My learning is limitless and my enthusiasm for all things spiritual is endless. I have many teachers from whom I have learned so much and I feel nothing but deep gratitude for their very presence. Each Teacher is specialized in the area of his own enlightenment and awakening and so, there are so many different ways to come to the path of the heart and mind as ONE. Eventually all teachings lead to Spirit, The Ultimate Reality.
Personally I am not rigid in my beliefs. In my heart I always see a seamless golden thread that runs through every tradition and teaching. To be focussed only on one to the exclusion of all else feels right for many, but one really misses out a lot of gems from other teachings as well in the process. In this world, we need to keep our mind active and questioning so that we will always be in a state of readiness and understanding. To "Know Thyself" is to know everything especially one's Self. Without this knowledge one is rudderless and cast about endlessly from one extreme to another with no solid center.
Having said all of the above and while I continue to read and study from various teachings, my most favoured one are the ones that come from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. He was an epitome of simplicity and though I never knew of him till only a few years ago, I feel like I have always known him. Here are some profound quotes. If you so desire you can check out a lot more about him from the link below plus there's a lot of information available about him on the internet. Enjoy. May you be inspired by this simple Sage.
QUOTES FROM "I AM THAT" by NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ
-- 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, which cannot be verbalized, but
which can be experienced. All you need to do is to try and try again. After all
the sense of ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of
things to it- body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions and so on. All these
self-identifications are misleading, because of these you take yourself to be
what you are not --
-- 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. Once you are quiet, things will begin to happen
spontaneously and quite naturally, without any interference on your part --
-- To know itself the self must be faced with its opposite
the not-self. Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination,
detachment, self-knowledge liberation. And what is liberation after all? To
know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and
imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself
that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream --
-- All this is temporary, while I am dealing with the eternal.
Gods and their universes come and go, avatars follow each other in endless
succession, and in the end we are back at the source. I talk only of the
timeless source of all the gods with all their universes, past, present and
future --
-- God is only an idea in your mind. The fact is you. The
only thing you know for sure is: 'here and now I am'. Remove, the 'here and
now' the 'I am' remains, unassailable. The word exists in memory, memory comes
into consciousness; consciousness exists in awareness and awareness is the
reflection of the light on the waters of existence --
-- Once you accept time and space as real, you will consider
yourself minute and short-lived. But are they real? Do they depend on you, or
you on them? As body, you are in space. As mind, you are in time. But are you
mere body with a mind in it? Have you ever investigated? --
-- Experience, however sublime, is not the real thing. By
its very nature it comes and goes. Self-realisation is not an acquisition. It
is more of the nature of understanding. Once arrived at, it cannot be lost. On
the other hand, consciousness is changeful, flowing, undergoing transformation
from moment to moment. Do not hold on to consciousness and its contents.
Consciousness held, ceases. To try to perpetuate a flash of insight, or a burst
of happiness is destructive of what it wants to preserve. What comes must go.
The permanent is beyond all comings and goings. Go to the root of all
experience, to the sense of being. Beyond being and not-being lies the immensity
of the real. Try and try again --
-- There can be no experience of the Absolute as it is
beyond all experience. On the other hand, the self is the experiencing factor
in every experience and thus, in a way, validates the multiplicity of
experiences. The world may be full of things of great value, but if there is
nobody to buy them, they have no price. The Absolute contains everything
experienceable, but without the experience they are as nothing. That which
makes the experience possible is the Absolute. That which makes it actual is
the Self --
-- Fearlessness comes by itself, when you see that there is
nothing to be afraid of. When you walk in a crowded street, you just bypass
people. Some you see, some you just glance at, but you do not stop. It is the
stopping that creates the bottleneck. Keep moving! Disregard names and shapes,
don't be attached to them; your attachment is your bondage --
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