I
AM
THAT
Talks with
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The real does not die, the unreal never lived.
Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body falling off like a discarded garment.
The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death.
The body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long.
I
AM
THAT
Talks with
SRI NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ
Translated
from the Marathi taperecordings by
MAURICE FRYDMAN
Revised and edited by
SUDHAKAR S. DIKSHIT
THE ACORN PRESS
Durham, North Carolina
Copyright © 1973 by Nisargadatta Maharaj
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Originally published by Chetana Pvt. Ltd., Bombay, India, 1973, 3d ed.
1981, reprinted 1983. Published by arrangement with Chetana in the U.S.A. and Canada by The Acorn Press, P.O. Box 4007, Duke Station, Durham, North Carolina . Published in hardcover 1982, reprinted 1984,1985, 1986.
First American Paperback 1988
Third printing 1992
ISBN: 0-89385-022-0
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 81-66800
Photographs by Jitendra Arya
Printed in the United States of America
That in whom reside all beings and who resides in all beings, who is the giver of grace to all, the Supreme Soul of the
universe, the limitless being — I am that.
Amritbindu Upanishad
That which permeates all, which
nothing transcends and which, like the universal space around us, fills
everything completely from within and
without, that Supreme non-dual Brahman
— that thou art.
Sankaracharya
The seeker is he who is in search of himself.
Give up all questions except one: ‘Who am I?’ After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The ‘I am’ is certain. The ‘I am this’ is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
To know what you are, you must first
investigate and know what you are not.
Discover all that you are not — body,
feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that —
nothing, concrete or abstract, which you
perceive can be you. The very act of
perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive.
The clearer you understand that on the level of mind you can be described in negative
terms only, the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
○
Foreword
That there should be yet another edition 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 agnosti-cism, 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.
viii
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 the 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 realize 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 con-ix
sciousness, 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. Realize 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 bring 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 causation 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 realized.
The best that you can do is to listen attentively to the jnani — of whom Sri Nisargadatta is a living example — and to trust and believe him. By such listening you will realize 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 recognize 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. lt is then that the highest realization will just happen effortlessly.
x
Mark the words of the jnani, which cut across all concepts and dogmas. Maharaj says: “Until one becomes self-realized, 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.
Philosophical Faculty
DouweTiemersma
Erasmus Universiteit
Rotterdam, Holland
June,1981
* Evening Talk. October 2, 1979, recorded by Josef Nauwelaerts of Antverp. Belgium.
○
Who is Nisargadatta Maharaj?
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 has 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 xii
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 to 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 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 an 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
* See Appendix II
xiii
appeared to be worthless compared to it. He had attained self-realization.
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 note 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.
○
Translator’s Note
I met Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj some years back and was impressed with the spontaneous simplicity of his appearance and behaviour and his deep and genuine earnestness in expounding his experience.
However humble and difficult to discover his little tenement in the backlanes of Bombay, many have found their way there. Most of them are Indians, conversing freely in their native language, but there were also many foreigners who needed a translator.
Whenever I was present the task would fall to me. Many of the questions put and answers given were so interesting and significant that a tape-recorder was brought in. While most of the tapes were of the regular Marathi-English variety, some were polyglot scrambles of several Indian and European languages.
Later, each tape was deciphered and translated into English.
It was not easy to translate verbatim and at the same time avoid tedious repetitions and reiterations. It is hoped that the present translation of the tape-recordings will not reduce the impact of this clear-minded, generous and in many ways an unusual human being.
A Marathi version of these talks, verified by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj himself, has been separately published.
Bombay,
Maurice Frydman
October 16, 1973
Translator
○
Editor’s Note
The present edition of I AM THAT is a revised and re-edited version of the 101 talks that appeared in two volumes in earlier editions. Not only the matter has now been re-set in a more readable typeface and with chapter headings, but new pictures of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj have been included and the appen-dices contain some hitherto unpublished valuable material.
I draw special attention of the reader to the contribution entitled
‘Nisarga Yoga’ (Appendix I), in which my esteemed friend, the late Maurice Frydman, has succinctly presented the teaching of Maharaj. Simplicity and humility are the keynotes of his teachings, as Maurice observes. The Master does not propound any intellectual concept or doctrine. He does not put forward any pre-conditions before the seekers and is happy with them as they are. In fact Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj is peculiarly free from all disparagement and condemnation; the sinner and the saint are merely exchanging notes; the saint has sinned, the sinner can be sanctified. It is time that divides them; it is time that will bring them together. The teacher does not evaluate; his sole concern is with
‘suffering and the ending of suffering’. He knows from his personal and abiding experience that the roots of sorrow are in the mind and it is the mind that must be freed from its distorting and destructive habits. Of these the identification of the self with its projections is most fatal. By precept and example Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj shows a short-cut, a-logical but empirically sound. It operates, when understood.
Revising and editing of I AM THAT has been for me a pilgrimage to my inner self — at once ennobling and enlightening. I have done my work in a spirit of dedication, with great earnestness. I have treated the questions of every questioner as mine own questions and have imbibed the answers of the Master with a mind emptied of all it knew. However, in this process of what may be called a two-voiced meditation, it is possible that at places I xvi
may have failed in the cold-blooded punctiliousness about the syntax and punctuation, expected of an editor. For such lapses, if any, I seek forgiveness of the reader.
Before closing, I wish to express my heart-felt thanks to Professor Douwe Tiemersma of the Philosophical Faculty Erasmus.
Universiteit, Rotterdam, Holland for contributing a new Foreword to this edition. That he acceded to my request promptly makes me feel all the more grateful.
Bombay,
Sudhakar S. Dikshit
July 1981
Editor
○
Contents
V
XIII
4. Real World is Beyond the Mind
6. Meditation
7. The Mind
8. The Self Stands Beyond Mind
10. Witnessing
11. Awareness and Consciousness
13. The Supreme, the Mind and the Body
14. Appearances and the Reality
15. The Gnani
16. Desirelessness, the Highest Bliss
17. The Ever-present
18. To Know What you Are, Find What you Are Not
19. Reality lies in Objectivity
21. Who am I?
22. Life is Love and Love is Life
23. Discrimination leads to Detachment
xviii
24. God is the All-doer, the Gnani a Non-doer
25. Hold onto ‘I am’
27. The Beginningless Begins Forever
28. All Suffering is Born of Desire
29. Living is Life’s only Purpose