Non Duality Quotes

You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.

I am Not, but the Universe is my Self.

Brahman is the ultimate reality; it is simultaneously Saguna and Nirguna; divisions are due to ignorance. Mind and intellect can never catch hold of it; they have only one option and that is to merge with it.

Om is the things, Om is the ingredient, Om is the container and the content of this universe.

Wisdom tells me I am nothing, love tells me I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.

Life is a series of events and sensations. Everything else is interpretation. Much is lost in translation and added in assumption / projection

The Lotus opens. Movement from earth, through water, from fire to air. Out and in beyond life and death now, beyond inner and outer, sense and non-sense, meaning and futility, male and female, being and non-being, Light and darkness, void and full. Beyond all duality, or non-duality, beyond and beyond. Disincarnation. I breathe again.

True freedom is when all the stories, all the insights, all the realizations, concepts, beliefs and positions dissolve. What remains is what you are; a vast, conscious, luminous space simply resting in itself, not knowing a thing, at the point where all things are possible.

Relationships only work in a spiritual sense when you and I really see that we are one.

One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.

We are one at the root - we just part at the branch

Om is that God of love. Like a loving mother Om cleans us of our clutters collected through many incarnations.

Mind makes a man of God.

When you are truly awakened, you have completely stopped trying to become awakened. You simply are. You know that you did not locate awakening; awakening located you.

You do not need any preacher or prophet to learn about God. The teaching is spread on the trees and the mountains, on the stars and the river, on the Sun and the moon. The ultimate teaching is written in your heart. You just need to wake up and see.

If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general.

Om was there in the existence, when no religion was formed or founded. It will be there in the existence, if all the religions are demolished.

The room was filled with Hundreds of devotees When Chow Ling asked: Why are you worshipping the teapot Instead of drinking the tea?

It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.

You do not need to go to any temple or church to worship God. The whole existence is God’s temple. Your own body is the temple of God. Your own heart is the shrine. You do not need to subscribe to any religion to experience God. The only religion you need to experience God is love, kindness and respect to all beings.

Being enlightened ironically means realizing that there is no separate entity that can be enlightened or unenlightened.

You are what resides before, beyond and between what you think so do not be consumed by thought. It is only a fragment of your magic.

To plan is to hope … without feeling passive.

A free spirit is not bound by this, that, matter, materialism or opinion. They sing, dance and flow on the wind - for they are at one with it. They are nothing and everything - void and expanse. Even space and time does not confine or define them. For they are pure energy itself.

It’s only the ego that wants to surrender the ego; the real meaning of surrender does not involve anything external. It means to surrender to your true nature.

Not knowing anything, not searching for anything, understanding that we can’t hold on to anything, leaves us with nothing — nothing except our original nature, pure awareness.

All paths are valid, but in the end you will find that the realization of the ultimate truth is a pathless path.

In life the one becomes many. In death the many become one.

Shiva represents the non-dualistic Absolute..... all dualities merge within him.

If one desires clear sight One cannot place one’s trust in reflections. The way in is The only way out.

The universe looks different from different angles. Everyone is right from their perspective. If you say, 'No. Some are right. Others are wrong , then you are also right. There is no absolute right or wrong. Absolute is just silence of nothingness.

When you touch river Ganga in Rishikesh, you also touch the ocean to which the river is connected. Because the distinction between the river and ocean is just in your mind. You also touch the vapours rising from ocean, You touch clouds, rains, earth, mountains, You touch eternity. You touch God. Remove the distinctions, clean the mind. God is right here, right now.

God, the world seen through the glasses of my limited understanding no longer interests me. I surrender my questions, my answers, my theories, my opinions, my beliefs. Fill me with awe. Overwhelm me with your wonders.

The philosophic outlook rises above all sectarian controversy. It finds its own position not only by appreciating and synthesizing what is solidly based in the rival sects but also by capping them all with the keystone of nonduality.

The one who believes himself to be a person needs to try to find that person. This is a solution, an antidote, offered to a ghost that thinks it actually exists.

...all that we do is governed by the law of opposites in which every so-called positive act is exactly and equally balanced by its opposite.;

Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.

When you desire freedom, then you have to be willing to face what you have been running from in your search for it.

The overwhelming joy the artist gets from bringing art into existence, the mystic gets from existence.

You do not choose your thoughts. In fact, they are not yours. What’s more, you, too, are a thought.

Om is the signature sound of this Universe. It is the soundless sound of existence.

Once you attain the state of Absolute Oneness or Non-Duality, you become one of those spiritual legends that humanity so gloriously venerates as the founding fathers of religion.

Om is the presence which steals away. It steals away the ordinary mundane existence of strife, struggle and duality; it steals away anxiety, aggression, fear, grief and sorrow; it steals away the debris of anger, hatred, confusion and ignorance, to fill us with the nectar of joy, immortality and life eternal.

You are in a house of mirrors. People around you are your reflections. They look different because you look different from different angles. You are Paramatma (Supreme Soul). Don't identify yourself with a reflection which says, 'No, I am just a little human being.

You aren’t actually a someone, a person, who is conscious. You are the awake space of awareness itself, within which all the “thought up” entities in your world appear. Out of all these imagined entities, you have simply made the mistake of thinking that one of them is you.

Draw some dashes on a paper. Now mentally try to create a line by joining two of more dashes. Did you do it? Where is the line you just created? It’s in your mind. It has no existence except in your mind. The relationship between you and the line you just created is same as the relationship between the supreme soul (Paramaatma) and soul. The souls have no separate existence.

Realization includes everything, the mundane and the transcendental. In true awakening, nothing stands apart and nothing is excluded. If we find ourselves in a state where something is excluded, that state, however amazing it is, is still a dualistic state.

Looking forward” to what you think enlightenment might be at some grand point in the future keeps you from seeing the truth of its presence right now.

Life is a series of events and sensations. Everything else is interpretation. Much is lost in transition - and added in assumption / projection

Ignorance is at best merely a drop of bliss, whereas spiritual knowledge is at all times an ocean of bliss.

Perception is projection.

The worst thing about life is that, after the extremely rare nondual awakening, mere pleasure is the best thing that you can get out of it.

The Self, when finite, is Human and when infinite, is God.

The emotions we feel, and the desires and thoughts we have, are as ours as the sounds we hear.

The Earth and sky fuse at the horizon, and each becomes the other, till there is no other.

The hell is not something which is full of trash, because one can adjust and find comfort in trash after some time. The hell is when our little temple of purity gets surrounded by trash.

Awareness is that which is reading these words right now, whatever “that” is. You know without a doubt that there is something reading these words right now and awareness is precisely what that is.

What is constant? Is the mind anything more than a conglomeration of thoughts? Where is the mind apart from thought? If there is no thought, can there be a mind? They cancel each other out, do they not?

Of course the thinking mind must sooner or later be controlled, developed, and supplied with the force of will for a break-through to non-thinking, a direct experience of non-duality. But at what stage?

It is because you think of God as 'other" who exists out there somewhere, separate from you, you wander everywhere looking for what is your own reality. Self-realisation is realizing there are no others.

Realization is not about you, the wave, realizing it is ocean. The ocean realizes itself in you and reveals itself to have never been just a wave. Nothing changes except the falling away of a false belief.

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

At the moment of enlightenment, everything is dropped—body, mind, all states, all things—everything. At that moment, there is no separate entity that can become enlightened, because there is no I that can experience it.

Real consciousness is touch. Thought is getting out of touch. The crux of the whole problem lies here, in the duality of man's consciousness. Touch, the being in touch, is the basis of all consciousness, and it is the basis of enduring happiness. Thought is a secondary form of consciousness, Mind is a secondary form of existence, a getting out of touch, a standing clear, in order to come to a better adjustment in touch. Man, poor man, has to learn to function in these two ways of consciousness. When a man is in touch, he is non-mental, his mind is quiescent, his bodily centres are active. When a man's mind is active in real mental activity, the bodily centres are quiescent, switched off, the man is out of touch. The animals remain always in touch. And man, poor modern man, with his worship of his own god, which is his own mind glorified, is permanently out of touch. To be always irrevocably in touch is to feel sometimes imprisoned. But to be permanently out of touch is at last excruciatingly painful, it is a state of being nothing, and being nowhere, and at the same time being conscious and capable of extreme discomfort and ennui.

Non-duality is the essential quality of awareness, yet when we speak of three types of awareness—normal, meditative, and pure—we are speaking of a gradual experiential process that takes place from dualistic to non-dualistic states, from very cluttered minds to minds that are increasingly liberated from habitual reactivity and preconceptions about how things are supposed to be.

How then should I love God?’ You should love God non-mentally, that is to say the soul should become non-mental and stripped of her mental images. For as long as your soul is mental, she will possess images. As long as she has images, she will possess intermediaries, and as long as she has intermediaries, she will not have unity or simplicity. As long as she lacks simplicity, she does not truly love God, for true love depends upon simplicity . . . Indeed, you must love him as he is One, pure, simple and transparent, far from all duality. And we should eternally sink into this One, thus passing from something into nothing. So help us God. Amen.

To think that you are living life, even though you still haven’t realized nondual awakening, is like thinking that you are eating a mostly sweet, partially bitter—or vice versa—apple, while all you are doing is licking a photocopy of a picture of an apple seed.

In Advaita Vedanta, and in many other ancient wisdom traditions, the world is said to be an illusion. This illusion is commonly referred to as maya, a Sanskrit name which refers to the apparent, or objective reality which is superimposed on the ultimate reality in order to generate the phenomena of what we call the material world. Maya is the magic by which we create duality—by which we create two worlds from one. This creation is an illusory creation—it is not real—it is an imaginary manifestation of the one Universal Consciousness, appearing as all of the various phenomena in objective reality. Maya is God’s, or Consciousness’s, creative power of emptying or reflecting itself into all things and thus creating all things—the power of subjectivity to take on objective appearance.

If we are nothing, there is nothing at all to serve as a barrier to our boundless expression of love. Being nothing in this way, we are also, inevitably, everything. 'Everything' does not mean self-aggrandizement, but a decisive recognition of interconnection; we are not separate. Both the clear, open space of 'nothing' and the interconnected mess of 'everything' awakens us to our true nature.

Some of the verse in "AshthavakraGIta" are so powerful that will take you to the far beyond cosmos and you will feel oneness with everything in the universe and all cosmos will be projected inside you. The day you know that all the things are the object is perceivable by the subject(knower) that is you, and you are not the body not the mind but the pure consciousness that illuminates the entire world.

Question: who is more limited? 1. A believer in Theism or a believer in Atheism? Answer: It's a tie. Both are limited equally by their fixated beliefs. Existence is infinitely beyond preconception. The truly awakened mind is free, open, and innocent like a child. A child of the Universe

A Strange Prayer: Dear Lord, I, the self searching illusion, has seen and experienced the outer world: relationships, success and failure, true friends, strangers and backbiters. I lived the different emotions during different seasons; I witnessed ups & downs, enjoyed love & hate, was good & bad, faced beauty & ugliness. There were times when I was brave, there were times when I was a coward. There were times when I was proactive, there were times when I was indecisive. After, flying high in the skies, and yet being a loser... After, being nothing & no one, and yet feeling content.. I have understood the difference between lust and love, happiness and sadness, selfishness and selflessness. One often leads to another; another secretly carries the one! Yet I am lost between being and becoming. An inner voice admits that my heart is an unexplored realm, my mind is a prisoner to my wishful thinking, and the soul is unknown to me. Setting that unknown free... now, this is my heartiest wish. As Saurabh Sharma, the human being, I always pray to thee, " O lord, set me free. I don't want love, I don't want to be loved; I want myself to be love itself now. That beautiful, silent and divine existence...! I want to get merged into that. Please give me wisdom and courage; Merge me into your supreme kingdom by setting my soul free.

Good-bad, hot-cold, high-low, left-right: When you rise above all these pairs, you experience the final pair which seems to encapsulate everything else. Different Yogis call his final pair with different names: Shiva-Shakti, Existence-Nonexistence, Srishti-Shunya, Pure Masculine-Pure Feminine, Being-Nonbeing. You must transcend this final pair too. The desire to cling to one side of this final pair, the desire to always be Shunya or Shiva or Feminine or Nonbeing, stops you from having the absolute experience of Paramatma. You have to realize that Shiva and Shakti are same. Srishti as a whole is Shunya. Pure Masculine is pure Feminine.

I am a lonely figure when I run the roads. People wonder how far I have come, how far I have to go. They see me alone and friendless on a journey that has no visible beginning or end. I appear isolated and vulnerable, a homeless creature. It is all they can do to keep from stopping the car and asking if they can take me wherever I'm going. I know this because I feel it myself. When I see the runner I have much the same thoughts. No matter how often I run the roads myself, I am struck by how solitary my fellow runner appears. The sight of a runner at dusk or in inclement weather makes me glad to be safe and warm in my car and headed for home. And at those times, I wonder how I can go out there myself, how I can leave the comfort and warmth and that feeling of intimacy and belonging, to do this distracted thing. But when finally I am there, I realise it is not comfort and warmth I am leaving, not intimacy and belonging I am giving up, but the loneliness that pursues me this day and every day. I know that the real loneliness, the real isolation, the real vulnerability, begins long before I put on my running shoes.

A bird is inside a moving car. He is flapping his wings and thinking that car is moving because of him. That is your life: Bird is your soul, car is your body-mind. You say, “There is no satisfaction in the journey.” Guru says, “Detach from the car.” But you panic as soon as you hear the word “detach”. It only means, fly above the car, not inside it.

Suppose that the universe has a battery. If you take out the battery, universe becomes non existent. But then the battery will exist! Both the battery and the universe can’t be non-existent. When one is in existence, the other is in non-existence. This absolute combination is known by many names: Shiva-Shakti, Shunya-Srishti, Pure Feminine-Pure Masculine.

Just knowing that there is no gate to pass through doesn’t mean that we are at the end of the search, not if we are still standing outside that gateless gate.

The One that experiences itself as your body-mind is the same One that experiences itself in every other body-mind, form, or appearance that exists.

Maybe that is the purest and most radical kind of religion – simple attention. Present-moment awareness. Instead of a belief system, awareness sees through all beliefs.

When it occurs without having to voice it - vibin' on the same page, flowin' on the same wave, soakin' up the same light rays.

Like the past, the future is merely an idea; a mere thought.

Like ‘me’, ‘you’ is merely a particular activity of the mind, which is merely a particular process of the brain.

Thinking happens by itself. The thing that is thinking that it is it that is thinking is a product of thinking.

Each and every event was unavoidable, and was avoidable only in theory. Even my realizing and my saying that, and your reading or hearing, and your agreeing or disagreeing with that.

Even amazing states of bliss, peace, clarity and spaciousness have nothing to do with awakening as these are just experiences coming and going in the impersonal awareness that you are.

Once you emerge from the state of absolute divinity, the self within you becomes Christ – it becomes Buddha – it becomes Moses – it becomes Krishna. The sage who emerges from the state of non-duality begins to perceive the self as Christ, not Christ as Christ – the self as Moses, not Moses as Moses – the self as Mohammed, not Mohammed as Mohammed – the self as Krishna, not Krishna as Krishna.

There is a transcendent spontaneity of life, a ‘creative Reality’, as Krishnamurti calls it, which reveals itself as immanent only when the perceiver’s mind is in a state of ‘alert passivity’, of ‘choiceless awareness’. Judgement and comparison commit us irrevocably to duality. Only choice-less awareness can lead to non-duality, to the reconciliation of opposites in a total understanding and a total love. Ama et fac quod vis. If you love, you may do what you will.

Anything that appears and disappears cannot actually be you because it is being observed by you. By removing the attention from these things and noticing what remains, you are left only with what is permanent — the truth of who you are.

We are the beat of nature's heart, the earth is our heaven and the sun our breath, through our heart journey's the eternity unfolds and encircles us with her gentle hands, there is no end or return, no answer, just one spark flickers.

In Banaras, I asked a monk, “To hold onto human character, one must have at least one desire. What is your desire.” He replied, “I have only one desire: Moksha or liberation from mortal bodies.” I said, “You are using the desire to leave the body to hold on to the body. Isn’t that contradiction? Aren’t you stuck in a loop of contradiction?” Recently, I met an old man in Chamundi Hills. He was singing praise of Maa Chamundi. I asked him, “Baba, what is your one desire that you are using to hold onto this body?” He replied, “Desire to sing songs in praise of Maa Chamundi.” I asked, “What about the desire of Moksha? Don’t you want to be free from this bondage?” He replied, “There is just one soul who is free- the Paramatma. I am that.” I said, “But how come you are stuck in this human body?” He said, “Young man! My mortal form is only in your mind. When you let go of your mind, you can meet me as Paramatma - the free soul. Then there is no you and me. There is just Paramatma.

A laptop is a good example of what this universe is all about. When it is folded, it is nothing. There is no movement and no visuals. When you unfold it, two parts emerge: the keyboard part and the screen part. The screen part is the outer world or the Existence. That is where your body exists. The keyboard part is inner world or the non-Existence. That is where your soul (non-)exists. A soul often gets so attached to the visuals on screen that it forgets about the keyboard or the inner world.

The science of Chaos teaches us that everything is interconnected, but the contemporary developments in neuroscience, getting started with the brain neurons and their multiple connections, reveal the topology of the brain, a miniature of the universal geometry of everything.

The Multiplicity and the Unity are one and the same thing, a thing that is both many and one at the same time. The waves, and the currents underwater, make up the ocean. The ocean is the underlying basis for every wave. Neither the ocean, nor the waves, can be understood in isolation from each other.

A man called Mr. Mind died. His wife Mrs. Soul was in the process of transferring all his property papers in her name. Then she came across his death certificate. She said to her lawyer, “I want all his papers in my name and this paper also belongs to him. Transfer it in my name.” Lawyer did that. Now she was also legally dead! She could no longer claim her husband’s properties. She was absolutely nothing now. This is the last step in spiritual journey. The concept of soul has to die so that only the soul remains. The concept belongs to the mind. If you don’t let go of it, you are still attached to the mind.

Religion is the secret of life. It teaches us to love, to serve, to forgive, to endure, and to interact with our brothers and sisters with empathy and compassion. Advaita (non-duality) is a purely subjective experience. But in daily life it may be expressed as love and compassion. This is the great lesson taught by the great saints and sages of India, the exponents of Sanatana Dharma.

Inside the united and indivisible universal Wholeness, every thought and action we make concerning the part, creates the reaction of the whole towards us. In short, whatever we are doing and in whichever way we are doing it, has a multiple effect on us, from every “corner” of the universal unity. The meaning of universal, indivisible unity creates a new social and ecological awareness, since the social and the nature are structural parts of the whole and every action we take against it, results in a reaction of the whole cosmic creation against us.

The living world is not the harsh domain of classical Darwinism, where each struggle against all, with every species, every organism and every gene competing for advantage against every other. Organisms are not skin-enclosed selfish entities, and competition is never unfettered. Life evolves, as does the universe itself, in a 'sacred dance' with an underlying field. This makes living beings into elements in a vast network of intimate relations that embraces the entire biosphere itself an interconnected element within the wider connections that reach into the cosmos.

And what is it that experiences our self? Only our self! There is only one substance in experience and it is pervaded by and made out of knowing or awareness. In the classical language of non-duality this is sometimes expressed in phrases such as, ‘Awareness only knows itself’, but this may seem abstract. It is simply an attempt to describe the seamless intimacy of experience in which there is no room for a self, object, other or world; no room to step back from experience and find it happy or unhappy, right or wrong, good or bad; no time in which to step out of the now into an imaginary past or into a future in which we may become, evolve or progress; no possibility of stepping out of the intimacy of love into relationship with an other; no possibility of knowing anything other than knowing, of being anything other than being, of loving anything other than loving; no possibility of a thought arising which would attempt to frame the intimacy of experience in the abstract forms of the mind; no possibility for our self to become a self, a fragment, a part; no possibility for the world to jump outside and for the self to contract inside; no possibility for time, distance or space to appear.

Whatever we experience in a dream appears to us to be real only so long as we are experiencing that dream. When we wake up and consider what we had experienced, we understand clearly and without any doubt that it was all unreal, being merely a figment of our imagination. Likewise, all that we experience in this so-called waking state appears to us to be real only so long as we are experiencing this state. When we wake up into our real waking state, which is the non-dual state of perfectly clear self-consciousness or self-knowledge, we will discover that all the duality that we are now experiencing in our present state of self-ignorance is as unreal as all the duality that we experienced in our dream, being nothing but a mere figment of our own imagination.

As in other Buddhist Tantric techniques, recommended preliminaries for these practices include developing skill at both calm-abiding (zhi gnas; śamatha) and insight meditation (lhag mthong; vipaśyanā). As in earlier Buddhist teachings, many Chöd dehadāna practices emphasize renunciation, purification, and self-transformation through the accumulation of merit and the exhaustion of demerit. Rather than suggesting that one must wait to accumulate adequate merit before offering the gift of the body, however, Chöd provides the opportunity for immediately efficacious offering of the body through techniques of visualization. Using a technique which echoes the traditional Buddhist teaching of the of the mind-made body (manomayākāya), the practitioner engages in visualizations which allow her to experience the non-duality of agent and object as she offers her body. The process of giving the body as a means of attainment is commonly articulated in Chöd practice texts (sgrub pa; sādhana). These practice texts exhibit the framework of mature Tantra sādhana, including the stages of generating bodhicitta, going for refuge, meditating on the four immeasurables, and making the eight-limbed offering. Generally speaking, the main section of a developed Chöd sādhana has three components. The first two—a transference of consciousness (nam mkha’ sgo ‘byed) practice, and a body maṇḍala (lus dkyil) practice—have distinctly purifying purposes. The Chöd transference of consciousness practice has parallels with other Buddhist practices called "’pho ba." In this part of the visualization practice, the practitioner’s consciousness is "ejected" from one's body through the Brahma aperture at the crown of one's head. At this time, one's consciousness can be visualized as becoming identical with an enlightened consciousness, which is embodied in a figure such as Machik, Vajrayoginī (Rdo rje rnal byor ma) or Vajravārāhī (Rdo rje phag mo). [....] In th[e] first stage of this transformation, the practitioner identifies with an enlightened being, thus overcoming attachment to her own body-mind aggregates and purifying them through this non-attachment. In the second stage, the practitioner can extend this identification: the practitioner identifies the microcosm of her body with macrocosms of the mundane and supramundane worlds. The body maṇḍala (lus dkyil) stage also allows the practitioner to reconceptualize her body as expanding through space and time and becoming indistinguishable from the realm of the supramundane, or the Dharmadhātu (chos kyi dbyings). Through the process of reconstructing her identity, the practitioner is able to see herself as the ultimate source of offerings for all sentient beings.