This series is a collection of pointers or teaching aphorisms by Nisargadatta Maharaj on realizing Yourself beyond the sense “I Am”. If the sense "I Am" can be perceived, it cannot be Who You Are. What perceives? Who or what are You? Remember, to know Yourself, return to the silence before words. Without the intake of food, there is no opportunity to say ‘I am’, out of the essence of the earth sprouts vegetation and out of that sprouts the ‘I am’, realize this without eyesight or intellect. That principle likes to cry, enjoy, and laugh, but you are not that, realize this only. Become one with the ‘I am’, then you can transcend it, then ‘I the Absolute’ am not the ‘I am’. – Nisargadatta Maharaj
Remember, to know Yourself, return to the silence before words. With the practice of self-enquiry, seekers often have experiences of profound peace and silence. However, these peaceful experiences are not stable. Sooner or later seekers will experience some type of stress or drama in everyday life, and then they will feel that they have lost this sense of peace and stillness. The series will share pointers that reveal the pattern of attraction and aversion that create "heaven" and "hell" and keep seekers trapped on the roller coaster of pleasure and pain. Like water is shaped by the container, so is everything determined by conditions (gunas). But as light remains itself regardless of the colours it brings out, so does the real remain real, regardless of conditions in which it is reflected. – Nisargadatta Maharaj
Every moment we recognize awareness ― and really trust and learn to appreciate it ― joy comes, compassion comes, and love. But it isn’t personal; it isn’t based on liking, preferences, or kammic attachments. The dhamma is not the destruction of conditioned phenomena, but the container of it. All possibilities of conditioned phenomena arise and cease in the dhamma; and there is nothing that can bind us once we see that, because the reality of the dhamma is seen rather than the forms that arise and cease. Mindfulness reflections are skilful means the Buddha developed for investigating experience, for breaking down the illusions we hold, for breaking through the ignorance we grasp at, for freeing ourselves from form, the limited and the unsatisfactory. Rather than teaching too many techniques now, or giving too much structure, I prefer to encourage people just to trust themselves with mindfulness and awareness. Often meditation is taught with this sense that one has to get something or ...