maurice frydman

[Guest guest]

(excerpt from " remembering nisargadatta maharaj " by david godman):

 

....One morning Maharaj seemed to be more-than-usually frustrated about

our collective inability to grasp what he was talking about.

 

'Why do I waste my time with you people?' he exclaimed. 'Why does

no one ever understand what I am saying?'

 

I took my chance: 'In all the years that you have been teaching

how many people have truly understood and experienced your teachings?'

 

He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, 'One. Maurice

Frydman.' He didn't elaborate and I didn't follow it up.

 

I mentioned earlier that at the conclusion of his morning puja he

put kum kum on the forehead of all the pictures in his room of the

people he knew were enlightened. There were two big pictures of

Maurice there, and both of them were daily given the kum kum

treatment. Maharaj clearly had a great respect for Maurice. I remember

on one of my early visits querying Maharaj about some statement of his

that had been recorded in I am That. I think it was about fulfilling

desires.

 

Maharaj initially didn't seem to agree with the remarks that had

been attributed to him in the book, but then he added, 'The words must

be true because Maurice wrote them. Maurice was a jnani, and the

jnani's words are always the words of truth.'

 

I have met several people who knew Maurice, and all of them have

extraordinary stories to tell about him. He visited Swami Ramdas in

the 1930s and Ramdas apparently told him that this would be his final

birth. That comment was recorded in Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi in

the late 1930s, decades before he had his meetings with Maharaj. He

was at various stages of his life a follower of Ramana Maharshi,

Gandhi, and J. Krishnamurti. While he was a Gandhian he went to work

for the raja of a small principality and somehow persuaded him to

abdicate and hand over all his authority to people he had formerly

ruled as an absolute monarch. His whole life is full of astonishing

incidents such as these that are virtually unknown. I have been told

by someone who used to be a senior Indian government official in the

1960s that it was Frydman who persuaded the then India Prime Minister

Nehru to allow the Dalai Lama and the other exiled Tibetans to stay in

India. Frydman apparently pestered him continuously for months until

he finally gave his consent. None of these activities were ever

publicly acknowledged because Frydman disliked publicity of any kind

and always tried to do his work anonymously...

 

http://davidgodman.org/interviews/nis1.shtml