TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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"The very idea 'I am self-realised' [or 'I am Self-Realised'] is a
mistake. There is no 'I am this,' 'I am that' in the Natural State."
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Next, quotations from Maharaj will be offered, excerpted from the book QUOTATIONS AND POINTERS dealing with NON-DUALITY, ADVAITA, NISARGA YOGA and more
The quotations and pointers from Maharaj which will be offered during the next few days will be arranged by category and subject matter. The quotes offered today will deal with:
"ABIDING NATURALLY, IN THE NISARGA FASHION"
"A life lived . . . in full awareness is by itself Nisarga Yoga."
"What needs be done is being done, in the normal and natural way."
"Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly. The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused."
"There is a state beyond forgetting and not forgetting - the natural state."
"Go beyond, back to your normal, natural state."
What You Are, You already Are. By knowing what You are not, You are free of it and remain in Your Own Natural State. It all happens quite spontaneously and effortlessly."
"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."
"When your attention is off a thing and not yet fixed on another, in the interval you are pure being. When, through the practice of discrimination and detachment (viveka-vairagya), you lose sight of sensory and mental states, pure being emerges as the natural state."
"The jnani is afraid of nothing, but he pities the man who is afraid. After all, to be born, to live and to die is natural. To be afraid is not. To the event, of course, attention is given."
“I take my stand in the original state where I was not aware that I am.”
Questioner: "Then, how do you know you are in the supreme state?"
Maharaj: "Because I am in it. It is the only natural state."
Maharaj: "Deal with the consciousness only . . . get to know it thoroughly. That is all that can be done. Later on, everything happens spontaneously; doership goes. Know the inside-out of consciousness and recognize it as useless; it is a fraud."
Q: "Are you now in the perfect state?"
M: "Perfection is a state of the mind, when it is pure. I am beyond the mind, whatever its state, pure or impure. Awareness is my nature; ultimately I am beyond being and non-being."
Live "just as you wake up spontaneously and fall asleep spontaneously. Don't make any effort."
Q: "Can I avoid this protracted battle with my mind?"
M: "Yes, you can. Just live your life as it comes, but alertly, watchfully, allowing everything to happen as it happens, doing the natural things the natural way, suffering, rejoicing -- as life brings. This also is a way."
" . . . Bliss is more of the nature of a great peace."
"Leave the mind alone. Stand aware and unconcerned and you will realise that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature."
"All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace."
"No effort is necessary; in fact, effort itself is a hindrance. It is intuitive understanding."
"Just live your life as it comes, but alertly, watchfully, allowing everything to happen as it happens, doing the natural things the natural way, suffering, rejoicing - as life brings. What needs be done is being done, in the normal and natural way."
"Turn away from your desires and fears and from the thoughts they create . . . ."
"The state in which no desire arises is the Natural State."
"You will recognise that you have returned to your natural state by a complete absence of all desire and fear."
"All will happen by itself. You need not do anything, only don't prevent it."
"Once you are quiet, things will begin to happen spontaneously and quite naturally without any interference on your part."
"You need not seek anything; all will come to you most naturally and effortlessly."
"Spontaneity became a way of life, the real became natural, and the natural became real."
The result of Nisarga / Natural abidance is "infinite affection and Love . . . radiating in all directions, embracing all, making all interesting and beautiful . . . ."
"The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being."
"The self by its nature knows itself only."
"Love is a state of being. Sex is energy. Love is wise. Sex is blind. Once the true nature of Love and sex is understood, there will be no conflict or confusion."
"When one is fully matured, realisation is explosive. It takes place spontaneously, or at the slightest hint. The quick is not better than the slow. Slow ripening and rapid flowering alternate. Both are natural . . . ."
"In complete obedience to nature there is no effort."
"So far your life was dark and restless (tamas and rajas). Attention, alertness, awareness, clarity, liveliness, vitality, are all manifestations of integrity, oneness with your true nature (sattva)."
"Sattva [basically, truth and peacefulness and balance] is the faithful servant of the self; ever attentive and obedient."
"Do I want anything from you. I wish you well -- such is my nature."
"As a whole the world does not need saving. Man makes mistakes and creates sorrow; when it enters the field of awareness, the consciousness of a jnani, it is set right. Such is his nature."
"The obstacles to the clear perception of one's true being are desire for pleasure and fear of pain. It is the pleasure-pain motivation that stands in the way. The very freedom from all motivation, the state in which no desire arises is the natural state."
"The nature of the self is pure awareness, pure witnessing, unaffected by the presence or absence of knowledge or liking." [Thus, the "True Self" or "Real Self" is nothing more than Pure Witnessing, and that can only be during the manifestation. Pre-manifestation and post-manifestation, there is no self or Self of any kind.]
" . . . Jnanis are not made, they realise themselves as such, when they return to their source, their real nature."
[The jnani] "is happy and fully aware that happiness is his very nature and that he need not do anything, nor strive for anything to secure it."
" . . . Love and compassion are his very nature."
"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 and omniscient deity is a clear sign of ignorance."
"Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature."
"The very nature of the self is love."
"Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy."
"Nature is one - Reality is one."
"Do nothing. Just be. In being all happens naturally."
"What you call realisation is a natural thing. When you are ready, your guru will be waiting."
"The harmonised people may be called natural, ruled by law, while the disintegrated are chaotic and subject to accidents."
" . . . Realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels, that disturbs."
"No particular thought can be [the] natural state, only silence."
"What you take to be the 'I' in the 'I am' is not you. To know that you are is natural, to know what you are is the result of much investigation."
"The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being."
"You need to return to the state in which I am -- your natural state. Anything else you may think of is an illusion and an obstacle."
Just witnessing is natural . . . ." [There is no deer or bird or fish or any other non-human life-form which is driven to abandon the witnessing-only state. Here in this neighborhood, the deer watch humans who overslept racing off in the morning to earn money to buy things they do not need; they watch humans rear-ending each others' cars because they were texting rather than witnessing what was going on in the traffic around them; they witness some humans ignoring the leash laws and they witness some of those un-leashed dogs attaching other people and other dogs; they watch children crying when one of those un-leashed dogs kills the childrens' pet cats. They witness all of those people involved loading into their cars and leaving the area to go to court to try to settle before a judge the issues with their pets / their dead pets. The deer are not driven by ideologies or xenophobia or racial hatred to march in the streets with tiki torches and with Nazi flags and with white supremacist flags and with rebel flags left over from a war which supposedly ended 150 years ago - but did not - and then drive a car at break-neck speed (literally) and kill someone with different beliefs and injure scores of others with different beliefs. They merely witness, and what they witness without knowing it are (to use Maharaj's words) the members of a species driven by "ignorance, stupidity, and insanity" as they go and do and zoom about and generate levels of noise that nature never saw for billions of years. Much chaos and disharmony and misery and suffering could be eliminated among humans via more use of the all-natural process of . . . just witnessing.] So . . .
" . . . Keep quiet. Once you are quiet, things will begin to happen
spontaneously and quite naturally without any interference on your
part."
"Non-identification, when natural and spontaneous, is liberation."
"Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind."
"This freedom from attachment does not come with practice; it is natural when one knows one's true being."
"Deepen and broaden your awareness of yourself and all the blessings will flow. You need not seek anything, all will come to you most naturally and effortlessly."
" . . . What prevents the insight into one's true nature is the weakness and obtuseness of the mind."
"Play, for example, is natural and man is the most playful animal in existence."
"The ending of the self with its desires and fears enables you to return to your real nature, the source of all happiness and peace."
"When more people come to know their real nature, their influence, however subtle, will prevail and the world's emotional atmosphere will sweeten up."
"Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realise yourself as one with it. It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition."
"When the mind is kept away from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never known; and yet you recognise it at once as your own nature."
"The very idea 'I am self-realised' [or 'I am Self-Realized'] is a mistake. There is no 'I am this'. 'I am that' in the Natural State."
"The darkness you see is but the shadow of the tiny speck. Get rid of it and come back to your natural state."
"Take note of the peculiar nature of pure awareness, its natural self-identity, without the least trace of self-consciousness, and go to the root of it and you will soon realise that awareness is your true nature and nothing you may be aware of, you can call your own."
"Your real nature is not like what you appear to be. Give up the idea of being a person, that is all."
"Self-surrender is the surrender of all self-concern. It cannot be done, it happens when you realise your true nature."
"Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we find it."
"To believe that you depend on things and people for happiness is due to ignorance of your true nature; to know that you need nothing to be happy, except self-knowledge, is wisdom."
"From the awareness of the unreal to the awareness of your real nature there is a chasm which you will easily cross, once you have mastered the art of pure awareness."
Questioner: "Emptiness and nothingness -- how dreadful!"
Maharaj: "You face it most cheerfully, when you go to sleep! Find out for yourself the state of wakeful sleep and you will find it quite in harmony with your real nature."
"Realise once for all that neither your body nor your mind, nor even your consciousness is yourself and stand alone in your true nature beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. No effort can take you there, only the clarity of understanding."
"Realise that your true nature is that of pure light only, and both the perceived and the perceiver come and go together."
"For reality to be, the ideas of 'me' and 'mine' must go. [Recall that Grandmother's Cherokee language did not contain either word.] They will go if you let them. Then your normal natural state reappears, in which you are neither the body nor the mind, neither the 'me’ nor the 'mine', but in a different state of being altogether. It is pure awareness of being, without being this or that, without any self-identification with anything in particular or anything in general. In that pure light of consciousness there is nothing, not even the idea of nothing. There is only light."
"There is nothing to practise. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge."
To be continued.
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