Ramana Maharshi Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Being enlightened is just being aware. It's just being aware of something that you weren't aware before.

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.

When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind itself is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are.

You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

Man only remains hypnotised with the false idea of an ego. When this ghost is off from us, all dreams vanish, and then it is found that the one Self only exists from the highest Being to a blade of grass.

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.

Everybody who is not awake spiritually is totally identified with and run by their thinking mind - the incessant voice in the head.

Enlightenment is not a complete remedy.

Drop dreaming and you are there where you have really been always, but you were never aware. All meditation techniques are just antidream efforts, just dream-negating devices.

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

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.

Desire disappears as you become more and more aware. When awareness is one hundred percent, there is no desire at all.

Realisation is our nature. It is nothing new to be gained. What is new cannot be eternal. Therefore there is no need for doubting if one would lose or gain the Self.

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.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.

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.

Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.

To find a Buddha all you have to do is see your nature.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

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.

The final goal of all human endeavor is the development of the human soul.