I Am That: A Modern Spiritual Classic

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

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 skepticism and agnosticism, leading to a fatuous way of living, engrossed in mere gross utilities of life, just consuming material goods. Sometimes, however, though rarely, skepticism gives rise to an intuition of a basic reality, more fimdamental than that of wcrds, religions or philosophic systems. Strangely, it is a positive aspect of skepticism. It was in such a state of skepticism, 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 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 ‘objeEtive’, or extraneous entitles, 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 amness’ 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 selfj, and being my self is all that there is. Everything that exists, exists as my selL 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 amness’ 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. It is then that the highest realization will just happen effortlessly.

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 conyindng words.

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 his parents named him Marufi.

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 by 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 hi 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 derk in an office, but resigned the job in4isgust. He then took to petty trading as a haberdasher and started a shop for selling children’s clothes, tobaccG 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 Navanath 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 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 warmhearted 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.

P.S. Nisargadatta Maharaj was born on Saturday 17th april 1897, and passed away on Tuesday 8th September 1981 at the age of 84. A memorial in his honour is built at Nisarga Co-op. Housing Society, C Wing, Patharewadi, Dahisar West, Mumbai 400 068, India.

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.

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 reset in a more readable typeface and with chapter headings, but new pictures of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj have been included and the appendices contain some hitherto unpublished valuable material.

I draw special attention of the reader to the contribution entitled ‘Nisarga Yoga’ (Appendix 1), 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 preconditions 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 exthanging 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 shortcut, 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 my own questions and have imbibed the answers of the Master with a mind emptied of all it knew. Howevez., in this process of what may be called a two-voiced meditation, it is possible that at places 1 may have failed in the cold-blooded punctiliousn 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 heartfelt thanks to Professor Douwe Tiemersma of the Philosophical Faculty Erasmus, Urtiversiteil Rotterdam, Holland for contributing a new Foreword to -this edition. That he acceeded to my request promptly makes me feel all the more grateful.

This collection of the timeless teaching of one of the greatest sages of India, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, regarded by many as a “modern spiritual classic” is a testament to the uniqueness of the seer’s , life and work. I Am That (now in its ninth printing) continues to draw new audiences and to enlighten anxious seekers for self-realization.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was a teacher who did not propound and ideology or religion but gently unwrapped the mystery of the self. His message is simple, direct and yet sublime.

I Am That preserves his dialogues with the followers who came from around the world seeking guidance in destroying false identities. The sage’s sole concern was with human suffering and the ending of suffering. It was his mission to guide the individual to an understanding of his true nature and the timelessness of being. He taught that mind must recognize and penetrate its own state of being, not “being this or that, here or there, then or now,”but just timeless being.

A simple man, Maharaj was a householder and petty store keeper in Bombay where he lived, and died in 1981 at the age of 84. He had not been educated formally but came to be respected and loved for his insights into the crux of human pain and the extraordinary lucidity of his direct discourse. Hundreds of diverse seekers travelled the globe and sought him out in his unpretentious home to hear him. To all of them he gave hope that “beyond the real experience is not the mind, but the self the light in which everything appears…the awareness in which everything happens.”

I Am That is a legacy from a unique teacher who helps the reader to a clearer understanding of himself as he comes to Maharaj again and again with the age old questions, “whence am I ?” who am I “ and “whither am I ” the listeners were never turned away from the humble abode of Maharaj then and are not turned away now.