Liberation of the mind

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.



- Nisardadatta Maharaja
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There is only one mistake you are making

You take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be internal. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche.

That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right. You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.



- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
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There is no good and no evil

In every concrete situation there is only the necessary and the unnecessary. The needful is right, the needless is wrong. The situation decides.

Every situation is a challenge which demands the right response. When the response is right, the challenge is met and the problem ceases. If the response is wrong, the challenge is not met and the problem remains unsolved.

Your unsolved problems - that is what constitutes your karma.

Solve them rightly and be free.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
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Everything Under the Sun

Look around you; there is only one reality. The reason that you are here, wherever here is for you, is because it is the only place that you can be right now. But even though reality is right here, and even though there is quite literally nothing but reality, it is very possible for you to miss it altogether. By miss it I mean to imagine that reality is something or somewhere other than here. As strange as it may sound it is very possible, even probable, that even though you have eyes to see, you do not see. And even though you have ears to hear, you do not hear. What you see and hear is not exactly what is actually here, but what you imagine is here.

Our imagination is a very powerful force in determining what we perceive. If we imagine that the world is teeming with evil forces, we will surely perceive the world as evil. But if we imagine the world to be essentially good, we will perceive it as good. Either way it is the same world that we are looking at. But the world is neither good nor bad in and of itself; it is simply what it is. And if we see the world as either good or bad, we will not be able to see it as it actually is. We will only be able to see it as we imagine it to be.

Now take this idea and apply it to everything and everyone in your life. Try it for a moment, or an hour, or a day. And if you do, you may begin to notice that the world you imagine to exist does not exist at all. This may cause you some fear, or possibly the thrill of discovery, but either way the important thing is to get some distance from the habitual way the mind contorts and creates perception.

But even though our mind imagines the world and everything in it to be other than the way it actually is, the reality of existence remains eternally untouched by our misperception of it. This is both relatively good and bad. It is good in that existence is eternally what it is. We need not worry about reality becoming something other than reality. But it is bad in the sense that the world we imagine to exist is always colliding with the world as it actually is. This collision is the cause of immense human suffering and conflict.

So we are trapped within our illusions and misperceptions. And the greatest illusion of all is to believe that we are not trapped. But even when we realize that we are confined within a prison of our own making, we are trapped because all the ways we struggle to get out of our illusions are illusions themselves. So, yes, we are trapped, and helpless to boot.

But there is a very strange thing that can occur at exactly the point where you realize that there is no escaping the imaginary world of your illusions. You bare your heart open to illusion, surrender your eternal struggle against it, and admit to being bound by its cunning imagination. I don't mean that you become despondent or resigned to your fate. I mean that you truly let go in the face of your utter defeat and stop struggling.

And when all the struggle ceases, we realize that the prison of our mind cannot hold us in anymore, because the prison was all along something we imagined into existence. And imagined things aren't real, they don't exist. But we could never really see this as long as we were fighting the phantoms of our minds. We needed the one thing that our imaginary minds could not bring about, could not fake or create: the genuine surrender of all struggle.

In the blink of an eye, we are no longer confined within illusion nor our attempt to avoid illusion. When all struggle ceases, there is nothing to bind us to a distorted perception of existence and we can finally see. What we see is that we do not simply exist within existence, but all of existence exists within us as well. And although everywhere we look we see the endless diversity of life, we also now see our own true face in everything under the sun.

- Adyashanti
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Why worry so much about causation?

What do causes matter, when things themselves are transient? Let come what comes and let go what goes - why catch hold of things and enquire about their causes?

- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
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Don't trouble the mind

and don't let it trouble you. This is how to control the mind.

- Papaji,from The Truth Is, posted to DailyDharma
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There is no such thing as enlightenment.

The realization of that fact is
itself enlightenment.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj