A central thread in Nisargadatta Maharaj’s teaching is the primacy of the simple sense of being, the bare feeling “I am.” He repeatedly urges the seeker to stay with this pure sense of existence, without adding any qualifications such as “I am this” or “I am that,” and to let everything else go. In this vision, the body and mind are appearances within consciousness, while one’s true nature is the motionless witness in which they arise and subside. Identity with the body–mind complex is described as a fundamental misapprehension that gives rise to suffering, desire, and fear. By recognizing that what one really is cannot be lost and is not an object among other objects, the seeker begins to intuit the subject of all experience rather than yet another thing to be found.

From this standpoint, spiritual practice becomes a matter of radical self-inquiry and non-identification. Nisargadatta emphasizes questioning all assumptions about who is the seeker, and he encourages giving attention to the sense “I am” until all other thoughts fall away. The world and the person are seen as reflections or projections within consciousness, shaped by concepts, memories, and imagination. When all such concepts are dropped, what remains is termed the real: the timeless, ever-present awareness that does not come and go. Problems and bondage then appear as belonging only to the imagined person, while the true Self is recognized as already free.

Another key motif is the insistence that reality is always here and now, not the result of a future attainment. The search for some distant state is described as a subtle avoidance of what is immediately present. The guru’s function, in this light, is simply to point back to one’s own being, never to confer realization from outside. Words and teachings are to be tested in direct experience, since intellectual understanding alone cannot grasp what Nisargadatta calls pure being or consciousness. When false identifications are relinquished, understanding and a natural sense of unity with all beings arise of themselves, and what had seemed a spiritual journey is revealed as a recognition of what has always been the case.