Nothing is wrong with you, but the ideas you have of yourself are altogether wrong.
It is not you who desires, fears and suffers, it is the person built on the foundation of your body by circumstances and influences.
You are not that person.
This must be clearly established in your mind and never lost sight of.
-Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
All the quotes on this thread will be Nisargadatta’s.
“The greatest guru is your inner self. Truly he is the supreme teacher. He alone can take you to your goal and he alone meets you at the end of the road. Confide in him and you need no outer guru.”
Here’s a karma killer:
“Seeking out causes is a pastime of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect. Everything is its own cause.”
“Everything is its own cause”
Nice!
Keep those quotes coming.
“Why not turn away from the experience to the experiencer and realize the full import of the only true statement you can make; ‘I am’?”
“Establish yourself in the awareness of ‘I am’. This is the beginning and also the end of all endeavour.”
-Sri Nisargadatta
Okay, last Sri Nisargadatta quote for now 
“The entire universe of pain is born of desire. Give up the desire for pleasure and you will not even know what is pain.”
“Inertia and restlessness (tamas and rajas) work together and keep clarity and harmony (sattva) down. Tamas and rajas must be conquered before sattva can appear.”
“When I see I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see I am everything, that is love. And between these two, my life flows.”
~Nisargadatta
He also said as far as I remember (from reading one of his books)
All that you should ask yourself is can you remember who you were before you were born.
Which is what I took literally and thus it is in entire paradox with “seeking out causes being a pastime of the mind”.
To go mindless is rather stupid is it not?
To go joyless is even worse.
Is it not?
As long as one is conscious, there will be pain and pleasure. You cannot fight pain and pleasure on the level of consciousness. To go beyond them, you must go beyond consciousness, which is possible only when you look at consciousness as something that happens to you, and not in you, as something external, alien, superimposed. Then, suddenly you are free of consciousness, really alone, with nothing to intrude. And that is your true state. Consciousness is an itching rash that makes you scratch. Of course, you cannot step out of consciousness, for the very stepping out is in consciousness. But if you learn to look at your consciousness as a sort of fever, personal and private, in which you are enclosed like a chick in its shell, out of this very attitude will come the crisis which will break the
shell.
~Nisargadatta
“What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory, mysteriously and marvelously, you may call that ‘god’ It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain…You can do nothing to bring it about, but you can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there.”
~Nisargadatta
I love Nisargadatta, but I always feel he’s just a bit too far from me in time, place, and language for me to totally resonate. He always taught in the moment and of his time, in vernacular, to specific people. The problem is that such language doesn’t always endure or transfer well.
For me (being who and when and where I am), this quote resonates better if I substitute “suffering” for “pain”. The human body will always feel pain, but suffering is the reaction ego overlays upon pain. I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant. But, sigh, language… 
It’s good that, in the past century, people have been writing about this stuff in a more down-to-earth vernacular way. The problem is that we come to need constant replenishment in each time and place. On the other hand, such replenishment is probably for the best anyway.
Although a true master’s wisdom is always timeless and boundless I do agree that hearing it here and now is tops. You know Nisargadatta’s quotes are mostly from about only 30 years ago and were taken from conversations with westerners mainly. I like reading the whole conversations. He can really stay on it when it comes to pointing to the Truth in a conversation.
“We grow through investigation, and to investigate we need experience. We tend to repeat what we have not understood. If we are sensitive and intelligent, we need not suffer. Pain is a call for attention and the penalty of carelessness. Intelligent and compassionate action is the only remedy.”
~Nisargadatta
Yep, I am.
And I’m not saying he reads totally opaque to me. But it doesn’t quite ring my bell the way Sailor Bob (Nisargadatta’s student) does. And I haven’t even the glimmer of feeling that Nisagrgadatta was any less profound. It’s just language. Shoot, it may just be that I don’t dig whoever was translating for him (or did Nisagradatta teach in English? I’m not sure on that).
Q: When I do not separate, I am happily at peace. But somehow I lose my bearings again and again and begin to seek happiness in outer things. Why is my inner peace not steady, I cannot understand.
M: Peace, after all, is also a condition of the mind.
Q: Beyond the mind is silence. There is nothing to be said about it.
M: Yes, all talk about silence is mere noise.
Q: Why do we seek worldly happiness, even after having tasted one’s own natural spontaneous happiness?
M: When the mind is engaged in serving the body, happiness is lost. To regain it, it seeks pleasure. The urge to be happy is right, but the means of securing it are misleading, unreliable and destructive of true happiness.
Q: Is pleasure always wrong?
M: The right state and use of the body and the mind are intensely pleasant. It is the search for pleasure that is wrong. Do not try to make yourself happy, rather question your very search for happiness. It is because you are not happy that you want to be happy. Find out why you are unhappy. Because you are not happy you seek happiness in pleasure; pleasure brings in pain and therefore you call it worldly; you then long for some other pleasure, without pain, which you call divine. In reality, pleasure is but a respite from pain. Happiness is both worldly and unworldly, within and beyond all that happens. Make no distinction, don’t separate the inseparable and do not alienate yourself from life.
Nisargadatta and student
Yep, I am.
And I’m not saying he reads totally opaque to me. But it doesn’t quite ring my bell the way Sailor Bob (Nisargadatta’s student) does. And I haven’t even the glimmer of feeling that Nisagrgadatta was any less profound. It’s just language. Shoot, it may just be that I don’t dig whoever was translating for him (or did Nisagradatta teach in English? I’m not sure on that).
Everything was translated (You'd think such a one could pull up English :clown_face: ) and I have read that some of his translators were, how shall I say, incomplete.
Makes sense, Balance, thanks for the info. The pain vs suffering one is particularly a shame. Overcoming pain is a carnival stunt. Overcoming suffering is something else entirely
No problem J.A.H.K. 
Who experiences pain? Who suffers? I experience pain and I suffer. Who am I?
Aha! The great master’s technique appears to be something quite familiar…hours of ‘I Am’. Perhaps the different ‘camps’ are merely superficial stuff and we find our own unique ways of sadhana by plucking the fruits that suit our individual tastes from the great ones of our liking. I enjoy making my own particular fruit salad, I just remember to savor the fruits that are presently the most luscious for my diet of inner-peace.
“Go back to that state of pure being, where the ‘I am’ is still in its purity before it got contaminated with ‘this I am’ or ‘that I am’. Your burden is of false self-identifications – abandon them all. My Guru told me – ‘Trust me. I tell you; you are divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done’. I did believe him and soon realised how wonderfully true and accurate were his words. I did not condition my mind by thinking: ‘I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond’. I simply followed his instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being ‘I am’, and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with, nothing but the ‘I am’ in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared – myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.”
~Nisargadatta
“Living is Life’s only purpose.”
~Nisargadatta
“Now, you still think that you are one individual and that the guru is another individual, but it is not so. There can be no individuals separate from one another, no knowledge separable as worldly knowledge and spiritual knowledge. There is no guru and no disciple, there is no God and no devotee, there are no opposites, there is no second, always there is only one. Guru is you, guru is the One, he is the knower of consciousness, he is the witness of that illusion which is only temporary.”
~Sri Nisargadatta