Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: who were you before you were born?

Sri Nisargadatta

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Sometimes words can hit you like a hammer. When you read the words of Nisargadatta Maharaj with earnest and close attention it can turn your whole world upside down. The words have the ability to shatter everything that you'd always believed in. The mode of thinking is so strange, so novel and so weird (especially for us Westerners) that you can scarcely believe it is ever written down by a human maharaj

being. And yet you have the feeling that words were never more true than what you have read just now. Just reading one simple sentence from Nisargadatta Maharaj can change your life. It literally is a life shattering experience.

I will call this man 'the mystic with the hammer'. Far more than Friedrich Nietzche will he be remembered as having changed our way of perceiving and thinking about the world. This simple man who had no formal eduction whatsoever, this simple cigarette salesman from Mumbai, will one day be considered to be one of the greatest philosophers ever to have walked the earth.

you are not what you think

Nisargadatta Maharaj had the ability to always take a step further back in consciousness. He was a genius in taking the absolute position. From that absolute position there was no 'Nisargadatta' anymore, but, so to speak, only absolute Consciousness talking to relative consciousness. Everything personal was closely scrutinized and put aside as untrue. Only a universal stance was worth considering, because only universality could make a claim to truth. He always said that identification with the object was the source of all falsehood in the psyche and therefore of all misery. What did he mean by this 'identification with the object'?

Maharaj

Who are you? I'm a conscious person in a particular body, you say? But can that body that you call 'yours' live for one second without consciousness? Doesn't consciousness come first? Is it not a 'conditio sine qua non' for your body to exist? It seems that consciousness is your true identity and not your body. Your consciousness seems to be the vital cause for your body to exist. You cannot think or act without being conscious. Your body cannot perform its vital functions without your underlying consciousness to tell it how to perspire or how to digest. Take your consciousness away and your body won't work, as it happens when you die. So consciousness seems to be the substratum of your body.

But let's dive deeper into this. What about deep sleep? Or when you have a swoon or when you are dumbed by narcotics. In that state you aren't conscious anymore and yet you remained alive, as you inferred in retrospect. 'The whole night I wasn't there. I was fast asleep. Still now, waking up, I'm 'back again'. But this is absurd! I must have been there in deep sleep also, yet unaware. There must have been an 'I' also in the middle of the night.' So you agree that the feeling of 'I' is not dependent on the body nor on consciousness. In deep sleep there was no body nor was there consciousness. Yet you were there, alive. There must have been an 'I' all along.

So the real I is not your relative consciousness nor your body. In deep sleep they were suspended, yet you remained. So your I amounts to something like 'the feeling of being alive'. 'I am' you say to yourself, and this feeling of 'I am' is even there when you're not in the body or when unconscious, as in deep sleep. This 'amness' seems to be you true identity. Now Nisargadatta grasps our shoulder and looks us straight in the eyes and says: 'Always remain with this true identity! This is your real I. Do not for a single moment lose sight of this feeling of 'amness'. Divest your self of all other thoughts about your self. For they are all lies and false deductions.'

But how does it look like, this real I? How does it feel? Where am I to look? How can I realize being this real I? For it seems to be something different from what I conceive myself to be right now. Nisargadatta would only give negative answers when confronted with these questions. The 'I' is not such and such a thing, he said. It only is. Only being is its characteristic, or to be more precise, it is beyond being and non-being. It is a mere nothingness and not even that, for by now we have started to predicate it, and it may as well be concluded that it is everything at the same time. In deep meditation it can be experienced but only as a wide open space of deep emptiness and stillness. But not even that, for it is experienced to be so dynamic that it is fullness and completeness also. We can not know it. For it is the ultimate subject that can never be an object of thought or intuition. How could our eye see its self? We can only be it. Sink into it. Rest in it. But we can never know it.

This is the position the small child is in. His consciousness is a vast open space full of dynamics and possibilities. But his consciousness and his feeling of self have this great disadvantage of not letting maharaj

itself be known. In the beginning the child is totally satisfied and at ease with this unknowable self. For it is such a joy just to be and who wants to know, if being alone is fun enough? But then the mind with its rationality develops in his consciousness. The characteristic of the mind is that it wants to know. So it becomes dissatisfied with this unknowable self. It wants to put some labels on it, like it has done with everything else that came to mind. Now the first thing that comes to mind as being 'I' is the body because it seems in some way or another to be controlled by the self. So it is concluded that the body must be the self.

All kinds of feelings connected to the body, like pleasure and pain, satisfaction or frustration, fear or lust, seem so close to the feeling of I, that there must be a connexion between these feelings and the sense of self. Somehow I must have generated these feelings and if I have generated them, I must be the one responsible and in charge. These feelings have a grip on me. What else can I be than these feelings? Also in the mind all kinds of thoughts, images and representations enter consciousness, so exhilarating and exciting that it must be me generating these thoughts and representations. For what else am I? I must be something, mustn't I?

So the child starts to identify his self with these feelings, these thoughts and these representations. He loses sight of the true kernel of his life force and he mixes his subject up with the objects that enter his stream of consciousness. He is beguiled and fooled by mere objects in the space and time continuum. Only because the ultimate subject of his life escapes all objectivation and can not therefore be known.

the two mirrors

To understand this a little bit more let us imagine a dark room with two mirrors placed on opposite sides, facing each other. In between the two mirrors a lamp is placed. The light of the lamp makes it possible for the two mirrors to reflect each others images. In the beginning both mirrors were clean and empty. So both mirrors reflected only each others emptiness perfectly. But in the course of time the right mirror in the room somehow became all covered with dust. The dust settled more and more in the course of time. After the lapse of years the original right mirror couldn't be seen anymore, but was now covered with stains and dirt. Though the left mirror always stayed perfectly clean and empty, it now looked as if this left mirror also had become covered with dirt and stains. For it didn't do anymore than to reflect the image of the right mirror.

But then suddenly (after how many years?) the caretaker of the room entered. He saw the condition the right mirror was in. He right away took out his sponge and cleaned the right mirror. With contentment he now saw that half work done was all work done. For the left mirror wasn't in need of cleaning. mirror

It now reflected a perfectly clean and empty image of itself again. Cleaning one mirror was enough, he saw with a laugh.

Now the left mirror is your true Self. It always stays in its self perfectly clean, empty and unsullied. But the way it looks is conditioned by the state of the right mirror, the relative consciousness of the ego-self. If this relative consciousness is calm, empty and peaceful, without all kinds of stains covering up its natural being, then the true Self can reflect its true nature of an empty stainless mirror also.

Nisargadatta says that we cannot do anything to reach, to realize or the know the Left Mirror. It simply cannot be done with an act of the ego-self. Due to the fact that our true Self is of another dimension. The only thing we can do (and if we want to 'work' spiritually, let this be our sadhana, our religious path) is to clean our relative consciousness of the stains of all mental images, of all conceptualizations, of all judgments, of all feelings, in short of all the objects that enter our stream of consciousness, in order for the one true Mirror to reflect the right image and be its true Self again. So the religious path is a via negativa. It is a path of emptying out one's self of all objects of consciousness. 'Entledigung' as Meister Eckhart used to call it.

the unreality of the right mirror

But after realizing this Nisargadatta takes one last final step back in consciousness (as the genius he was) to reveal us the ultimate truth. For the fact is, he says, that in reality the right mirror does not exist. There is only one mirror, the left One. The existence of the right one is only an optical illusion. It looks like the god/Brahman has created numberless mirrors to reflect itself but they are only rays of reflection coming from Its self. In fact every mirror is the One itself.

For relative consciousness in the cosmos has no substantiality. It is a reflection that only lives in the time and space continuum for a short period of time, stretched out over a limited space. When its allotted time is over it dies and is again taken up into its Source, the One. It needs a definite body to manifest itself. It needs content of mind to keep up the illusion of its existence. Both relative consciousness and its body are mere illusions in time and space.

maharaj

But though an illusion, our consciousness serves a purpose. It's because of our soul that we can experience the One and also that the One can experience the soul, because, like we said, the Mirror can not see itself. Probably that's the reason that the One has created the manifest world, to be able to see Its self. So when we feel the energy, the love, bliss and the joy of the One it can only be in our relative consciousness. In the absolute position of truth there is only the deep stillness and emptiness of God. This is what we truly are.

seeing the false as false

It might seem that there are two selves, an absolute one and a relative, and that the absolute Self is witnessing the relative one. When we still live in the illusion of having a separate identity this having two selves is our reality. When we first start to meditate we slowly learn to be a witness to all the objects that enter the stream of our consciousness, that is: we learn to take more and more the position of our absolute I. This is probably a necessary step in losing the identification with our relative I (and so lose all identification with all of the objects in our consciousness). But Nisargadatta urges us to go on and to realize a higher state: to see that we are not divided in and against our selves. We are not in a psychic schism. Do we really think we have two 'I's'? Is it not our deepest experience that we are one and whole? One of the two must be our false 'I'. Which one? 'Make this question the question of your life', Nisargadatta says.

All it takes is seeing the false as false. It doesn't take time to have insight in which of the two 'I's' is the real one. All it needs is a quantum leap in your consciousness, an altering of Gestalt. See how your false 'I' always changes. See that it is conditioned by your consciousness and your body. That it is no more than a result of thought, place and time. Is there a personality, is there a definite individual, when we totally live in the present, when the past with its conditioning and the future with its hopes and anticipations fall away?

criticism: Nisargadatta is a mystic in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. To understand his point of view we must clearly see that Vedanta was a reaction against the strong formalistic ritualism of Vedic Hinduism. Before Vedanta reformulated the basic tenets of Hinduism, religion in India had deteriorated to a large extent into ritualism. People misinterpreted the Veda's. They thought that if they'd follow maharaj

some prescribed method or ritual, that it would automatically lead to the redemption and liberation of their souls, moksha. But this absent minded murmuring of prayers and dumb-headed bringing of offers didn't lead to anything. Only to more stupidity.

Vedanta protested against this ritualism. They thought it was an insult at religion. Vedanta said that moksha could only be ensured if we would gain a deep insight into the Truth (as summarized above). We have to really understand, right to the deepest layers of our soul, what we truly are and what the world is. Without this deep insight, which is more like an intuition of the soul than mere mental knowledge, we cannot realize the deepest truth in our lives and become liberated. This path of insight and understanding was called jnana-yoga. A full accomplished yogi in this tradition was called a jnani.

But in my view Vedanta is an antithesis and not a synthesis. It overstates its case in depreciating and writing off all methods and paths for reaching enlightenment. Most Vedantists teach us that there is no path, that there is no method to follow, because every person is already enlightened and has always been so. But this leads to some frustration, because this 'being already enlightened' is only true from an enlightened perspective, from an absolute stance, ex specie aeternitatis. But if we ask any average person in the street if he feels enlightened, he will answer 'far from'.

So what happened was this: people flocked in thousands to the tenement apartment of Nisargadatta in Mumbai and got the Vedantic message that there really was no method to reach anything. For the 'I' who wants to reach for enlightenment is imaginary in the first place. Just get rid of this false 'I'. But then people said that they would gladly accept the truth and deep wisdom of his philosophy and feel it them selves all the time. But how do we get rid of this false 'I', which is bugging us from early in the morning till late at night? How can I be like you, so full of love and deep wisdom? But then he would answer 'who wants to get rid of what?' And then the debate got frustrated into vicious circles.

For what Nisargadatta failed to tell his audience was that we can only see our true identity with the help of our relative consciousness. This relative consciousness of ours is closely connected to the body. Body and consciousness are mutually dependent and influence each others condition. So if the body is tensed and all stressed up, then our mind is also full of negative and stressed thoughts. Also vice versa: if we think from memory about bad events in the past, then our body becomes stressed, anxious and painful. So thoughts and emotions are conditioned by the state our body is in and the way our body feels is conditioned by the thoughts and emotions we have.

Now when someone for the first time goes on a search for liberation, to put an end to all of his sufferings, he is bound to be in the worst psychological and physiological shape possible. Otherwise there would not be need for him to find a solution to his problems. So his body and his physical nervous maharaj

system suffer from the stress of a life time. In this shape it is impossible to see our true identity. We might assent to it intellectually. Our intuition might probably see the deep truth of the spiritual words of Nisargadatta, but we fail to realize it. The shape of our nervous system is conditioning our consciousness. Every time it becomes all covered up with dust and stains, even if we've cleaned it for a couple of minutes or so. In this condition we will never be able to have an adequate reflection of our true identity.

So the body and the mind first have to cool down and become silent and peaceful. This cannot happen in a split second, as many Vedantists want us to believe. Why not? This is because our body is in time. The body needs time to destress itself first. It cannot be released of its tensions in a fortnight. We are here talking about tensions built up in years. So it will take some time, sometimes even considerable years. And apart from intellectual and intuitive insight into the truth, meditation must do the job, because meditation is a physical technique to make the nervous system healthy and relaxed again. Then, with a healthy and peaceful body, are we finally able to realize our true identity (though we may see it on forehand). I have written more elaborately about this topic in the physical aspects of enlightenment.

So other mystical traditions talk of stages of mystical development, as for instant Christian mysticism. I think these traditions are right. Before we can reach to the peak of Nisargadatta's non-duality, we first have to climb some lower mountains. No mountaineer has begun his career with conquering the Mount Everest. The cleaning of the mirror is a process and it requires training. We have to follow some paths to be able to do it. On the via purgativa (see the Mystic Life) we have to encounter the Dark Night of the soul first. Before we can reach the non-dual stage of no-self, we first have to have the unio mystica of the via unitiva. All these stages have been mapped out by the mystics and I think they were right. For the loss of self is a process that spreads itself out over the years. It is the spiritual growth of a life time. Intellectual understanding is not enough.

But given this criticism we must never forget that Nisargadatta truly was a Mount Everest among men. He spoke to us from the highest non-dual and absolute position a human being can ever attain. His mirror was so cleaned that he purely reflected the love and wisdom of the god/Brahman. To be accurate, due to constant identification with our real I, his right mirror had almost vanished completely. He was one of those few people who already in this life realized what most of us only realize after death. With this attainment he had become one of the gods among men.

Arnhem August 2004

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was born in Mumbai (Bombay) in March, 1897. His parents, who gave him the name Maruti, had a small farm at the village of Kandalgaon in Ratnagiri district in Mahrashtra.

Maruti's father died when the boy was eighteen, leaving behind his wife and six children. Maruti and his older brother left the farm to look for work in Mumbai. After a brief stint as a clerk, Maruti opened a shop selling children's clothes, tobacco, and leaf-rolled cigarettes, called beedies, which are popular in India. The shop was modestly successful and Maruti married in 1924. A son and three daughters soon followed.

When Maruti was 34, a friend of his, Yashwantrao Baagkar, introduced him to his guru, Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj, the head of the Inchegeri branch of the Navanath Sampradaya. The guru gave a mantra and some instructions to Maruti and died soon after. Sri Nisargadatta later recalled:

"My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense 'I am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am'. It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked!"

Nisargadatta's guru, Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj

Within three years, Maruti realized himself and took the new name Nisargadatta. He became a saddhu and walked barefoot to the Himalayas, but eventually returned to Mumbai where he lived for the rest of his life, working as a cigarette vendor and giving religious instruction in his home.

The success of I Am That, first published in English translation in 1973, made him internationally famous and brought many Western devotees to the tenement apartment where he gave satsangs.

At the time of his death in 1981 he was his guru's successor as the head of the Inchegari branch of the Navanath Sampradaya. He was 84 years old.

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