Ramana Maharshi Quotes

It's all real and it's all illusory: that's Awareness!

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Is perception equivalent to existence?

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

The physical universe that you see is all in your mind. When you turn your mind off, or become unconscious, the physical universe, for you, disappears. Then, when you awaken your consciousness, the universe reappears magically. Quite simple really - no thoughts on your part, no physical world. As Walt Whitman succinctly stated: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You." Without your mind to process it, the universe simply disappears into nothingness.

You can't have a universe without the mind entering into it.

Life is consciousness.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

We confuse ourselves with space-time events, when in fact we are the ones who generate these space-time events.

The problem is we think we exist.

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream

It is clear that every immediate object of our senses both exists and is real in the primary meaning of these terms so long as we remain aware of the object.

The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.