An Explosion Happened When You Were Born

Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your self realization.

You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened – at the moment when you were born.

There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner.

What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche.

That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right.

You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.

― Nisargadatta Maharaj

Many of us assume life happens from the outside in. We think the way we feel is caused by things outside of us. We think the way to improve our experience is to change things outside of us. This approach requires endless effort and will never bring true fulfillment, because it takes us further away from ourselves.

An explosion happened when we were born, a big bang that created the entire universe within us. We’ve spent many years thinking ourselves into forgetting – but we’re just one thought away from coming back home.