Nisargadatta Maharaj presents reality as fundamentally non-dual, grounded in pure, attributeless consciousness. What ordinarily appears as an individual person in a concrete world is, in this view, only a transient appearance within awareness, comparable to a dream or mirage. The body, mind, and world possess at best a functional or relative reality; they lack independent, ultimate existence. The sense of being a separate “me” is a construct woven from memory, tendencies, and identification, rather than the true locus of identity. All such phenomena arise, change, and pass away within a single, indivisible field of awareness.

Central to his teaching is the subtle distinction between the felt sense “I Am” and the Absolute that precedes even this primordial intuition of being. The “I Am” is described as the first emergence from the unmanifest Parabrahman, the nearest accessible pointer to one’s real nature. By resting in this pure sense of being—prior to any qualification such as “I am this or that”—one begins to discern the difference between the changeless witnessing awareness and the changing contents of experience. Yet, even this “I Am” is ultimately seen as a temporary manifestation, to be transcended in the realization of the Absolute that is beyond being and non-being, beyond all concepts and experiences.

From this standpoint, the entire manifest universe, including the personal self, is maya: an illusory play that appears spontaneously in consciousness without a separate creator or ultimate cause. Subject and object, inner and outer, self and other, are divisions introduced by mind and language, not features of reality itself. There is no genuinely separate individual doer; all action belongs to the spontaneous movement of manifest consciousness. Consciousness is not produced by matter; rather, everything that can be known or experienced appears within consciousness and depends upon it.

What is commonly called ignorance is, for Nisargadatta, a simple but far-reaching misidentification: taking oneself to be the body–mind and taking the world of appearances as ultimately real. Liberation, or realization, consists in the direct, lived recognition that one’s true nature is this formless, undifferentiated awareness in which body, mind, and world arise and subside. Such realization does not necessarily alter the appearance of the world, but it radically transforms one’s relationship to it, giving rise to freedom, non-attachment, and a profound inner peace. The emphasis throughout is on immediate recognition rather than conceptual elaboration, a turning toward the ever-present awareness that is the sole, abiding reality.