SpiritAwake

Nisargadatta

Do understand that you are destined for enlightenment. Cooperate with your destiny, don’t go against it, don’t thwart it.There are no conditions to fulfill. Allow your destiny to fulfill itself.

There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. 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. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in results of your efforts.

Let come what comes and let go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, nor are you to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not.

Discover all you are not. Body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, time, space, being and not being, this or that – nothing concrete or abstract you can point to is you. 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.

When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest is done for you.

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 and feeling, purity in your behavior.

Whenever a thought or emotion of desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn away from it, just refuse attention, just turn away, look between the thoughts. When you do not resist, you meet with no resistance. Turn away from your desires and fears and from the thoughts they create and you are at once in your natural state.

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

Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal.

What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory, mysteriously and marvelously, you may call that ‘god.’ It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain. You can do nothing to bring it about, but you can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there.

See the event as event only, the transient as transient, experience as mere experience and you have done all you can. Then you are vulnerable to reality, no longer armored against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and experiences. But as soon as there is some like or dislike, you have drawn a screen.

When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing then the Supreme State will come to you uninvited and unexpected!

The desire for truth is the highest of all desires, yet, it is still a desire. All desires must be given up for the real to be. When all search ceases, it is the Supreme State.

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

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. You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.

Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining. Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether.

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.

The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly and without return.

Leave knowledge behind you. Forget it. Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs. Abandon all verbal structures, all relative truth, all tangible objectives. The absolute can be reached by absolute devotion only. Don’t be half-hearted.

Keep quiet, undisturbed, and the wisdom and the power will come on their own. You need not hanker. Wait in the silence of the heart. It is very easy to be quiet, but willingness is rare. Stay without ambition, without the least desire, exposed, vulnerable, unprotected, uncertain and alone, completely open to and welcoming life as it happens, without the selfish conviction that all must yield you pleasure or profit, neither material nor so-called spiritual.

A level of mental maturity is reached when nothing external is of any value and the heart is ready to relinquish all. Then the real has a chance and it grasps it. Delays, if any, are caused by the mind being unwilling to see or to discard.

There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. Just like upon sunrise you see things as they are, so upon self-realization you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.

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. It is entirely uncaused, independent, complete in itself, beyond time and space, mind and matter.

The real does not begin; it only reveals itself as beginning-less and endless, all-pervading, all-powerful, immovable prime mover, timelessly changeless.

Reality is the ultimate destroyer. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one – this is the ultimate solution of every conflict. As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal.

To locate a thing you need space, to place an event you need time; but the timeless and space-less defies handling. It makes everything perceivable, yet itself is beyond perception. The mind cannot know what is beyond the mind, but the mind is known by what is beyond it.

When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But 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.

In love there is not the one even, how can there be two? Love is the refusal to separate, to make distinctions. Before you can think of unity, you must first create duality. When you truly love, you do not say: ‘I love you; where there is mentation, there is duality.

Pain and pleasure go always together. Freedom from one means freedom from both. If you do not care for pleasure, you will not be afraid of pain.

Sex is an acquired habit. Go beyond. As long as your focus is on the body, you will remain in the clutches of food and sex, fear and death. Find yourself and be free.

Desire is of the past, fear is of the future.

You need not gather any more experience, rather you must go beyond experience.

Cease being fascinated by the content of your consciousness. When you reach the deep layers of your true being, you will find that the mind’s surface-play affects you very little.

Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go everything. The giving up is the first step. But the real giving up is in realizing that there is nothing to give up.

Nisargadatta