Swami Vivekananda Quotes

There is no mind to control if you realise the self. The mind having vanished, the self shines forth. In the realised man, the mind may be active or inactive, the self remains for him.

Become aware of the silent witness that is observing the unfolding of all the external events of your life. This eternal presence is your true Self.

Our identification with the mind and body is the chief reason for our failure to know our self as we truly are.

Satori - in the awakening from a dream. Awakening and self-realization and seeing into one's own being - these are synonymous.

The search "Who am I"...ends in the annihilation of the illusory "I" and the Self which remains over will be as clear as a gooseberry in the palm of one's hand.

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. 'Who am I, then?' The one who sees that.

We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

You are not your body; you are not your brain, not even your mind. You are Spirit. All you have to do is reawaken to the memory, to remember.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

The mind is only a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts have their root in the I-thought. Whoever investigates the True "I" enjoys the stillness of bliss.

The truth is that we are a part of God. God could not have created anything except out of his own consciousness. We're all his dream, and our duty in life that God has assigned to us, that the universe has placed squarely in our laps, is to find out who we really are. "Gnothi seauton," as the Greeks used to say. "Know thyself." But to know thyself, if you trace it back, to the deeper and deeper levels, you discover that that self is not your body or your ego or your personality or your country or anything, that's just a sack of self-definitions that you carry around with you

Self-inquiry is the process and the goal also. 'I am' is the goal and the final reality. To hold to it with effort is self-inquiry. When spontaneous and natural it is realization.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

The ego is nothing but condensed unawareness. When you become aware by and by that condensed unawareness we call 'ego' disappears. Just as if you bring a lamp into the room - and the darkness disappears. Awareness is the lamp, the lamp we were talking about the first day. Be a lamp unto yourself.

Surrender means seeing that "I am not separate" - just SEEING that "I am not separate." Nothing is surrendered, nothing is dropped; just a nonsense idea, a dream is no more there because you are awake.

Without seeing the origin of light, the true form of one's Self, the ordinary man sees by the mind different things and is deluded.

I have seen without perceiving I have been another man Let me pierce the realm of glamour So I know just what I am.

Fear is only in duality. Fear is Mind. When you are your Self, there is no fear.

Generally, people who are not self-realized are full of themselves. One who is self-realized sees that the whole world is full of one.

Even great travelers of the inner world have got stuck in beautiful experiences, and have become identified with those experiences, thinking, "I have found myself." They have stopped before reaching the final stage where all experiences disappear. Enlightenment is not an experience.

By meditation we try to slow down the mechanism of projections. If the mechanism is slowed down and even for a single moment you begin to be aware of the gap - imageless gap of the screen - you have the glimpse. Suddenly you know that you have lived in the dreams of your own creation; and whatsoever you have known as the world was not the world really, it was YOUR world.

Your job on Earth, therefore, is not to learn (because you already know), but to remember Who You Are. And to remember who everyone else is.

Zazen is the ultimate practice. This is indeed the True Self. The Buddhadharma is not to be sought outside of this.