Notes on ‘I Am That’

I Am That:

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 1 thing that matters – ‘I am’ & let go of all else.

Be fully aware of your own being and you will be in bliss.

Because you take your mind off yourself and make it dwell on what you are not, you lose your sense of well-being of being well.

What you perceive is distorted and coloured by feelings of like and dislike. Make your thinking orderly and free from emotional overtones, and you will see people and things as they are with clarity & charity.

A quiet mind undistorted by desires and fears, free from ideas and opinions, clear on all levels is needed to reflect the reality.

Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace.

Desire not, fear not, observe the actual as and when it happens.

There is no chaos in the world, except the chaos which your mind creates. It is self-created in the sense that at its very centre is the false idea of oneself as a thing different and separate from other things. In reality, you are not a thing, nor separate. You are the infinite potentiality; the inexhaustible possibility.

‘I do not see the world as separate from me and so there is nothing for me to desire, or fear.’

“No desire or fear enters my mind, there is perfect silence”

“A man who moves with the earth will necessarily experience days & nights. He who stays with the sun will know no darkness. My world is not yours. As I see it, you are on a stage performing.

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

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

You can spend an eternity looking elsewhere for truth and love, intelligence and goodwill, imploring God and man — all in vain. You must begin in yourself, with yourself – this is the inexorable law. You cannot change the image without changing the face. First, realise that your world is only a reflection of yourself and stop finding fault with the reflection. Attend to yourself, and set yourself right -mentally and emotionally. The physical will follow automatically. You talk so much of reforms: economic, social, political. Leave alone the reforms and mind the reformer. What kind of world can a man create who is stupid, greedy, and heartless?

Clarify your mind, purify your heart, sanctify your life – this is the quickest way to change your world.

To believe that you depend on things & 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.

A saint does not want things to be different from what they are, he knows that considering all factors, they are unavoidable He is friendly with the inevitable and therefore does not suffer.

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

A man who no longer thinks in terms of loss and gain is the truly non-violent man, for he is beyond all conflict.

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.

‘This is not me; this is not mine. I am beyond all this.

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

There is nothing that cannot be achieved by training.

None can prove your existence, because his existence must be confirmed by you first. Your being and knowing you owe nobody. Remember, you are entirely on your own. You do not come from somewhere; you do not go anywhere. You are a timeless being and awareness.

Words don’t matter. What matters is the idea you have of yourself, for it blocks you. Give it up.

Easier to change, than to suffer.

Pain is transient, you are not.

Beyond pain and pleasure, there is bliss.

Consciousness? It is a burden. Body means burden. Sensations, desires, thoughts – these are all burdens. All consciousness is of conflict.

The difference lies in what I do not experience. I do not experience fear or greed, hate or anger. I ask nothing, refuse nothing, keep nothing.

Whatever you do for the sake of truth, will take you to truth. Only be earnest and honest. The shape it takes hardly matters.

Mere longing, undiluted by thought and action, pure, concentrated longing, will take you speedily to your goal.

As long as you give importance to words, you are children.

The potential becomes actual by thinking. The body and its affairs exist in the mind.

You have to turn away from the world and go within until the inner and the outer merge and you can go beyond the conditioned, whether inner or outer.

Pain and pleasure are merely symptoms resulting from wrong knowledge and wrong feeling.

‘If there be God, then all is God’s and all is for the best. Welcome all that comes with a glad and thankful heart. And love all creatures. This too will take you to yourself.’

Whatever happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter, yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. Without desire or fear, he enjoys it, as it happens.

He 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. It follows him, more real than the body, nearer than the mind itself. You imagine that without cause there can be no happiness. To me, dependence on anything for happiness is utter misery. Pleasure and pain have causes, while my state is my own, totally uncaused, independent, unassailable.

Whatever state I am in, I see it as a state of mind to be accepted as it is. Realised man – What matters is their outlook, their attitude, which is that of total detachment, aloofness, standing apart.

What matters is that I am neither the body nor the mind. I am.

Desire nothing, for you lack nothing. The very seeking prevents you from finding.

You are right, enlightenment is the highest good. Once you have it, nobody can take it away from you.

The causes of perversity are also natural – heredity, environment and so on. You are too quick to condemn. Do not worry about others. Deal with your own mind first. When you realise that your mind too is a part of nature, the duality will cease.

Detachment brings control.

Wherever there is conflict, effort, struggle, striving, longing for a change, the new is not.

Watch your mind, how it comes into being, and how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover yourself as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover yourself as the light behind the watcher.

The essence of slavery is to imagine yourself to be a process, to have a past and a future, to have history. In fact, we have no history, we are not a process, and we do not develop, nor decay; also see all as a dream and stay out of it.

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 experience ever unborn and deathless.

Know your sensations, feelings and thoughts well.

Watch your mind, how it comes into being, and how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover yourself as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover yourself as the light behind the watcher.

The essence of slavery is to imagine yourself to be a process, to have a past and a future, to have history. In fact, we have no history, we are not a process, and we do not develop, nor decay; also see all as a dream and stay out of it.

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 experience ever unborn and deathless.

Know your sensations, feelings and thoughts well.

No self-definition is valid.

Q: How should one work? A: Neither for yourself nor for others, but for the work’s own sake. A thing worth doing is its own purpose & meaning. Make nothing a means to something else. Bind not.

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!

When all search ceases, it is the Supreme State.

Stop making use of your mind and see what happens. Do this one thing thoroughly. That is all.

The sight of a flower is as marvellous as the vision of God. Let them be. Why remember them and then make memory into a problem? Be bland about them; do not divide them into high and low, inner and outer, lasting and transient. Go beyond, go back to the source, go to the self that is the same whatever happens. Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality, the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being.

The main point to grasp is that you have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, desires and fears, and that you have imprisoned yourself in it. Break the spell and be free.

Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realise 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.

When you work for something wholeheartedly and steadily, it happens, for it is the function of the mind to make things happen. In reality, nothing is lacking and nothing is needed, all work is on the surface only. In the depths, there is perfect peace. 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.

Just as a cloud obscures the sun without in any way affecting it, so does assumption obscure reality without destroying it.

All is one – this is the ultimate solution to 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. First, we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then realise that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind and matter and beyond both.

Truly, all is in me and by me. There is nothing else. The very idea of ‘else’ is a disaster and a calamity.

Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves.

The world is full of contradictions, hence your search for harmony and peace. These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of chaos.

As long as you give first place to the world, you are bound by it; once you realise, beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Of course, your body remains in the world and of the world, but you are not deluded by it.

Don’t ask the mind to confirm what is beyond the mind. Direct experience is the only valid confirmation.

The real is changeless. What changes is not real, what is real does not change.

It is a matter of actual experience that the self has being independent of mind and body. It is being – awareness – bliss. Awareness of being is bliss.

This complete aloofness, unconcern with mind and body is the best proof that at the core of your being, you are neither mind nor body. 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 yourself. The more earnest you are at remembering what needs to be remembered, the sooner will you be aware of yourself as you are, for memory will become experience. Earnestness reveals being. What is imagined and willed becomes actuality — here lies the danger as well as the way out.

Austerity is a wise way to happiness. Once you have gone through an experience, not to go through it again is austerity. To eschew the unnecessary is austerity. Not to anticipate pleasure or pain is austerity. Having things under control at all times is austerity.

But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it.

Realise that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events; that while all happens, comes and goes, you alone are, the changeless among the changeful, the self-evident among the inferred. Separate the observed from the observer and abandon false identifications.

Your difficulty lies in your wanting reality and being afraid of it at the same time.

And in harmony, there is no place for fear.

Be like that infant, instead of trying to be this or that, be happy to be. You will be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness. But there should be no feelings and ideas to stand between you and the field.

Be interested in yourself beyond all experience, be with yourself, and love yourself; the ultimate security is found only in self-knowledge. The main thing is earnestness. Be honest with yourself and nothing will betray you.

The main thing is to be free of negative emotions — desire, fear etc., the ‘six enemies’ of the mind. Once the mind is free of them, the rest will come easily. Just as cloth kept in soap water will become clean, so will the mind get purified in the stream of pure feeling.

When you sit quietly and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the surface. Do nothing about them, and don’t react to them; as they have come so will they go, by themselves. All that matters is mindfulness, total awareness of oneself or rather, of one’s mind.

What is observable is not the real self.

Just realise that nothing observable, or experienceable is you, or binds you. Take no notice of what is not yourself.

If you want to live sanely, creatively and happily and have infinite riches to share, search for what you are

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.

My teacher told me to hold on to the sense ‘I am’ tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment.

To be free from thoughts is itself meditation.

How to be free? You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Don’t get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it.

What was never lost can never be found. Your very search for safety and joy keeps you away from them. Stop searching, cease losing. The disease is simple and the remedy is equally simple. It is your mind only that makes you insecure and unhappy. Anticipation makes you insecure, memory – unhappy. Stop misusing your mind and all will be well with you. You need not set it right – it will set itself right, as soon as you give up all concern with the past and the future and live entirely in the now.

This work of mental self-purification, the cleansing of the psyche, is essential.

Awareness by itself is motionless and timeless, here and now.

As long as you pay attention to ideas, your own or of others, you will be in trouble. But if you disregard all teachings, all books, anything out into words and dive deeply within yourself and find yourself, this alone will solve all your problems and leave you in full mastery of every situation, because you will not be dominated by your ideas about the situation.

A normal state cannot be painful, while a habit often leads to chronic pain.

It is desires and fears that make the mind restless. Free from all negative emotions it is quiet.

‘I see things as they are, momentary events, presenting themselves to me in rapid succession, deriving their being from me, yet definitely neither me nor mine.’

Go back to that state of pure being, where the ‘I am’ is still in its purity before it got contaminated with ‘this I am’ or ‘that I am’. Your burden is of false self-identifications — abandon them all.

‘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.’

No memory will persist, if you lose interest in it, it is the emotional link that perpetuates the bondage. You are always seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and 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 timelessly present.

I am telling you again: You are the all-pervading, all-transcending reality. Behave accordingly: think, feel and act in harmony with the whole and the actual experience of what I say will dawn upon you in no time. No effort is needed. Have faith and act on it.

For, attitude attracts opportunity.

Thoughts – Your very fighting them gives them life. Just disregard. Look through.

Love is will, the will to share your happiness with all. Being happy – making happy – this is the rhythm of love.

If you are angry or in pain, separate yourself from anger and pain and watch them. Externalisation is the first step to liberation. Step away and look. The physical events will go on happening, but by themselves, they have no importance.

If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events.

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.

Keeping away from all desires and contentment in what comes by itself is a very fruitful state – a precondition to the state of fullness.

Believe me, it is the satisfaction of desires that breeds misery. Freedom from desires is bliss.

Compassion is but another word for the refusal to suffer for imaginary reasons.

It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy — truth liberates.

Behave as if you were pure awareness, bodiless and mindless, spaceless and timeless, beyond ‘where’ and ‘when’ and ‘how’. Dwell on it, think of it, learn to accept its reality.

Let the dream unroll itself to its very end. You cannot help it. But you can look at the dream as a dream, refuse it the stamp of reality.

Freedom from all desire is eternity. All attachment implies fear, for all things are transient. And fear makes one a slave. This freedom from attachment does not come with practice; it is natural, when one knows one’s true being. Love does not cling; clinging is not love.

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. Don’t disturb your mind with seeking.

World full of pain? from the body’s point of view. But you are not the body. You are the immensity and infinity of consciousness. Don’t assume what is not true and you will see things as I see them. Pain and pleasure, good and bad, right and wrong: these are relative terms and must not be taken absolutely. They are limited and temporary. ‘

To myself I am neither perceivable nor conceivable; there is nothing I can point out and say: ‘this I am’. You identify yourself with everything so easily, I find it impossible. The feeling: ‘I am not this or that, nor is anything mine’ is so strong in me.

Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life.

I am nothing that can be pointed at. I am neither a ‘this’ nor a ‘that’.

Nothing is a mistake unless repeated.

When pain is accepted for what it is, a lesson and a warning, and deeply looked into and heeded, the separation between pain and pleasure breaks down, both become experience – painful when resisted, joyful when accepted.

All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious, the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance — these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss.

Untangle mind? By being with yourself, the ‘I am’; by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies.

Don’t anticipate and don’t regret – it is memory and imagination that causes suffering.

Watch your mind.

Be free from predilections and preferences and the mind with its burden of sorrow will be no more.

‘Your world, of desires and their fulfilments, of fears and their escapes, is definitely not my world. I do not even perceive it, except through what you tell me about it’

The world- how different it is when you can see it as it is, not through the screen of desire and fear.

Once you realise that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end.

Faith expressed in action is a sure means to realisation.

You believe that you are not what you experience and you look at everything from a distance.

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

Begin by realising that the world is in you, not you in the world.

With a little attentiveness, of close observation of oneself, you will see that no event is outside your consciousness.

Yet there is the experience of just being.

Do understand that you are destined for enlightenment. Co-operate with your destiny, don’t go against it. Allow it to fulfil itself. All you have to do is to give attention to the obstacles created by your mind.

For, what has a beginning and an end has no middle. It is hollow. It has only the name and shape given to it by the mind, but it has neither substance nor essence.

Self-interest and self-concern are the focal points of the false. Your daily life vibrates between desire and fear. Trace every action to its selfish motive and look at the motive intently till it dissolves.

Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, and stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now; you need absolutely nothing.

All you can say about yourself is: ‘I am.’ You are pure being — awareness — bliss. To realise that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness of the transient as transient, imaginary as imaginary, unreal as unreal. It is not at all difficult, but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the true so difficult to see.

Learn from the sorrows of others and save yourself your own. It is not experience that you need, but the freedom from all experience.

You are not even a human being. You just are — a point of awareness, co-extensive with time and space and beyond both, the ultimate cause, itself uncaused. If you ask: ‘Who are you?’ My answer: ‘Nothing in particular. Yet, I am.’

Keep on remembering: I am neither the mind nor its ideas: do it patiently and with convictions and you will surely come to the direct vision of yourself as the source of being — knowing — loving, eternal, all-embracing all-pervading. You are the infinite focussed in a body. Now you see the body only. Try earnestly and you will come to see the infinite only.

There is nothing to do. Just be. Do nothing. Be. Having seen that you are neither the ‘outer’ world of perceivables nor the ‘inner’ world of thinkables, that you are neither body nor mind -just be.

You will recognise that you have returned to your natural state by a complete absence of all desire and fear. After all, at the root of all desire and fear is the feeling of not being what you are.

Changes are inevitable in the changeful, but you are not subject to them. You are the changeless background, against which changes are perceived.

The unreal may look real, but it is transient. The real is not afraid of time.

It appears to be real only because you believe in it. Doubt it, and it ceases.

What is limited in time and space, and applicable to one person only, is not real. The real is for all and forever.

Practice desirelessness – Just turn your mind away. Desire is the fixation of the mind on an idea. Get it out by denying it attention.

Whatever may be the desire or fear, don’t dwell upon it.

You can emotions but beware of reactions, of induced emotions. Be entirely self-determined and ruled from within, not from without. Give up a thing because you see its valuelessness. As you keep on giving up, you will find that you grow spontaneously in intelligence and power and inexhaustible love and joy.

Realise yourself as away from all that can be pointed at as ‘this’ or ‘that’.

The mind is what it thinks. To make it true, think true.

The bridge between the watcher and his dream. ‘I am this, I am that’ is dream, while pure ‘I am’ has the stamp of reality on it.

Whatever you think about with desire or fear appears before you as real. Look at it without desire or fear and it does lose substance.

Purge the mind of evil, then restart- watch it relentlessly.

In self-awareness, you learn about yourself. Of course, you can only learn what you are not. To know what you are, you must go beyond the mind.

Just refuse attention when a thought or emotion of desire or fear comes to your mind. Just turn away, look between, rather than at the thoughts.

Whatever you are engrossed in you take to be real.

First, return to your true being and then act from the heart of love.

Shift your attention from words to silence and you will hear it. The mind craves experience, the memory of which it takes for knowledge.

It is better to say: ‘There is witnessing’

Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything. The real giving up is in realising that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is your own.

Thinking of yourself to be the body, you know the world as a collection of material things. When you know yourself as a centre of consciousness, the world appears as the ocean of the mind. When you know yourself as you are in reality, you know the world as yourself.

If you stand aloof as an observer only, you will not suffer.

True awareness is a state of pure witnessing, without the least attempt to do anything about the event witnessed.

Awareness of an object is called witnessing. When there is also self-identification with the object, caused by desire or fear, such a state is called a person. In reality, there is only one state; when distorted by self-identification it is called a person.

How to reach perfection?

Keep quiet. Do your work in the world, but inwardly keep quiet. Then all will come to you. Do not rely on your work for realisation. It may profit others, but not you. Your hope lies in keeping silent in your mind and quiet in your heart. realised people are very quiet.

Awareness is ever there. It need not be realised. Open the shutter of the mind, and it will be flooded with light.

Understand the root cause of your fears — estrangement from yourself: and of desires — the longing for the self, and your karma will dissolve like a dream. Nothing is affected, only bodies grow and decay.

Realise that no ideas are your own, they all come to you from outside. You must think it all out for yourself, and become yourself the object of your meditation. The effort to understand yourself is Yoga.

Meditation – Limit your interests and activities to what is needed for you and your dependents’ barest needs. Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built.

Go into what is undefinable and indescribable, except in negative terms.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes; you can always correct them, only intentions matter.

Our indifference to our neighbour’s sorrow brings suffering to our door.

Peace, power, happiness, these are never personal states, nobody can say ‘my peace’, ‘my power’ — because ‘mine’ implies exclusivity, which is fragile and insecure.

The only trouble is that you are addicted to experience and you cherish your memories. In reality, what is remembered is never real; the real is now.

As the mind is made of words and images, so is every reflection in the mind. It covers up reality with verbalisation and then complains.

But you insist that you think, you speak, while to me there is thinking, there is speaking

The moment you have seen how fragile is your condition, you are already alert. Now, keep alert, give attention, enquire, investigate, discover your mistakes of mind and body and abandon them.

Purity of body and clarity of mind, non-violence and selflessness in life are essential for survival as an intelligent and spiritual entity.

There is nothing in my mind. As you hear the words, so do I hear them. The power that makes everything happen makes them also happen.

The real is beyond experience. All experience is in the mind. You know the real by being real.

Put your awareness to work, not your mind.

Resist your old habits of feeling and thinking; keep on telling yourself: ‘No, not so, it cannot be so; I am not like this, I do not need it, I do not want it’, and a day will surely come when the entire structure of error and despair will collapse.

Peace and silence, silence and peace – this is the way beyond. Stop asking questions.

It is because you think yourself big enough to be affected by the world. It is not so. You are so small that nothing can pin you down. It is your mind that gets caught, not you. Know yourself as you are — a mere point in consciousness, dimensionless and timeless.

For without memory and expectation, there can be no time.

It is just a state unaffected by the mind, free from the past and future.

Memory – Withdraw from it, ignore it, go beyond, and it will cease to be.

Do not try to know the truth, for knowledge by the mind is not true knowledge. But you can know what is not true — which is enough to liberate you from the false. The idea that you know what is true is dangerous, for it keeps you imprisoned in the mind. It is when you do not know, that you are free to investigate. And there can be no salvation, without investigation.

To insist, and to resist, are contained in the will to be. Remove the will to be and what remains? To be denied personal existence is frightening, but you must face it and find your identity with the totality of life. Then the problem of who is used by whom is no more.

A sign of progress in spiritual life: Freedom from anxiety; a sense of ease and joy; deep peace within and abundant energy without. When you realise that the distinction between inner and outer is in the mind only, you are no longer afraid.

When you realise yourself as less than a point in space and time, something too small to be cut and too short-lived to be killed, then, and then only, all fear goes.

When the mind is engaged in serving the body, happiness is lost. To regain it, it seeks pleasure.

Do not try to make yourself happy, rather question your very search for happiness. It is because you are not happy that you want to be happy. Find out why you are unhappy. Because you are not happy you seek happiness in pleasure; pleasure brings in pain and therefore you call it worldly; you then long for some other pleasure, without pain, which you call divine.

Be aware that whatever happens, happens to you, by you, through you, that you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive and you will not be afraid. Unafraid, you will not be unhappy, nor will you seek happiness.

This attitude of silent observation is the very foundation of Yoga. You see the picture, but you are not the picture.

Experience is shaped by belief and belief is shaped by experience.

A man who keeps himself in low esteem, will not be able to trust himself, nor anybody else.

Real happiness is not vulnerable, because it does not depend on circumstances.

Others can give you pleasure, but never happiness.

And selfishness cannot be removed by effort, only by clear insight into its causes and effects. Effort is a sign of conflict between incompatible desires. They should be seen as they are – then only they dissolve.

Use every incident of the day to remind you that without you as the witness there would be neither animal.

Beware of all that makes you dependent.

Self-surrender is the surrender of all self-concern. It cannot be done, it happens when you realise your true nature.

You need not be attached to the non-essentials. Only the necessary is good. There is peace only in the essential.

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 the nourishment of interest and attention.

It is not what you do, but what you stop doing that matters.

Once you realise that there is nothing in this world, that you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage, or a picture on the screen, admiring and enjoying, but really unmoved. As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, actually existing in time and space, short-lived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase.

But when you know yourself as beyond space and time — in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable — you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are – against fear, there is no other remedy.

Once you have understood that the world is but a mistaken view of reality, and is not what it appears to be, you are free of its obsessions.

As long as we believe that we need things to make us happy, we shall also believe that in their absence we must be miserable. The mind always shapes itself according to its beliefs.

Real happiness is utterly unselfconscious. It is best expressed negatively as: ‘There is nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to worry about”.

The experience of being empty, uncluttered by memories and expectations; it is like the happiness of open spaces, of being young, of having all the time and energy for doing things, for discovery, for adventure.

Once you have understood that nothing perceivable, or conceivable can be yourself, you are free of your imagination. To see everything as imagination, born of desire, is necessary for self-realisation.

Look at the content of your mind. You are what you think about.

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, material or so-called spiritual.

Abandon every attempt, just be; don’t strive, don’t struggle, let go of every support, hold on to the blind sense of being, brushing off all else. This is enough.

Dispassion, detachment, freedom from desire and fear, from all self-concern, mere awareness — free from memory and expectation — this is the state of mind to which discovery can happen.

Once you can say with confidence born from direct experience: ‘I am the world, the world is myself’, you are free from desire and fear on one hand and become totally responsible for the world on the other.

You need not worry about action, look after your mind and heart. Stupidity and selfishness are the only evil.

Don’t trust definitions and descriptions — they are grossly misleading.

Be nothing, know nothing, have nothing.

Everybody behaves according to his nature. It cannot be helped, nor need it be regretted.

The world appears to you so overwhelmingly real, because you think of it all the time; cease thinking of it and it will dissolve into thin mist.

What motive is there for action? – None, unless you consider the love of life, of righteousness, of beauty, motive enough. Do not be afraid of freedom from desire and fear. It enables you to live a life so different from all you know, so much more intense and interesting.

You may believe in whatever you like and if you act on your belief, you will get the fruits of it.

Know yourself to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind.

You need not worry about your worries. Just be. Do not try to be quiet; do not make ‘being quiet’ into a task to be performed. Don’t be restless about ‘being quiet’, miserable about ‘being happy’. Just be aware that you are and remain aware – don’t say: ‘Yes, I am; what next?’ There is no ‘next’ in ‘I am’. It is a timeless state.

First of all, establish constant contact with yourself, be with yourself all the time. Into self-awareness, all blessings flow.

All dependence on another is futile, for what others can give others will take away. Only what is your own at the start will remain your own in the end. Accept no guidance but from within, and even then sift out all memories for they will mislead you.

Remember, nothing you perceive is your own. Words, heard or read, will only create images in your mind, but you are not a mental image. You are the power of perception and action behind and beyond the image.

A level of mental maturity is reached when nothing external is of any value.

Relinquish your habits and addictions, live a simple and sober life, and don’t hurt a living being; this is the foundation of Yoga.

Assertions are usually wrong and denials — right. Remember to remember that the perceived cannot be the perceiver. Whatever you see, hear or think of, remember – you are not what happens, you are he to whom it happens.

So far, you took the mind for the knower, but it is just not so. The mind clogs you up with images and ideas, which leave scars in memory. You take remembering to be knowledge. True knowledge is ever fresh, new, and unexpected. It wells up from within.

Words indicate but do not explain.

The mind misunderstands, misunderstanding is its very nature.

What is of the mind is relative, it is a mistake to make it into an absolute.

Meditating means giving attention. Become fully aware of your problem, look at it from all sides, and watch how it affects your life. Then leave it alone. You can’t do more than that.

You, the self, being the root of all being, consciousness and joy, impart your reality to whatever you perceive. This imparting of reality takes place invariably in the now, at no other time, because the past and future are only in the mind. ‘Being’ applies to the now only.

Self-betrayal is a grievous matter. Try to understand that you live in a world of illusions, examine them and uncover their roots.

I am entirely unimagined. I am what I am, not identifiable with any physical or mental state.

It is madness to split oneself through likes and dislikes. I am beyond both. I am not alienated. Moods are in the mind and do not matter.

You have separated yourself from the world, therefore it pains and frightens you. Discover your mistake and be free of fear.