If your desire and confidence are strong, they will operate and take you to your goal, for you will not cause delay by hesitation and compromise. The greatest Guru is your inner Self. Truly, He is the supreme teacher. He alone can take you to your goal and he alone meets you at the end of the road. Confide in him and you need no outer Guru. But again you must have the strong desire to find him and do nothing that will create obstacles and delays. And do not waste energy and time on regrets. Learn from your mistakes and do not repeat them.

161. Let us wait with improving others until we have seen ourselves as we are and have changed. There is no need to turn round and round in endless questioning; find your Self and everything will fall into its proper place.

162. The body exists in time and space, transient and limited, while the dweller is timeless and spaceless, eternal and all-pervading. To identify the two is a grievous mistake and the cause of endless suffering.

163. You are the god of your world and you are both stupid and cruel. Let God be a concept – your own creation. Find out who you are, how did you come to live, longing for Truth, goodness and beauty in a world full of evil. Of what use is your arguing for or against God, when you just do not know who is God and what you are talking about. The God born of fear and hope, shaped by desire and imagination, cannot be the Power that is the Mind and Heart of the universe.

164. There are two levels to consider – the physical of facts, and the mental of ideas. I am beyond both. Neither your facts nor ideas are mine. What I see is beyond. Cross-over to my side and see with me.

165. You are not here. I am here. Come in! But you don't. You want me to live your life, feel your way, use your language. I cannot, and it will not help you. You must come to me. Words are of the mind and the mind obscures and distorts. Hence, the absolute need to go beyond words and move over to my side. You give reality to concepts, while concepts are distortions of Reality. Abandon all conceptualisation and stay silent and attentive. Be earnest about it and all will be well with you.

166. Why play with ideas? Be content with what you are sure of. And the only thing you can be sure of is "I am". Stay with it, and reject everything else. This is Yoga.

167. If you want to sin, sin wholeheartedly and openly. Sins too have their lessons to teach the earnest sinner, as virtues the earnest saint. It is the mixing up of the two that is so disastrous. Nothing can block you so effectively as compromise, for it shows lack of earnestness, without which nothing can be done.

168. Go deep into the sense of "I am" and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of "I am" is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the "I am", without moving, you enter a state that cannot be verbalised but can be experienced. All you need to do is to try and try again.

169. Don't identify yourself with the world and you will not suffer.

170. To nourish the ideas: "I am a sinner, I am not a sinner" is sin. To identify oneself with the particular is all the sin there is. The impersonal is real, the personal appears and disappears.

171. Give up the idea of being what you think yourself to be.

172. What matters is the idea you have of yourself, for it blocks you. Give it up.

173. Easier to change, than to suffer. Grow out of your childishness, that is all.

174. This is childishness, clinging to the toys, to your desires and fears, opinions and ideas. Give it all up and be ready for the Real to assert Itself. This Self-assertion is best expressed in the words: "I am".

175. So far you took yourself to be the movable and overlooked the immovable. Turn your mind inside out. Overlook the movable and you will find your Self to be the ever-present, changeless Reality, inexpressible, but solid like a rock.

176. You are conscious. Hold on to it.

177. In witnessing, in awareness, Self-consciousness, the sense of being "this" or "that" is not. Unidentified being remains.

178. When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace, immersed in the deep silence of Reality.

179. All creation toils for its Self and will not rest until it returns to it.

180. What I say is true, but to you it is only a theory. How will you come to know that it is true? Listen, remember, ponder, visualise, experience. Also apply it in your daily life. Have patience with me and above all have patience with yourself, for you are your only obstacle.

181. To receive communication, you must be receptive.

182. All I can tell you is the way I travelled and invite you to take it.

183. As far as I am concerned, my teaching is simple: trust me for a while and do what I tell you. If you persevere, you will find that your trust was justified.

184. Names and shapes changes incessantly. Know your Self to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind. That is enough.

185. You seem to want instant insight, forgetting that the instant is always preceded by a long preparation. The fruit falls suddenly, but the ripening takes time.

186. After all, what I am offering you is the operational approach, so current in Western science. When a scientist describes an experiment and its results, usually you accept his statements on trust and repeat his experiment as he describes it.

187. First reject verbally, then mentally and emotionally, then in action. Give attention to the Reality within you and it will come to light. It is like churning butter. Do it correctly and assiduously and the result is sure to come.

188. The relative cannot result in the Absolute. But the relative can block the Absolute, just as the non-churning of the cream may prevent butter from separating. It is the Real that creates the urge; the inner prompts the outer and the outer responds in interest and effort.

189. If you cannot break a habit all at once, consider the familiar way of thinking and see its falseness. Questioning the habitual is the duty of the mind. What the mind created, the mind must destroy. Or realise that there is no desire outside the mind and stay out.

190. To have the direct experience of a country one must go and live there.

191. Givers there are many; where are the takers?

192. While you repeat verbally: "Give, give", you do nothing to take what is offered. I am showing you a short and easy way to being able to see what I see, but you cling to your old habits of thought, feeling and action and put all the blame on me.

193. Whatever he does, if he does it for the sake of finding his own real Self, will surely bring him to his own Self.

194. No need of faith which is but expectation of results. Here the action only counts. Whatever you do for the sake of Truth, will take you to Truth. Only be earnest and honest. The shape it takes hardly matters.

195. The very facts of repetition, of struggling on and on and of endurance and perseverance, in spite of boredom and despair and complete lack of conviction are really crucial.

196. There is a connection between the word and its meaning, between action and its motive. Spiritual practice is will asserted and reasserted.

197. Meet your own Self. Be with your own Self, listen to it, obey it, cherish it, keep it in mind endlessly. You need no other guide. As long as your urge for Truth affects your daily life, all is well with you. Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal. This is what I call Nisarga Yoga, the Natural Yoga. It is the art of living in peace and harmony, in friendliness and love. The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless.

198. Turn within and you will come to trust your Self.

199. What prevents you from knowing is not the lack of opportunity, but the lack of ability to focus in your mind what you want to understand. If you could but keep in mind what you do not know, it would reveal to you its secrets. But if you are shallow and impatient, not earnest enough to look and wait, you are like a child crying for the moon.

200. There is nothing wrong in repeating the same truth again and again until it becomes Reality. People need to hear words, until facts speak to them louder than words.

201. In my world there is community, insight, love, real quality; the individual is the total, the totality is in the individual. All are one and the one is all.

202. To remember what needs to be remembered is the secret of success. You come to it through earnestness.

203. Knowing the world to be a part of myself, I pay it no more attention than you pay to the food you have eaten.

204. Mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy.

205. To lose entirely all interest in knowledge results in omniscience.

206. Once you know your mind and its miraculous powers, and remove what poisoned it – the idea of a separate and isolated person – you just leave it alone to do its work among things for which it is well suited. To keep the mind in its own place and on its own work is the liberation of the mind.

207. Who would have witnessed the "I am" if your prior state of non-beingness were not there?

208. Remember, you cannot abandon what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself.

209. Earnestness is not a yearning for the fruits of one's endeavours. It is an expression of an inner shift of interest away from the false, the unessential, the personal.

210. The desire for Truth is the best of all desires, yet it is still a desire. All desires must be given up for the Real to be. Remember that you are. This is your working capital. Rotate it and there will be much profit.

211. A man who claims to know what is good for others is dangerous.

212. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep.

213. Do not look for me in identification with or opposition to something: I am where desire and fear are not.

214. Consciousness does not shine by itself. It shines by a light beyond it.

215. The mind must learn that beyond the moving mind there is the background of awareness which does not change. The mind must come to know the true Self and respect it and cease covering it up, like the moon which obscures the sun during solar eclipse.

216. While the mind is centred in the body, and consciousness is centred in the mind, awareness is free. The body has its urges and mind its pains and pleasures. Awareness is unattached and unshaken. It is lucid, silent, peaceful, alert and unafraid, without desire and fear. Meditate on it as your true being and try to be it in your daily life, and you shall realise it in its fullness.

217. Awareness becomes consciousness when it has an object. The object changes all the time. In consciousness there is movement; awareness by itself is motionless and timeless, here and now.

218. All consciousness is limited and therefore painful. At the root of consciousness lies desire, the urge to experience.

219. The world is but a succession of experiences and you are what makes them conscious, and yet remain beyond all experience. It is like the heat, the flame and the burning wood. The heat maintains the flame, the flame consumes the wood. Without heat, there would be neither flame nor fuel. Similarly, without awareness there would be no consciousness, nor life, which transforms matter into a vehicle of consciousness.

220. You can have for the asking all the peace you want. You must ask with an undivided heart and live an integrated life. Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, deserve it and don't disturb it by being a slave to your desires and fears.

221. The primary concept "I am" is dishonest, a cheat, it has deceived you into believing what is not. Focus sharply on the "I am" and it will disappear.

222. Discover all that you are not – body, feelings thoughts, time, space, being and not-being, this or that – nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive.

223. Go within and discover what you are not. Nothing else matters.

224. Distrust your mind, and go beyond it to the direct experience of being, knowing and loving. There are many starting points – they all lead to the same goal. You may begin with selfless work, abandoning the fruits of action; you may then give up thinking and in the end give up all desires. Here, giving up is the operational factor. Or you may not bother about anything you want, or think, or do and just stay put in the thought and feeling "I am", focussing "I am" firmly in your mind. All kinds of experience may come to you – remain unmoved in the knowledge that all perceivable is transient, and only the "I am" endures.

225. That which sees all and nothing is the inner teacher. He alone is, all else only appears to be. He is your own Self, your hope and assurance of freedom; find him and cling to him and you will be saved and safe.

226. The Self is solid, steady, changeless, beginningless and endless, ever new, ever fresh. Desirelessness and fearlessness will take you there.

227. Whatever happens it happens to you. What you do, the doer is in you. Find the subject of all that you are as a person.

228. 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. Give your heart and mind to it, think of nothing else.

229. Adhere to the thought that you are the ground of all knowledge, the immutable and perennial awareness of all that happens to the senses and mind. If you keep it in mind all the time, aware and alert, you are bound to break the bounds of non-awareness and emerge into pure life, light and love.

230. The idea, "I am the witness only", will purify the body and the mind and open the eye of wisdom. Then man goes beyond illusion and his heart is free of all desires. Just like ice turns to water and water to vapour, and vapour dissolves in air and disappears into space, so does the body dissolve into pure awareness, then into pure being, which is beyond all existence and non-existence.

231. By focussing the mind on "I am", on the sense of being, the "I am so-and-so" dissolves, the "I am a witness only" remains and that too eventually submerges into "I am all". Abandon the idea of a separate "I" and the question of "Whose experience?" will not arise.

232. When you discern and let go all that is unreal, what remains is real.

233. The good news of enlightenment will, sooner or later, bring about a transformation. First hearing, then remembering, pondering and so on. We are on familiar ground. The man who heard the news becomes a yogi; while the rest continue in their worldly pursuits of joys and sorrows.

234. Thinking yourself to be a person – living, feeling, thinking, active, passive, pleased or pained – is a mere habit, built on memory, prompted by desire. Question yourself, ask yourself: "Is it so?", "Who am I?", "What is behind and beyond all this?" And soon you will see your mistake. It is in the very nature of a mistake to cease to be, when seen.

235. What is perceived in pure awareness, unaffected by desire and fear, is what is called a fact.

236. Love is a state of being. Sex is energy. Love is wise, sex is blind.

237. What is going on is a projection of your mind. A weak mind cannot control its own projections. Be aware, therefore, of your mind and its projections. You cannot control what you do not know. On the other hand, knowledge gives power. In practice it is very simple. To control yourself, know yourself.

238. Give your undivided attention to the most important in your life, yourself. Of your personal universe you are the centre – without knowing the centre what else can you know?

239. The universe is of tremendous value. By going beyond it you realise your Self. Find a foothold in the beyond and all will be clear and easy.

240. Desires and fears remain only in your memory. Realise that their root is in expectation born of memory, and they will cease to obsess you.

241. In the ultimate state there is neither sorrow nor happiness, only freedom. Happiness depends on something or other and can be lost; freedom from everything depends on nothing and cannot be lost. Freedom from sorrow has no cause and therefore, cannot be destroyed. Realise that freedom.

242.
You evaluate the world as name and form, but when name and form are dissolved, a dissolution takes place. It is all happening spontaneously. There is no question of you trying to do anything.

243. Consciousness and unconsciousness, while in the body, depend on the condition of the brain. But the Self is beyond both, beyond the brain, beyond the mind. The fault of the instrument is no reflection on its user.

244. Everybody sees the world through the idea he has of himself. If you imagine yourself as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. I do not see the world as separate from me, and so there is nothing for me to desire or fear.

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

246. Wisdom is eternally negating the unreal. To see the unreal is wisdom. Beyond this lies the inexpressible.

247. Once you realise that the person is merely a shadow of the Reality, but not the Reality itself, you cease to fret and worry. You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown.

248. Freedom is freedom from worry. Having realised that you cannot influence the results, pay no attention to your desires and fears. Let them come and go. Don't give them nourishment of interest and attention.

249. The illusion of being the body-mind is there only because it is not investigated. Non-investigation is the thread on which all the states of mind are strung.

250. The "I am" is the sum total of all that you perceive, it's time-bound, the "I am" itself is an illusion, you are not the "I am" you are prior to it.

251. A man who knows that he is neither body nor mind cannot be selfish, for he has nothing to be selfish for. Or, you may say, he is equally "selfish" on behalf of everybody he meets; everybody's welfare is his own.

252. All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire.

253. The pure mind sees things as they are – bubbles in consciousness. These bubbles are appearing, disappearing and reappearing, without having real being. No particular cause can be ascribed to them, for each is caused by all and affects all. Each bubble is a body and all these bodies are mine.

254. All your questions are sprouting from your identification with the body-form. You should go inside. All hopes and desires should be for the Self. You should only be craving the Self.

255. Prior to the appearance of this form, I was neither being or no being. Consciousness has to appear in this form, so this form can recognise consciousness.

256. Whatever appears in consciousness will disappear in consciousness, but consciousness is ever present.

257. On what basis is one confident about this existence? What does it depend on?

258. For the earnest seeker it is easy to realise the Self, but it is difficult for others.

259. Everything becomes clear when you strive to realise the Self and not God. This realisation, even for a moment, wipes out all past and makes you free of all future strain and trouble.

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260. God may exist but only if there is an "I" to perceive it. Without an "I" to perceive it who will confirm his existence? The "I" creates God!

261. You become thought free when you are not thinking about yourself.

262. A Self-realised being is not affected by life or death.

263. The one who has created all bodies is the one who decides their karma, the activity that they perform.

264. Once you transcend the idea that "I am the body", then it won't matter whether life is short or long. The illusory world [maya] in no way can affect you.

265. Realise that eternal state, the Absolute [Parabrahman], which is prior to all conception. Abide in That!

266. Living is life's only purpose.

267. My Guru told me to hold on to the sense "I am" tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time I realised within myself the truth of his teaching. All I did was to remember his teaching, his face, his words constantly. This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am – unbound.

268. The mind creates time and space, and takes its own creations for reality. All is here and now, but we do not see it. Truly, all is in me and by me. There is nothing else. The very idea of "else" is a disaster and a calamity.

269. It is the choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing – food, sex, power, fame – will make you happy is to deceive yourself.

270. The Self is universal and its aims are universal. There is nothing personal about the Self. Live an orderly life, but do not make it a goal by itself.

271. Nothing profits the world as mush as the abandoning of profits. A man who no longer thinks in terms of loss and gain is the truly non-violent man, for he is beyond all conflict.

272. To divide and particularise is in the mind's very nature. There is no harm in dividing. But separation goes against fact. Things and people are different, but they are not separate. Nature is one, Reality is one. There are opposites, nut no opposition.

273. When you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear, and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only Self-realisation can break it. Go for it resolutely.

274. Just as a speck in the eye, causing inflammation, may wipe out the world, so the mistaken idea "I am the body-mind" causes the self-concern, which obscures the universe. It is useless to fight the sense of being a limited and separate person unless the roots of it are laid bare. Selfishness is rooted in the mistaken ideas of oneself. Clarification of the mind is Yoga.

275. The mind cannot know what is beyond the mind, but the mind is known by what is beyond it.

276. In reality, nothing happens. There is no past, no future. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, memories of former projections, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go – light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the picture.

277. You began as a child and you will end as a child. Whatever you have acquired in the meantime you must lose and start at the beginning.

278. What you need will come to you if you do not ask for what you do not need. Yet only few people reach this state of complete dispassion and detachment. It is a very high state, the very threshold of liberation.

279. The "here" is everywhere, and the "now" always. Go beyond the "I am the body" idea, and you will find that space and time are in you and not you in space and time. Once you have understood this, the main obstacle to realisation is removed.

280. You are concerned with your own happiness and I am telling you that there is no such thing. Happiness is never your own, it is where the "I" is not.

281. The world is but the surface of the mind, and the mind is infinite. What we call thoughts are just ripples in the mind. When the mind is quiet, it reflects the Reality. When it is motionless through and through; it dissolves and only the Reality remains. This Reality is so concrete, so actual, so much more tangible than mind and matter, that compared to it even diamond is soft like butter. This overwhelming actuality makes the world dream-like, misty, irrelevant.

282. There is only a stream of sensations, perceptions, memories and ideations.

283. A man who is given a stone and assured that it is a priceless diamond will be mightily pleased until he realises his mistake; in the same way pleasures lose their tang and pains their barb when the Self is known. Both are seen as they are – conditional responses, mere reactions, plain attractions and repulsions, based on memories or preconceptions. Usually pleasure and pain are experienced when expected. It is all a matter of acquired habits and convictions.

284. As long as there is the body and the sense of identity with the body, frustration is inevitable. Only when you know your Self as entirely alien to and different from the body, will you find respite from the mixture of fear and craving inseparable from the "I am the body" idea.

285. Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we find it. But rarely do we know where to seek. Once you have understood that the world is but a mistaken view of the Reality, and it is not what it appears to be, you are free of its obsessions.

286. Pleasure is a distraction and a nuisance, for it merely increases the false conviction that one needs to have and do things to be happy when in reality it is just the opposite.

287. To see everything as imagination born of desire is necessary for Self-realisation. We miss the Real by lack of attention and create the unreal by excess of imagination.

288. Do what you believe in and believe in what you do. All else is waste of energy and time.

289. To be is to suffer. the narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.

290. What I teach is the ancient and simple way of liberation through understanding. Understand your own mind and its hold on you will snap. The mind misunderstands, misunderstanding is its very nature. Right understanding is the only remedy, whatever name you give it.

291. The person is what I appear to be to other persons. To myself I am the infinite expanse of consciousness in which innumerable persons emerge and disappear in endless succession.

292. Just keep in mind the feeling "I am", merge in it, until your mind and feeling become one. By repeated attempts you will stumble on the right balance of attention and affection, and your mind will be firmly established in the thought-feeling "I am". Whatever you think, say, or do, this sense of immutable and affectionate being remains as the ever-present background of the mind.

293. The changeful keeps on changing, while the changeless is waiting. Do not expect the changeful to take you to the changeless – it can never happen.

294. You are the perceiving point, the non-dimensional source of all dimensions.

295. The realised man knows what others merely hear, but do not experience. Intellectually they may seem convinced, but in action they betray their bondage.

296. What happens to the body and the mind may not be within your power to change, but you can always put an end to your imagining yourself to be body and mind. Whatever happens, remind yourself that only your body and mind are affected, not your Self.

297. Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause Reality to rush in.

298. Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything. The giving up is the first step. But real giving up is the realisation that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is your own. It is like deep sleep – you do not give up your bed when you fall asleep, you just forget it.

299. Mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy.

300. Forget the known, but remember that you are the knower. Don't be all the time immersed in your experiences. Remember that you are beyond the experiencer, ever Unborn and deathless.

301. To want nothing and do nothing – that is true creation! To watch the universe emerging and subsiding in one's heart is a wonder.

302. When effort is needed, effort will appear. When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. You need not push life about. Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment, which is the dying now to the now. For living is dying. Without death life cannot be.

303. To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder.

304. The moment you know your real being, you are afraid of nothing. Death gives freedom and power. To be free in the world, you must die to the world. Then the universe is your own, it becomes your body, an expression and a tool. The happiness of being absolutely free is beyond description. On the other hand, he who is afraid of freedom cannot die.

305. Does a happy man seek happiness? How restless people are, how constantly on the move! It is because they are in pain that they seek relief in pleasure. All the happiness they can imagine is in the assurance of repeated pleasure.

306. The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused. Just like gold made into ornaments has no advantage over gold dust, except when the mind makes it so, so are we are in being – we differ only in appearance. We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving oneís life to this discovery.

307. Do not identify yourself with the world and you will not suffer.

308. Do understand that you are destined for enlightenment. Co-operate with your destiny, dont go against it, dont thwart it. Allow it to fulfil itself. All you have to do is to give attention to the obstacles created by the foolish mind.

309. You need not get at Reality, for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go of your attachment to the unreal and the Real will swiftly and smoothly slip into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realisation that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you.

310. The Real does not die, the unreal never lived.

311. I see no difference between you and me. My life is a succession of events, just like yours. Only I am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them.

312. Yes, I appear to hear and see and talk and act, but to me it just happens, as to you digestion or perspiration happens. The body-mind machine looks after it, but leaves me out of it. Just as you do not need to worry about growing hair, so I need not worry about words and actions. They just happen and leave me unconcerned, for in my world nothing ever goes wrong.

313. Pleasure and pain lost their sway over me. I was free from desire and fear. I found myself full, needing nothing.

314. To me it is "a body", not "my body", "a mind", not "my mind". The mind looks after the body all right, I need not interfere.

315. Whatever is done, is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they all are real to the man in bondage; to me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.

316. To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless, immovable, rock-like, unassailable; a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity.

317. Man alone can destroy in himself the roots of pain.

318. All is attended to in minutest details and yet there is a sense of unreality about it all. So is the case with me. All happens as it needs, yet nothing happens. I do what seems to be necessary, but at the same time I know that nothing is necessary, that life itself is only a make-belief.

319. There was discovery and it was sudden. Just as at birth you discover the world suddenly, as suddenly I discovered my real being.

320. I am neither conscious nor unconscious. I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions. A person is a set pattern of desires and thoughts and resulting actions; there is no pattern in my case. There is nothing I desire or fear, so how can there be a pattern?

321. All that is experienced, perceived and conceived by an "I", as well as the "I" is part of the illusion [maya].

322. Act on what you think is true. This is the way to Truth. Action is the test of Truth.

323. I have come to the conclusion that consciousness and whatever appears in consciousness is nothing but a gigantic fraud.

324. The desire to find the Self will surely be fulfilled, provided you want nothing else. But you must be honest with yourself and really want nothing else. If in the meantime you want many other things and are engaged in their pursuit, your main purpose may be delayed until you grow wiser and cease being torn between contradictory urges. Go within, without swerving, without ever looking outward.

325. My world is absolutely free; everything in it is self-determined. Therefore I keep on saying that all happens by itself. There is order in my world too, but it is not imposed from outside. It comes spontaneously and immediately, because of its timelessness. Perfection is not in the future. It is now.

326. There is no religion, no karma, no time. There is only the all-prevading life-force. Do not try to know it, but hold on to what you have heard. It is the natural state where there is no memory that "I am the body". The one who holds the saying of the Guru as ultimate, will get forbearance and will get the state of Reality. Even if there is knowledge of Reality, it is not everlasting or true. As it is an experience, it cannot last. All is Reality, all is blisssful and peaceful. The memory of personality, however, is a misery. Remember that.

327. Whatever name you give it: will, or steady purpose, or one pointedness of mind, you come back to earnestness, sincerity, honesty. When you are in dead earnestness, you bend every incident, every second of your life to your purpose. You do not waste time and energy on other things. You are totally dedicated, call it will, or love, or plain honesty. We are complex beings, at war within and without. We contradict ourselves all the time, undoing today the work of yesterday. No wonder we are stuck. A little of integrity would make a lot of difference.

328. Go deep into the sense of "I am" and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of "I am" is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the "I am", without moving, you enter a state that cannot be verbalised but can be experienced. All you need to do is to try and try again.

329. I can tell you about myself. I was a simple man, but I trusted my Guru. What he told me to do, I did. He told me to concentrate on "I am" – I did. He told me that I am beyond all perceivables and conceivables – I believed. I gave him my heart and soul, my entire attention and the whole of my spare time. As a result of faith and earnest application, I realised my Self within three years.

330. Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, deserve it.

331. Emotional reactions, born of ignorance or inadvertence, are never justified. Seek a clear mind and a clean heart. All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace.

332. For him, the sincere seeker, the right procedure is to adhere to the thought that he is the ground of all knowledge, the immutable and perennial awareness of all that happens to the senses and mind. If he keeps it in mind all the time, aware and alert, he is bound to break the bounds of non-awareness and emerge into pure life, light and love. The idea – "I am the witness only" will purify the body and the mind and open the eye of wisdom. Then man goes beyond illusion and his heart is free of all desires. Just like ice turns to water and water to vapour, and vapour dissolves in air and disappears into space, so does the body dissolve into pure awareness, then into pure being, which is beyond all existence and non-existence.

333. You are not the body. The only solution is for you to give up your identity with the body-mind.

334. I see what you too could see, here and now, but for the wrong focus of your attention. You give no attention to your Self. Your mind is all with things, people and ideas, never with your Self. Bring your Self into focus, become aware of your own existence. See how you function, watch the motives and results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself, by inadvertence.

335. Why do you feel sorry for this mortal body?

336. Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them – your very seeing will make them go.

337. How do you go about finding anything? By keeping your mind and heart on it. Interest there must be and steady remembrance. To remember what needs to be remembered is the secret of success. You come to it through earnestness.

338. First purify your vision. Learn to see instead of staring. Also you must be eager to see. You need to both clarity and earnestness for self-knowledge. You need purity of heart and mind, which comes through earnest application in daily life of whatever life you have understood. There is no such thing as compromise in Yoga.

339. Take the first step first. All blessings come from within. Turn within. "I am" you know. Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way.

340. It is easier to understand that the entire manifestation is in the nature of a dream, or a mirage, but you interpret the rest of the manifestation as being a mirage and won't let go of the seer of a phenomenon. The seer is also part of the mirage. See it all as a dream and be done with it.

341. Refuse all thoughts except one: the thought "I am". The mind will rebel in the beginning, but with patience and perseverance it will yield and keep quiet.

342. All you need is to stop searching outside what can be found only within. Set your vision right before you operate. You are suffering from acute misapprehension. Clarify your mind, purify your heart, sanctify your life – this is the quickest way to a change of your world.

343. Have your Guru always in your heart and remember his instructions – this is real abidance with the True.

344. You must exist prior to witnessing for witnessing to happen.

345. We discover Self by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.

346. You are not this mortal body, so why even be concerned with it?

347. When the "I am" beingness state goes, the Absolute will again prevail. It ever prevails. The state in which you were eight days prior to conception or thousands of years prior to that, whatever that state is, that state ever prevails whether the beingness state is there or the beingness disappears. That is the eternal state of yours.

348. Forget me, forget Maharaj, forget the teachings, just stay in the Self as a portal to the Absolute.... Forget me, forget Maharaj, forget the teaching, stay in the consciousness and your own unique path will emerge for you.

349. Stay in the Self as a portal to the Absolute, be the Self as a portal to the Absolute.

350. The Supreme is the easiest to reach for it is your very being. It is enough to stop thinking and desiring anything, but the Supreme.

351. Expect nothing from experiences, all experiences do is lead you to more experiences.

352. All that explanations do is help you to feel better about what happened. Cause and effect are just a way of thinking about things.

353. There is no karma in final Reality.

354. Take the first step first. All blessings come from within. Turn within. "I am" you know. Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way.

355. You are always seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, always after happiness and peace. Don't you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable? Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking, nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which "I am" is timeslessly present. Soon you will realise that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels that disturbs. Avoid the disturbances, that is all.

356. My concepts, if implanted in you, will destroy all other words and concepts.

357. Being the Self is worshipping the Self.

358. My religion is to worship the Self.

359. Everything is zero. There is no gain, there is no loss.

360. Actions occur, blame or praise is assigned later. Be free from the fruit of your action.

361. Happiness is where the "I" is not.

362. All that is to be will be.

363. When I see myself as everything, that is love.

364. There is no one nor anything closer or further away from the Self.

365. What you know about yourself came from outside of you, therefore discard it.

366. I am not interested in your illusion or your imagined entity.

367. Stay in the Self. Stay prior to the senses.

368. There is no birth. There is no death. There is no person. It is all a concept. It is all an illusion. You are the child of a barren woman.

369. I simply followed my Guru's instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being "I am", and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the "I am" in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared – myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.

370. Consciousness is the Guru of the Guru.

371. All that you can teach is understanding; the rest comes on its own.

372. Discard all as "not this, not this" [neti-neti]. All layers or veils are consciousness to be discarded, The "I am", the sense of beingness, is a temporary state. Prior to "I am" is the consciousness, also called "the Self of All".

373. Hold onto the "I am", the sense of beingness, discard all else.

374. The important thing is consciousness. You must give your full attention to the consciousness itself, Self itself. That is the process of meditation; then all the secrets are revealed to you by the Self.

375. In the Absolute, I do not even know that I am.

376. There is no such thing as enlightenment, because there is no entity to be enlightened.

377. What does consciousness depend upon?

378. I am nothing perceivable or conceivable. All perceivables or conceivables are to be discarded as "not this, not this", until the negator too is discarded or negated.

379. By enquiry, deconstruction through a process of negation, "not this, not this", all conditioning that gives the illusion or appearances of difference or separation from the substratum that is consciousness.

380. To go beyond, we must pass through total negation of everything as having independent existence.

381. Resolutely reject what you are not until the real Self [the Absolute] emerges in its glorious nothingness. It is not-a-thingness.

382. Once the attention is fixed on the substratum of consciousness [final Reality], there is nothing left. In short, you liquidate that yardstick of body-mind as your identity.

383. I see only consciousness and know everything to be but consciousness. As you know the picture on the cinema screen to be light.

384. It is not possible for a phenomenal object to achieve something, and this body is only a phenomenal object.

385. In fact, there is no body or a world to contain it. There is only a mental condition, a dream-like state easy to dispel by questioning its reality.

386. Even the consciousness is a temporary appearance, an appearance on the absolute Reality.

387. Go in, prior to thoughts, prior to beingness, prior to consciousness itself. The basic concept, beingness, is itself an illusion.

388. The original state is timeless, formless, and that what has come about is merely an illusion. The sum total is, whatever experiences you have, whether for a day or for years, it is all an illusion.

389. Krishna said, "Remember me, I am always there." What is that state of Krishna? He is beyond the body-mind state; that means he is the consciousness. Further, Krishna is the absolute Reality.

390. The spray of the ocean contains innumerable droplets, but they are the ocean only.

391. The eye does not see, does not notice the consciousness prior to the opening of the eye lid.

392. The experience of presence is part of the "I am", and should not be there.

393. Since you are formless consciousness, you can perform no action nor have a particular behavior. Therefore, there is no doer and there is no action that has been performed by a doer, of a particular behavior. Imagining that you can realise your true nature through actions or behaviors is delusion.

394. Whatever exists has no substance. It is unreal. The present moment is unreal. It is very simple: the present moment is time-bound, and anything that is time-bound is untrue.

395. If there is no consciousness there is no God. The existence and essence of God are both in this consciousness, and therefore in this body. The body is consciousness.

396. I have come to the conclusion that the world is spontaneously there without any seed or cause; its creation is causeless or seedless. Seeking out causes is a past time of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect.

397. You are neither body nor in the body. There is no such thing as a body. Just as the universe is contained in consciousness, so too this physical body is merely an appearance in consciousness.

398. If you can remember it or forget it, it is not the Reality. There is only one Truth in the world and that is that everything is unreal.

399. If you can remember it or forget it, it is not you, therefore discard it.

400. You must remember that you are prior to the word; kill the words. Don't frame your knowledge, don't condition it by words. Be prior to the words.

401. I am telling you a simple thing: get rid of the notion that you are this corpse. The body is dead always. The body is inert. You are not the body. Do nothing else except this; do not identify the Self with a body.

402. Without the experience of the waking and sleep states, try to explain what you are.

403. The realised man has lost the capacity of identifying himself with anything. He is without location, placeless, beyond space and time, beyond the world, beyond words and thoughts is he.

404. We are neither matter or energy, neither body nor mind.

405. Time is in the mind. Space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is just a way of thinking.

406. Things happen without cause.

407. As to my mind, there is no such thing. There is consciousness in which everything happens.

408. There is no entity that needs enlightenment. There is no such thing as enlightenment!

409. The worshiper is the Self and the object of worship is also the Self, the consciousness.

410. Personality is a mistaken identity. There is no such thing as a person or self. Any image you have of yourself is not true.

411. Abide only in consciousness. In your attention, only consciousness should be there. This is meditation. What I mean by meditation is to reject all experiences and to be in the experience-less state.

412. You have only to abide in that consciousness.

413. Whatever you understand, you are not that.

414. The world is not; it is a mere appearance.

415. All your activities, material and spiritual, are in this illusion. Once you understand the object of spirituality, you will also understand that spirituality is unreal.

416. Consciousness has no shape or design. You are and I am, but only as points in consciousness. We are nothing apart from consciousness. This must be well grasped. The world hangs on the thread of consciousness. No consciousness, no world.

417. There is no creator and nobody created me.

418. All experience is illusory, limited and temporal. Whatever the experiencer feels or thinks is all in the consciousness, and is not real. Expect nothing from experience.

419. All knowledge is a form of ignorance.

420. Not only is the body-mind unreal, but this manifest consciousness, this universe, is also unreal. The I am-ness is dream-like, ephemeral.

421. My Guru told me that consciousness, the Self, is the Guru.

422. I talk only to the consciousness about the consciousness.

423.
The conscious presence depends on the body, and the body is nothing but the sperm and ovum, so where is this "you"? The body is like an instrument that says, "I am", like an announcer. Presently you think you are the body-mind, and whatever concepts you have collected are flowing out. When you begin spirituality, you reject the body-mind with "I am not that." Then you come to the "I am" only, without words. Then you are everything, you are not confined to the body.

424.
From where do you know that you are?

425.
Anything that appears in time is an illusion to be discarded.

426. Ultimately, you are not even the observer.

427. There is really no witness because there is nothing to be witnessed. Seek the source of consciousness.

428. That which makes you think that you are human is not human. It is but a dimensionless point of consciousness; a conscious nothing. So long as you consider yourself as a separate entity wanting spiritual salvation, all this is useless.

429. We think that when the body is destroyed, the consciousness is also destroyed; it is not destroyed; it becomes one with the universal Reality.

430. The consciousness, the Self, is the soul of the manifest world; and you, the Absolute, are the soul of the consciousness.

431. Consciousness is a temporary condition which is upon the total, timeless, spaceless, changeless state. It is a happening which has come and which will disappear.

432. I take my stand in the original state where I was not aware that I am.

433. The Absolute is without quality and beyond consciousness.

434. I do not believe in spirituality. Spirituality is as discardable as dishwater. I am nothing, and even the word nothing has no meaning.

435. In the end, one has to give up even the association with consciousness itself. This is the ultimate aim. You are consciousness. Where is the question of your merging with the consciousness?

436. Whatever you meditate on, you are not that. Whatever you observe, you are not that. So in this way, reject whatever you observe and finally settle down where no more observation is.

437. To go beyond yourself, you must be beyond consciousness, which is possible only when you look at consciousness as something that happens to you and not in you, as something external, alien, superimposed.

438. I was never born, will never die.

439. In the true state nothing is.

440. The Absolute is the unborn state prior to consciousness, so how can it have an iota of knowledge?

441. When you meditate on the sense "I am", which is the beginning of knowledge, how can there be any questions?

442. Catch hold of the "I am" and all obstacles will evaporate, you will be beyond the realm of body-mind.

443. There is no reason, no cause, no purpose. It is spontaneously happening. Everything is an illusion. Your conviction that you were born is an illusion.

444. There is no link or mark or connection between the Absolute and the illusory person or self.

445. In the unmanifest absolute, there is no consciousness at all – no consciousness of existence.

446. The absolute Reality is the unborn state in which there is no experience. It will be revealed to you.

447. Eight days prior to conception or a thousand years back, who were you?

448. In spite of the body, I am in the absolute state. Worlds come and go. I am the original being.

449. Abidance in the non-witnessing state is the advaita state, the highest. In the highest state there is no experience. Experience, experiencing, experiencer – everything is only one.

450. Having understood the nature of consciousness you will also understand that you are not the consciousness.

451. One who is completely rid of coming and going, and, finally, one who is completely rid of one's very own concept that "I am", is completely liberated.

452. Just trust me and live by trusting me. I shall not mislead you. You are the supreme Reality beyond the world and its creator. Beyond consciousness and its witness. Beyond all assertions and denials.

453. I am nothing, have nothing, can do nothing, yet all comes out of Me, the source is Me, the root, the origin is Me.

454. You can never say what it is. Anything you say it is, it isn't.

455. The seeker is he who is in search of himself.

456. You must watch yourself continuously – particularly your mind – moment by moment, missing nothing. This witnessing is essential for the separation of the Self from the "not-self". A mere verbal statement will not do – you may repeat a formula endlessly without any result whatsoever.

457. Understanding the "I am", your sense of "being" or just "presence" is extremely important as on it rests the entire outcome of the teaching.

458. You have "to be" before anything else can be, your sense of "presence" or the feeling "I am" is really fundamental to anything that has to follow.

459. This sense of "being" or the feeling "I am", was it not the very first event or happening before any of your living experiences could begin?

460. Apply your mind, go back in time and try to recollect the moment when for the first time it dawned on you that "you are" or "I am". This nascent "I am" is without words or nonverbal.

461. This "I am" is still there with you, ever present, ever available, it was and still is the first thought. Reject all other thoughts and remain there.

462.
Everyone is concerned about what happens after the death of the body and not about what happened before its birth.

463. When the "I am" goes all that remains is the Absolute, give all your attention to the "I am".

464. You have to transcend the "I am" to enter the concept-free ultimate Reality, where you do not even know you are!

465. One who has realised the "I am", which means transcending it as well, for him there is no birth or death nor any karma.

466. Witnessing happens in the state prior to the "I am". Right now, right here, you are the absolute Reality. Hold on to the "I am" very firmly, ever abide in it and it will dissolve, leaving you as you really are.

467. You are neither the "I am" nor its activities, you as the Absolute are none of these. Be a true devotee, by abiding in the "I am" thereby transcending the experience of death to attain Immortality.

468. What is it in you that understands this "I am" without a name, title or word? Subside in that innermost center and witness the "I am".

469. Totally accept the sense"I am" as oneself, and with full conviction and faith firmly believe in the dictum "I am that by which I know I am".

470. Catch hold of the sense"I am" in meditation and the realisation will occur that "I", the Absolute, am not the quality "I am".

471. Do nothing else but stay in the "I am", the primary illusion, and then it will release its stranglehold on you and vanish.

472. In deep meditation, infused only with the "I am", it would be intuitively revealed to you as to how this "I amness" came to be.

473. My Guru taught me what "I am" and I pondered only on That. My original state is to be in that state where there is no "I am".

474. To do away with body-mind sense or identity, imbibe or dwell in the "I am". Later the "I am" will merge into the ultimate Reality.

475. Having acquired and understood the sense"I am" stay there in seclusion and don't wander around here and there. Once you stabilise in the "I am", you will realise that it is not the eternal state, but "you" are eternal and ancient.

476. True happiness cannot be found in things that change and pass away. Pleasure and pain alternate inexorably. Happiness comes from the Self and can be found in the Self only. Find your real Self and all else will come with it.

477. Every pleasure, physical or mental, needs an instrument. Both the physical and mental instruments are material, they get tired and worn out. The pleasure they yield is necessarily limited in its intensity and duration. Pain is the background of all your pleasures. You want them because you suffer. On the other hand, the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain. It is a vicious circle.

478. You should identify yourself only with this indwelling "I am". That is all. Sit in meditation by identifying with the "I am", dwell only on the sense "I am".

479. Forget all about physical disciplines and just be. When you are established in the "I am" there are no thoughts or words.

480. Consciousness depends on the Absolute, the Absolute does not depend on consciousness.

481. When you shall begin to question your dream, awakening will not be far away.

482. You are the Reality beyond the "I am", the Parabrahma. Meditate on this and remember this, until this idea, too, leaves you. Understand the "I am", transcend it and realise the Absolute.

483. It is the "I am" that investigates the "I am" and on realising its falsehood it disappears and merges into Eternity.

484. Along with the sense "I am" appears space and the world. When the "I am" vanishes, the world is liquidated.

485. The "I am" in body form can reach the highest state only if you understand, accept it and dwell there. Then you escape birth and death.

486. You have to be there before you can say "I am". The "I am" is the root of all appearance.

487. Nobody ever fails in Yoga. It is slow in the beginning and rapid in the end. When one is fully matured, realisation is explosive.

488. The "I am" has great potency, the entire manifestation has come from it. When you dwell in the "I am" as your destiny you realise that your destiny is not death but the disappearance of "I am".

489. Go to the "I am" state, remain there, merge, and go beyond. If you were to dwell in the "I am" and firmly abide in it, all external things will lose their grip on you.

490. The knowledge "I am" means consciousness, God, Guru and Ishwara. But you, the Reality, are none of these.

491. Out of nothingness, the sense "I am", or beingness, has risen. This "I am" has to return to its source. There is no individual.

492. You should consider more closely your own world, examine it critically and, suddenly, one day you will find yourself in mine.

493. Consistently and with perseverance separate the "I am" from "this" or "that", just keep in mind the feeling "I am".

494. Hold on to the "I am" to the exclusion of everything else. The "I am" in movement creates the world, the "I am" at peace becomes the Absolute.

495. The "I am" concept is the last outpost of the illusion. Hold on to it until you are no more. Remain focused on the "I am" until it goes into oblivion, then the eternal is, Reality is.

496. Prior to birth where was the "I am"? Don't contaminate the "I am" with the body idea.

497. In the absence of "I am" nothing is required. The "I am" will go with the body and the Absolute remains.

498. You must not only have the conviction that "I am" but also that you are free from the "I am".

499. Remember the "I am" only and give up the rest. Staying in the "I am" you realise that it is unreal.

500. Understand that the "I am" has dawned on you and all are its manifestations. In this understanding you realise you are not the "I am".

501. Sitting quietly, being one with the "I am", you lose all concern for the world.

502. Appearance and disappearance, birth and death; these are qualities of "I am" and do not belong to you, the Absolute.

503. With the dropping off of the primary experience "I am", all experiences vanish and only the Absolute remains.

504. The belief in the "I am" to be something as a body or an individual is the cause of all fear. In the absence of the "I am", who is to fear what?

505. In understanding the unreality of the "I am", of the world, you are totally free.

506. Before you occurred to yourself as "I am" you were the highest [Parabrahman]. Until the impurity of "I am the body" goes, stay put in the "I am" quietude.

507. Erroneously you have handed over the sense "I am" to the body, thereby reduced the limitless to the limited, hence you are afraid of dying.

508. Your fall started with the appearance of "I am", then you blundered by embracing the body as "I am". All that gathered thereafter is unreal.

509. Who has the knowledge "I am"? Somebody in you knows that "I am", "you are". Who is it?

510. Who can know the illusory state "I am"? Only a non-illusory state can do so.

511. The primary illusion is only this knowingness "I am". Liberation is when this knowingness is transformed into non-knowingness.

512. When the body dies, the "I am" goes into oblivion. Nothing happens to you, the Reality.

513. In the absence of the sense "I am", only my eternal state ever prevails.

514. Remain still at the source of your creation.

515. If you just try to keep quiet, all will come – the work, the strength for work, the right motive. Must you know everything beforehand? Don't be anxious about your future – be quiet now and all will fall in place. The unexpected is bound to happen, while the anticipated may never come. Don't tell me you cannot control your nature. You need not control it. Throw it overboard. Have no nature to fight, or to submit to. No experience will hurt you, provided you don't make it into a habit. Of the entire universe you are the subtle cause. All is because you are. Grasp this point firmly and deeply and dwell on it repeatedly. To realise this as absolutely true, is liberation.

516. You have to think "I am not the body but I am that formless, nameless knowledge indwelling in the body." When you abide sufficiently long in this state, whatever doubts you may have, that knowledge "I am" itself will sprout out with life and meaning for you, intended for you only, and everythng will become clear. No external knowledge will be necessary.

517. You must come to a firm decision. You must forget the thought that you are the body and be only the knowledge "I am", which has no form and no name. Just be. When you stabilise in beingness it will give all the knowledge and all the secrets to you, and when the secrets are given to you, you transcend beingness, and you, the Absolute will know that you are also not the consciousness. Having gained all this knowledge, having understood what is what, a kind of quietude prevails, a tranquility. Beingness is transcended, but beingness is available.

518. Your belonging is a matter of your own feeling and conviction. After all, it is all verbal and formal. In reality there is neither Guru nor disciple, neither theory nor practice, neither ignorance nor realisation. It all depends on what you take yourself to be. Know your Self correctly. There is no substitute to Self-knowledge.

519. Pure experience does not bind; experience caught between desire and fear is impure and creates karma.

520. There is nothing in the world except for this ignorance which is the greatest fraud. Consciousness itself is dishonest. That ignorance has automatically grown roots and branches.

521. All types of hungers come along with the body and they make you a beggar. Where there is no movement of consciousness there is Perfection. Wherever there is knowledge of the body there is God. And where there is God, there is a body. There will be no misery or happiness where there is no knowledge of "beingness". Where there is no name, there is no form, there is no quality. If there is no quality, there can be no action. Just pay attention to the fact that "you are". Do not do anything more.

522. Everyone has one common flavor. It is only temporary. There was a flavor "I am Krishna", "I am Shiva", but no flavor or taste has lasted. There have been great saints and sages, but today have they the taste of "I am" left with them? The memory of this body is not there in another body. That is the nature of consciousness. In a moment there are millions of births and this huge mundane world comes into existence.

523. Continuously contemplate that you are pure Reality, you are not of the class that dies. There is nothing – no one except you. Therefore, do not talk against anyone, do not blame anyone.

524. Whatever is, is a form of consciousness. It has taken rise. "That" is you alone. The same is the seed of the universe, seed of Reality, the seed of Self. By repeating "I am not the body", gradually it turns into a conviction.

525. There is no importance to how one behaves. Knowing he is neither "this" nor "that", he sits quiet. I am not even the one who knows "I am". There is bliss after "this is like this, this is not like that" goes away. When bliss becomes compact, impenetrable, then it is not consciously felt. This bliss is not that which admits memory or forgetfulness. The information given by the mind, intellect and consciousness does not even touch one, yet he acts. One who is listening has come into existence due to the conglomoration of the mind, intellect and consciousness. But the one who is the impenetrable bliss is the one who is the knower of the mind, intellect and consciousness.

526. One should be ashamed of saying that the body is his form. How much is being done in order to save honour and to avoid shame? The impenetrable bliss is not of the class of shame. All the qualities [gunas] belong to mind, intellect and consciousness. There can be no action without them. One's nature means one's conduct according to previous impressions. The one with bliss is under no rule of conduct. You are inside the collective of mind, intellect and consciousness.

527. Direct knowledge means your own Self. There is no teaching there, nor teacher. The body is introduced only in the "beingness". "Beingness" and a dream are not two, and all is felt and fancied in that alone. So long as this "I amness" was not known, there was no hitch in the compact bliss. The dream looks very real, but it is dishonest, not true. The "I amness" has no limit or standard. You have to understand this only once, and then there is no concern for the body at all. The "I amness" is a passing phase. It is borrowed. Your enjoying of your ""I amness" will not last. This is a fact that you will know yourself. Only a rare one understands the phase of this consciouslness. There is no coming and going for him. Without the Grace of the Guru that impenetrable consciousness will not be stablised.

528. You speak of my experience as different from your experience, because you believe we are separate. But we are not. On a deeper level my experience is your experience. Dive deep within your Self and you will find It easily and simply. Go in the direction of "I am".

529. Only the "I am" is certain. It is impersonal and all knowledge stems from it. Hold on to it and let all else go.

530. I do not believe in spiritual paths. The purpose of spiritual paths is to enmesh you in the world of knowledge, while Reality resides prior to it. All spiritual paths lead to unreality. Discard all paths.

531. We know the outer world of sensations and actions, but of our inner world of thoughts and feelings we know very little. The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of, and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness. Incidentally, practice of meditation affects deeply our character. We are slaves to what we do not know; of what we know we are masters. Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discover and understand its causes and its workings, we overcome it by the very knowing; the unconscious dissolves when brought into the conscious. The dissolution of the unconscious releases energy; the mind feels adequate and becomes quiet.

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