Who is Nisargadatta Maharaj? (from I Am That)

[Guest guest]

When asked about the date of his birth the Master replied blandly

that he was never born!

 

Writing a biographical note on Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj is a

frustrating and unrewarding task. For, not only the exact date of his

birth is unknown, but no verified facts concerning the early years of

his life are available. However, some of his elderly relatives and

friends say that he was born in the month of March 1897 on a full

moon day, which coincided with the festival of Hanuman Jayanti, when

Hindus pay their homage to Hanuman, also named Maruti, the monkey-god

of Ramayana fame. And to associate his birth with this auspicious day

his parents named him Maruti.

 

Available information about his boyhood and early youth is patchy and

disconnected. We learn that his father, Shivrampant, was a poor man,

who worked for some time as a domestic servant in Bombay and, later,

eked out his livelihood as a petty farmer at Kandalgaon, a small

village in the back woods of Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra.

Maruti grew up almost without education. As a boy he assisted his

father in such labours as lay within his power -- tended cattle,

drove oxen, worked in the fields and ran errands. His pleasures were

simple, as his labours, but he was gifted with an inquisitive mind,

bubbling over with questions of all sorts.

 

His father had a Brahmin friend named Vishnu Haribhau Gore, who was a

pious man and learned too from rural standards. Gore often talked

about religious topics and the boy Maruti listened attentively and

dwelt on these topics far more than anyone would suppose. Gore was

for him the ideal man -- earnest, kind and wise.

 

When Maruti attained the age of eighteen his father died, leaving

behind his widow, four sons and two daughters. The meagre income from

the small farm dwindled further after the old man's death and was not

sufficient to feed so many mouths. Maruti's elder brother left the

village for Bombay in search of work and he followed shortly after.

It is said that in Bombay he worked for a few months as a low-paid

junior clerk in an office, but resigned the job in disgust. He then

took petty trading as a haberdasher and started a shop for selling

children's clothes, tobacco and hand-made country cigarettes. This

business is said to have flourished in course of time, giving him

some sort of financial security. During this period he got married

and had a son and three daughters.

 

Childhood, youth, marriage, progeny -- Maruti lived the usual humdrum

and eventless life of a common man till his middle age, with no

inkling at all of the sainthood that was to follow. Among his friends

during this period was one Yashwantrao Baagkar, who was a devotee of

Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj, a spiritual teacher of the Navnath

Sampradaya, a sect of Hinduism. One evening Baagkar took Maruti to

his Guru and that evening proved to be the turning point in his life.

The Guru gave him a mantra and instructions in meditation. Early in

his practice he started having visions and occasionally even fell

into trances. Something exploded within him, as it were, giving birth

to a cosmic consciousness, a sense of eternal life. The identity of

Maruti, the petty shopkeeper, dissolved and the illuminating

personality of Sri Nisargadatta emerged.

 

Most people live in the world of self-consciousness and do not have

the desire or power to leave it. They exist only for themselves; all

their effort is directed towards achievement of self-satisfaction and

self-glorification. There are, however, seers, teachers and revealers

who, while apparently living in the same world, live simultaneously

in another world also -- the world of cosmic consciousness, effulgent

with infinite knowledge. After his illuminating experience Sri

Nisargadatta Maharaj started living such a dual life. He conducted

his shop, but ceased to be a profit-minded merchant. Later,

abandoning his family and business he became a mendicant, a pilgrim

over the vastness and variety of the Indian religious scene. He

walked barefooted on his way to the Himalayas where he planned to

pass the rest of his years in quest of a eternal life. But he soon

retraced his steps and came back home comprehending the futility of

such a quest. Eternal life, he perceived, was not to be sought for;

he already had it. Having gone beyond the I-am-the-body idea, he had

acquired a mental state so joyful, peaceful and glorious that

everything appeared to be worthless compared to it. He had attained

self-realisation.

 

Uneducated though the Master is, his conversation is enlightened to

an extraordinary degree. Though born and brought up in poverty, he is

the richest of the rich, for he has the limitless wealth of perennial

knowledge, compared to which the most fabulous treasures are mere

tinsel. He is warm-hearted and tender, shrewdly humorous, absolutely

fearless and absolutely true -- inspiring, guiding and supporting all

who come to him.

 

Any attempt to write a biographical not on such a man is frivolous

and futile. For he is not a man with a past or future; he is the

living present -- eternal and immutable. He is the self that has

become all things.

 

 

And from the 1981 edition's foreward, the following:

 

 

That there should be yet another addition of I AM THAT is not

surprising, for the sublimity of the words spoken by Sri Nisargadatta

Maharaj, their directness and the lucidity with which they refer to

the Highest have already made this book a literature of paramount

importance. In fact, many regard it as the only book of spiritual

teaching really worth studying.

 

There are various religions and systems of philosophy which claim to

endow human life with meaning. But they suffer from certain inherent

limitations. They couch into fine-sounding words their traditional

beliefs and ideologies, theological or philosophical. Believers,

however, discover the limited range of meaning and applicability of

these words, sooner or later. They get disillusioned and tend to

abandon the systems, in the same way as scientific theories are

abandoned, when they are called in question by too much contradictory

empirical data.

 

When a system of spiritual interpretation turns out to be

unconvincing and not capable of being rationally justified, many

people allow themselves to be converted to some other system. After a

while, however, they find limitations and contradictions in the other

system also. In this unrewarding pursuit of acceptance and rejection

what remains for them is only scepticism and agnosticism, leading to

a fatuous way of living, engrossed in mere gross utilities of life,

just consuming material goods. Sometimes, however, though rarely,

scepticism gives rise to an intuition of a basic reality, more

fundamental than that of words, religions or philosophic systems.

Strangely, it is a positive aspect of scepticism. It was in such a

state of scepticism, but also having an intuition of the basic

reality, that I happened to read Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's I AM

THAT. I was at once struck by the finality and unassailable certitude

of his words. Limited by their very nature though words are, I found

the utterances of Maharaj transparent, polished windows, as it were.

 

No book of spiritual teachings, however, can replace the presence of

the teacher himself. Only the words spoken directly to you by the

Guru shed their opacity completely. In a Guru's presence the last

boundaries drawn by the mind vanish. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj is

indeed such a Guru. He is not a preacher, but he provides precisely

those indications which the seeker needs. The reality which emanates

from him is inalienable and Absolute. It is authentic. Having

experienced the verity of his words in the pages of I AM THAT, and

being inspired by it, many from the West have found their way to

Maharaj to seek enlightenment.

 

Maharaj's interpretation of truth is not different from that of Jnana

Yoga/Advaita Vedanta. But, he has a way of his own. The multifarious

forms around us, says he, are constituted of the five elements. They

are transient, and in a state of perpetual flux. Also they are

governed by the law of causation. All this applies to the body and

the mind also, both of which are transient and subject to birth and

death. We know that only by means of the bodily senses and the mind

can the world be known. As in the Kantian view, it is a correlate of

the human knowing subject, and, therefore, has the fundamental

structure of our way of knowing. This means that time, space and

causality are not `objective', or extraneous entities, but mental

categories in which everything is moulded. The existence and form of

all things depend upon the mind. Cognition is a mental product. And

the world as seen from the mind is a subjective and private world,

which changes continuously in accordance with the restlessness of the

mind itself.

 

In opposition to the restless mind, with its limited categories --

intentionality, subjectivity, duality etc. -- stands supreme the

limitless sense of `I am'. The only thing I can be sure about is

that `I am'; not as a thinking `I am' in the Cartesian sense, but

without any predicates. Again and again Maharaj draws our attention

to this basic fact in order to make us realise our `I am-ness' and

thus get rid of all self-made prisons. He says: The only true

statement is `I am'. All else is mere inference. By no effort can you

change the `I am' into `I am-not'.

 

Behold, the real experiencer is not the mind, but myself, the light

in which everything appears. Self is the common factor at the root of

all experience, the awareness in which everything happens. The entire

field of consciousness is only as a film, or a speck, in `I am'.

This `I am-ness' is, being conscious of consciousness, being aware of

itself. And it is indescribable, because it has no attributes. It is

only being my self, and being my self is all that there is.

Everything that exists, exists as my self. There is nothing which is

different from me. There is no duality and, therefore, no pain. There

are no problems. It is the sphere of love, in which everything is

perfect. What happens, happens spontaneously, without intentions --

like digestion, or the growth of the hair. Realise this, and be free

from the limitations of the mind.

 

Behold, the deep sleep in which there is no notion of being this or

that. Yet `I am' remains. And behold the eternal now. Memory seems to

being things to the present out of the past, but all that happens

does happen in the present only. It is only in the timeless now that

phenomena manifest themselves. Thus, time and causality do not apply

in reality. I am prior to the world, body and mind. I am the sphere

in which they appear and disappear. I am the source of them all, the

universal power by which the world with its bewildering diversity

becomes manifest.

 

In spite of its primevality, however, the sense of `I am' is not the

Highest. It is not the Absolute. The sense, or taste of `I am-ness'

is not absolutely beyond time. Being the essence of the five

elements, it, in a way, depends upon the world. It arises from the

body, which, in its turn, is built by food, consisting of the

elements. It disappears when the body dies, like the spark

extinguishes when the incense stick burns out. When pure awareness is

attained, no need exists any more, not even for `I am', which is but

a useful pointer, a direction-indicator towards the Absolute. The

awareness `I am' then easily ceases. What prevails is that which

cannot be described, that which is beyond words. It is this `state'

which is most real, a state of pure potentiality, which is prior to

everything. The `I am' and the universe are mere reflections of it.

It is this reality which a jnani has realised.

 

The best that you can do is listen attentively to the jnani -- of

whom Sri Nisargadatta is a living example -- and to trust and believe

him. By such listening you will realise that his reality is your

reality. He helps you in seeing the nature of the world and of the `I

am'. He urges you to study the workings of the body and the mind with

solemn and intense concentration, to recognise that you are neither

of them and to cast them off. He suggests that you return again and

again to `I am' until it is your only abode, outside of which nothing

exists; until the ego as a limitation of `I am', has disappeared. It

is then that the highest realisation will just happen effortlessly.

 

Mark the words of the jnani, which cut across all concepts and

dogmas. Maharaj says: " until once becomes self-realised, attains to

knowledge of the self, transcends the self, until then, all these

cock-and-bull stories are provided, all these concepts. " Yes, they

are concepts, even `I am' is, but surely there are no concepts more

precious. It is for the seeker to regard them with the utmost

seriousness, because they indicate the Highest Reality. No better

concepts are available to shed all concepts.

 

I am thankful to Sudhakar S. Dikshit, the editor, for inviting me to

write the Foreword to this new edition of I AM THAT and thus giving

me an opportunity to pay my homage to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who

has expounded highest knowledge in the simplest, clearest and the

most convincing words.

 

Douwe Tiemersma

Philosophical Faculty

Erasmus Universiteit

Rotterdam, Holland

 

June, 1981

 

this may be of some interest and hoping that that's so...bob