For Nisargadatta Maharaj, enlightenment is not a special attainment but the clear recognition of what is always already the case: one’s true nature as pure awareness, the fundamental “I Am” that precedes all qualifications such as “I am this” or “I am that.” This “I Am” is not the personal identity built from thoughts, memories, and roles, but the bare sense of being itself, prior to the body–mind and independent of its changing states. Enlightenment, in this sense, is a shift from identifying with the transient person to recognizing oneself as the unchanging witnessing consciousness in which that person and the entire world appear and disappear. It is not the acquisition of a new experience, but the clarification of what has always been present.

Central to this understanding is the dissolution of false identification with the body–mind complex. The habitual sense of being a separate individual, a limited “jiva,” is seen as an illusion arising in consciousness. When this misidentification falls away, what remains is the direct knowing of oneself as pure being–consciousness, beyond birth and death, beyond all dualities and phenomenal experiences. The apparent multiplicity of beings and things is then understood as appearances within the one consciousness that is one’s own true nature.

In this light, enlightenment is natural and effortless, not a graded process or a state that comes and goes. It is the immediate and complete recognition that the seeker and the sought are not two, that there is no separate individual who becomes enlightened. What changes is not reality but understanding: the firm, unshakable seeing that the person is a transient construct in awareness, while awareness itself is timeless, formless, and free. From this recognition flows a profound freedom from the psychological suffering rooted in fear, craving, and bondage, since these all depend on taking the limited person to be what one truly is.