If we are not shaking in our boots, we are not facing truth. Truth has no interest in our love life, financial health or emotional stability. More often than not, these things are hindrances in her ability to shake us out of our sleepwalking. If we are not questioning on a daily level, our spiritual practice is worthless. Every single one of us is an expert liar. We must not underestimate our ability to fool our selves and every one around us. Political, economic or environmental action with out internal knowledge is useless. Internal awareness with out external action is insubstantial.

The you that is reading this is dreaming. Be firm in your commitment to get out of your slumber. Every thing and every one around us is committed to lulling us back to sleep. The road to awakening is a narrow path and no one can walk it for us. The best we can hope for is meeting kindred spirits who are finding and walking their own paths. We have to grow, prepare and eat the food. It is not some pre packaged processed food to be purchased and consumed. What sustains another might poison you.

We have to watch our lies. If our lips are moving with out conscious and deliberate intent, we are most likely lying. No thing outside of us will ever fill us. Having doubts, being engaged in questioning all and keeping an open and elastic mind are crucial. Truth is not pleasant nor friendly to our every day life. Look around and look at the world that we have created and continue to create. When not examined, our unconscious will ruin us. When integrated, it will elevate and empower us. That takes tremendous courage, to offer up our idealized self image at the alter of our true nature. “The Secret” is that there is no secret. These misguided teachings are embraced by our ego to solidify its position instead of having to admit that it is powerless and impermanent. Only we can awaken our selves. That takes hard, hard work. Any one who tells us otherwise is lying.

Wake up and live.

There can only be spiritual progress, if we confront our shadow, that part of the Soul which our ego does not want to see and acknowledge. This applies to nations as well as individuals. Iranian-born Abdi Assadi is a ruthless “exposer” of the shadow. The British musician Sting called his book “Shadows on the path” “a word-bomb placed underneath the altar of the church of spiritual complacency”. Assadi grew up in Pakistan and Nigeria, today he lives as a healer in New York. Wolf Schneider met him in Munich in April and after that conducted the following interview with him via E-mail.

WS: You live in New York. In April this year you came to Germany (Was it for the first time?) and met some people from the ‘Growth Movement’ (be they spiritually or therapeutically oriented). What difference do you see between people in the USA and Europe (or specifically Germany) in how they relate to the issues of human growth?

AA:I had visited Germany before, having been there to check out Ramesh Balsekar and Mother Meera in the 90s. This time I did get to visit many different cities in the North and South and talk to different people in the Growth Movement as you put it. There is a large difference between Germany and the US, especially the receptivity of people to the actual machinations of the human shadow which is what I was talking about. I remember my first night giving a talk in Hamburg being blocks away from a bombed out church that was left that way as a reminder of the horrors of WWII. Same when I was in Berlin and the Holocaust memorial as well as a train station that was used to transfer people to the concentration camps. The collective unconscious of Germany is fresh with what happens when the unconscious is repressed. Also, Germany is an old country, it has been around in different forms for many years. There is a realism there that does not really exist in the US or at best exists only on the fringe.

The US is a new country, only several hundred years old. And a place where the pilgrim settlers were puritans and that fact still informs the culture. The shadow is hugely suppressed here and there is a Mickey Mouse aspect to how a lot of the culture runs. We still have not truly come to terms with the fact that this country was built on the back of slaves, that our foreign policy has led and continues to lead to the murder of millions of people world wide. We still run on the idea that we are number one even though we have two million people in prison, that forty million of our fellow citizens are so poor as to need food stamps, that we are in debt to our eyeballs. The corporate media in the US has the population by the balls and there is not a lot of variation to allow people to get off the main topics dictated by these powers. The spiritual movement is also effected by that. The “feel good, every thing is fine, get yours” narcissistic ideology permeates a lot of the movement here. Of course there are elements that have kept away from that but they are not as prevalent as the “positive thinking” aspect of it. Spirituality and human growth has become a commodity to be purchased and consumed, just as all other products.

WS: Spirituality as a commodity that can be purchased and consumed, that aspect of it can be felt in Germany as well, hardly any less than in the States. Our globalized economy seems to prefer, if not dictate forms of spirituality, religion, worship which fit well into it and thus create a way of spiritual being which is very shallow.

AA: I am sure you are right in that the globalization process that is making corporations salivate is making such things uniform. At the same time I do feel there is a difference. When I was in Germany, your defense minister Schneider got crucified and had to resign over plagiarism of his doctorate work. In the US the crooks that brought us into this financial melt down all have their jobs and no one held accountable. In Germany people were up in arms over nuclear reactors due to what happened in Japan. In the US there was barely a whimper. In Germany there has been some recognition of what your past has been. In the US we still scream we are number one as our economy crumbles. These are symptoms of a culture whose shadow is profoundly repressed.

WS: Thank you for acknowledging that! I think you are right in that observation that we Germans are less arrogant concerning the value of our nation and our national character. We have confronted the horrible aspects of our past and our national character more than other nations. Your book is about shadow work: Individuals have to do it, but also nations have to do it. The US has to do it, Japan has to do it, for sure also China. Still even in Germany I am not too optimistic about the depth of our shadow work. I remember well how many decades it took for my parents to confront their Nazi past, how long it took for me, and I see the young generation rather nonchalant about it. I think we now have to do our shadow work as a planetary civilization. That means for instance – to pick out only two points among many others: confronting what we have done with our biotope which did support us so far but is not likely to do that so easily in the future; and our susceptibility to religious (or political) fundamentalism.

AA: That is an important point you bring up: absolutely nations have to look at their shadow and then globally. But then it comes right back to the individual. All nations have had and continue to have huge shadows. In the US the shadow has been projected on a rotating level from the Native Indians we wiped out to get this land, to the African we enslaved to cultivate the land and build it, then the Chinese, Irish and Italian immigrants on to Germans and Japanese during WWII and now the Arabs. And by no means is this a uniquely American trait, just that we have had so many migrants here that it has spread across all races. One can look at the frighteningly racist cartoons printed over the last several hundred years to get a clear picture of the phenomenon of shadow projection: of projecting unresolved aspects of one self unto others. To your point, this is a global phenomena but it can only be healed on an individual basis. Bottom up really, not the other way. And yes, one only needs to look at the nature of our planet to realize that we still have lots of work to do. We are at the point were we can not drink the water or eat the food or breathe the air and yet most of us are merrily along our lives. Nature is starting to shake us out of our slumber though.

WS: Okay, let’s now go to the individual: The spiritual seeker as he or she quite often is called wants to transform his ego by confronting the inner demons, doing the mandatory shadow work, going through the dark night of the soul, but …. quite often is trapped by a narcissistic guru or therapist, lands in a circle of the »chosen few« or with a mantra or any other method miraculously surpassing all that has hitherto been practiced by humans. How then to get out of that trap?

AA: Let me preface by saying that there are some living enlightened teachers that correctly point out that as long as the ego is present, one is pretty much screwed when it comes to spiritual work. What they mean is that the ego is not and can not be interested in any thing besides its own propagation, its own interests. This however can be misunderstood as meaning that we are helpless and there is nothing to do unless awakening hits us in the head. And nothing could be further from the truth. There is striving involved in awakening even though striving has to be given up at some point since it is the “I” that is striving. But we can be deadly “I”s or more benign “I”s and the planet needs more of the later. All things that fortify the deadly “I” are things that culture tends to glorify: organized religion, nationalism and pretty much all other “isms” since they strengthen instead of weaken the sense of “I”.

To your point, those steps along the way that you correctly describe is the ego playing hide and seek but the ego does get its wall whacked open here and there. Even the narcissistic guru or therapist has its place in pointing up towards our self. The wool can only be pulled over our eyes for so long. In my experience, all steps have served a purpose and have mirrored back a place that needed healing with in my self. And grace is a real thing, there is an intelligence in this plane that takes no prisoners when a part of us says “I want to wake up”. It answers immediately much to the surprise of the ego that was just bluffing.

The only way to get out of the trap that you describe is to first get our ass kicked so bad that we get humble enough to realize there is a problem. When we throw our hands up is when the real dying starts. There is a phenomena that is taking place right now were some of us are having glimpses of the whole with out having to go through the process that others of us had to go through before. It seems that Gaia in her wisdom is pushing us to the next level of evolution by awakening us. So that trap might not even be an issue real soon as the collective starts awakening.

WS: I have felt drawn this way and that between believing that “All is getting better every day; we are experiencing a shift in consciousness of historical dimensions” and “Oh shit, look at Fukushima, the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the widening gap between rich and poor, the destruction of nature”. Which in a way leads to the decision: Do I want to be optimist or pessimist. And each time I have decided to remain optimistic, “for reasons of mental health” – my health – and because as an optimist I am more inclined to work for he good outcome.

As to how much spiritual awakening is happening or how much spiritual self deceit: I see there is an explosion of interest in spiritual matters, also some increase in the dedication put to it and the depth of self inquiry, but there is also a huge increase in pretense as to what is spiritual. There is spiritual jargon flooding the various spiritual subcultures that has taken in a number of celebrities and is diffusing down the social strata and infecting the masses. On one hand that is opening doors to true understanding – occasionally. On the other hand it deceives, because it is only as if. It may still the hunger for truth for a while but without really nourishing.

AA: I know what you mean, the dance between “there finally seems to some light at the end of the tunnel” and “oh boy, we are screwed”. Of course, from the view point of the ego, we are always screwed. It will never turn out well for the ego, even in the best case scenario (which is rare) where we escape serious suffering. We, the ego, will lose all that is dear in the end. In the realm of the ego, only a fool would be optimistic. And in the awakened realm, there is no attachment so there is neither pessimism nor optimism as the dream nature of this realm is forcefully apparent. All just is. I certainly vote for a sweet dream instead of a nightmare but that is a collective decision which will take some softening of our collective egos yet. The Nisargadatta line comes to mind here: “When you realize you are everything, that is love; when you realize you are nothing, that is wisdom”.

But I feel you are talking about the bigger you when you say “Do I want to be pessimistic or optimistic”. Certainly freaking out about the world doesn’t help the situation. Personally, I keep informed about the world around me but as soon as my heart starts shutting down and division takes over in terms of fear or anger, I pull back into connecting with center. We have been through plagues and disasters that wiped out a major portion of humanity. Somehow we forget that we are impermanent. That alone is a powerful teacher. This teetering feeling of all these disasters is a bitter but healing medicine for the ego that feels it is solid. And of course, as Westerners we have been more fortunate than half of the world that has been living on a couple of dollars a day, is starving, dying of thirst, demolished by war etc.

The light and dark always dance together in this realm, that is its nature. As much awakening that is happening, there will be an equal amount of the pseudo ego infused energy with it. That is how it always is. I do see that people are getting a bit more wise but as a healer for a quarter century I have learned to never underestimate people’s attachment to their ego and all the suffering that entails. And hence our communal suffering. Our egos will do their best to the very end to as you beautifully put it “hunger for truth with out nourishing”. There is a manic sense to that kind of seeking though, a falseness that is more apparent than before. That is what I am seeing any way. The external calamities are fully in effect internally in people as well. They are one and the same on one level. There is a desperation that is palpable, in New York any ways. Ultimately it goes back to the fact that all we can do is do our own work. Honestly, humbly and thoroughly.

One last thing I did want to say room permitting. What I see as a big problem in our seeking spiritual knowledge is our confusion between the phenomenal and the absolute. The big gurus like Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta really were not concerned with phenomenal issues like relationships, how to make a right living, wars etc. They always pointed to the absolute, our true nature. Once in a while they would say something like “you idiots, all your problems are because of your selfishness which is your ego-centric desires”. That is also true of some of the modern gurus. Then there are other teachers that are focusing on the phenomenal but are not really aware of the absolute or are so only in theory and not direct experience. You can tell by the way they peddle experiences, phenomena, getting high etc. Of course both are valid, it is essential to know your true nature and also wonderful to not betray one self in love or work. However they are completely separate issues. I loved your idea of esoteric cabaret, how it attempts to bring the joy of both together. I believe it to be a noble endeavor to have a fulfilling life while one works towards awakening. This is what us Westerners can bring to the table, but it needs to be done consciously otherwise it will be another big mess. This is where one has to be aware of what the guru is offering. Unless one is totally fed up with life and has burned all desire (rare and unlikely), then one needs to be clear why one is following a specific guru. Our projection of the need for parental perfection on any teacher is where the shadow hides and bites us in the ass. The more clear we are about our own intent, the less likely for us to fall into that trap. Any ways, falling into that trap is also part and parcel of waking up. I have learned as much from the betrayals of my own teachers as I have from their clarity. Alas all are pointers back to our Self.

I felt a pain in my heart for the man, for all those around me and for myself. The tightening feeling in my chest was due to the fact of how far we all can stray from our authentic selves. We travel that distance to avoid emotional pain and the feelings of anxiety that pervade our experience in this realm. I thought of all the times in my own life when I have hidden under someone else’s banner instead of facing my internal demons. All the -isms and the -ists, from Judaism and Buddhism to Taoism and Jainism–what do we really intend when we make those allegiances? Labels can be and often are a shallow and unexamined definition of what makes us whole. Is the experience of one teacher tens, hundreds or thousands of years ago enough to define us, us unique souls who don’t share a single fingerprint? In my own life, I have learned to appreciate and learn from all these great and ancient traditions while tending to my own map as revealed to me in my own psyche and heart.

I believe the purpose of a healthy path is to bring us closer to our own true nature. Too often I have unconsciously misused teachings as a veil to hide behind rather than as a cleaning rag to dust off my mind and heart. I have rattled off a passage from some scripture when the moment would have been better met through an act of vulnerability, introspection or just remaining in the unknown. We all have a gift to share with ourselves and others that only comes about by us being authentic to who we are. In fact, that is our gift to the world: consciously manifesting our own true nature, with curiosity, awareness and compassion.

The same walk for over a decade and something new every day. Yet the
witness, this old friend who watches through my eyes and smells through
my nose, who lives within and beyond this single human specimen, is strangely
the same. What if I had died last night and I am in a bardo state, my spirit walking
out of my apartment out of habit? I chuckle, feel my feet and drop my breath. I
take solace in the fact that in the river of life this city street carries, my awareness
of this witness is all I have. Thirty three years walking these New York City streets,
the teenage boy and the middle aged man, walking step in step.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was born in a village south of Mumbai (Bombay) in 1897 on Hanuman’s birthday. In honor of this Hindu monkey deity of strength and power, he was given the name of Maruti. His father was a servant whom with time purchased some land and became a farmer. Maruti lived and worked on this land until 1915 when upon the death of his father he followed his oldest brother to Mumbai to help support his siblings and mother. His early years there started as an office clerk but soon gave way to his opening of a tobacco shop. This enterprise soon became prosperous and led to him operating six such shops. In 1924 he married Sumatibai with whom he fathered three daughters and a son.

He was a deeply religious man and kept in the company of fellow truth seekers. One such man was a friend named Yashwantrao Bagkar who introduced him at age 34 to Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj (1888-1936). This realized master, a contemporary of Sri Ramana Maharshi and a disciple of Bhausaheb Maharaj, was an adherent of the Advaitic (non-duality) school. His specific teaching for realization of Reality was Vihangam Marg, or the bird’s way. The basic premise of this path is that ignorance of one’s true nature comes from the constant repetition of the false through out life. This hypnosis can be reversed by constant practice of contemplation of truth as heard from the master. This constant mulling over, just like a bird flies from one branch to another, is a fast and short way of remembrance.

Maruti took Sri Siddharameshwar as his teacher and was given a mantra and some teachings. Despite the passing of his teacher soon after their meeting, Maruti devoted himself to serious and deep practice. He abandoned his family and business for a time after the death of his teacher and started wandering the Himalayas as a sadhu. He had a chance encounter with a fellow aspirant who talked him into the importance of going back to his life and practicing within that structure as opposed to being a wandering seeker. He took this to heart and returned to Mumbai to find none but one of his tobacco shops still thriving. This he found sufficient for his meager needs and built a tiny room on top of his apartment in the slums of Mumbai where he would spend all his spare time in contemplation.

In a short span of three years from the time of meeting his teacher he attained Realization at age 37. Of this time he said: “My guru told me you are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense “I Am”. Find your real self. I obeyed him because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence and what a difference it made. It took me only three years to realize my true nature. My guru died soon after I met him but it made no difference.

Maruti took on the name Nisargadatta Maharaj at this time which translates into the one who dwells in the natural state beyond manifestation. At this time he started satsangs and dispensing spiritual instructions from his tenement apartment. With the publication in English of his book “I Am That” he became know to a generation of international visitors who streamed into his presence seeking enlightenment. Translated from Marathi tape recordings by Maurice Frydman, a devotee of Ramana Maharshi, “I Am That” is a gold mine of pointers for the spiritual aspirant, a beacon of remembrance in a tomb of worldly forgetfulness. Every page contains a nugget of truth that shakes one’s anesthetized sense of Self awake from its worldly slumber. Transcribed in a question and answer format, all seeker’s questions from the worldly to the esoteric are squarely answered.

Nisargadatta’s teachings are classic Advaita Vedanta since he constantly emphasizes that there is nothing to seek, that we already are the Self. “You can not find what you have not lost” and“you are not a person” summarize this viewpoint. It is a skewed attention that has us feeling disconnected from reality: “we miss the real by lack of attention and create the unreal by excess of imagination”. He does not quote scripture nor holy books. His literacy was modest at best and he never read the Vedas. And yet the explosive force, simplicity and clarity of his words are astounding.

He taught that we need to “cease being fascinated by the content of your consciousness” and that “whatever pleases you, holds you back”. On the state of the world in troubled times he commented: “callous selfishness is the root of evil” and “it is selfishness, due to self- identification with the body, that is the main problem and the cause of all other problems”. He taught that “the world is the abode of desires and fears; you can not find peace in it”. “For peace you must go beyond the world”. The solution to this problem is to be “passionately dispassionate” since “it is through desire that you have created the world with its pains and pleasures”.

This is to be done by looking at our mind dispassionately in order to calm it. “When the mind is quiet, you can go beyond it. Do not keep it busy all the time. Stop it – and just be. A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet”.

It is from this place of quiet mind that one can grasp the “I Am”, the awareness beyond the mind and its limitations, the field in which all things happen. He states that “beyond the real experience is not the mind, but the Self, the light in which everything appears… the awareness in which everything happens”.

This “I Am” which is the state prior to and contains the body and mind is not the final state. The Absolute or pure Awareness and its attainment is the final state which transcends the “I Am” state. This indescribable “state” is the place from which the great masters like Nisargadatta Maharaj reach into the phenomenal dream world and nudge us awake.

On a final note let us turn our attention to an observation that he had for us westerners. “It is very often so with Americans and Europeans. After a stretch of sadhana they become teachers of Yoga, marry, write books – anything except keeping quiet and turning their energies within, to find the source of the inexhaustible power and learn the art of keeping it under control”.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj abandoned the physical body in 1981 at age 84.

http://www.namarupa.org/magazine/nr06.php

This awakening led to his abandonment of family and material possessions in Madurai within several months and pilgrimage to the holy mountain of Arunachala. Located in southern India and rising from the foothill town of Trivulanamai, this mountain is considered as the manifestation of Lord Shiva in the hindu tradition. His taking up residence here was due to the fact that from youth he had always associated the name Arunachala with the divine without ever knowing that it was an actual place. Upon the realization of its reality; a place which he credited with the powers that led to his Self realization; he took up residence there permanently until the demise of his physical body.

The name Bhagavan (Lord) Sri (Honorable) Ramana (shortened version of his birth name) Maharshi (great seer) was given to him by the great ascetic Vasishta Ganapathi Muni during his early years in Arunachala. During these years his life was conducted in total silence and absorption in the Absolute and hence a severe neglect of the physical body. This was followed by a period of silent teaching mostly through the emanation of spiritual energy and finally through verbal communication in a humble ashram that was built for him by his devotees. The ashram Sri Ramanasramam has been expanded and still exists today where tens of thousands of people from the world make the pilgrimage annually to benefit from the ever present energy as any attendee can attest.

Sri Ramana reiterated through out his teachings that being open to and immersed in his silent presence and its stilling effects on the mind was the most direct path to Awakening and that verbal instruction was for those who could not access that space. His Advaitic (non-dualistic) teaching can be summed up as the fact that consciousness or pure Being is all that exists, all else is non existent. And that Awakening involves only needing to remember this non-personal, ever present awareness he named the Self (as opposed to the ego or personal self) not discovering or attaining some new experience. It is the ego which is a false projection of the mind which obstructs the direct experience of this true nature. It is not a matter of seeking or acquiring something new but remembering the true nature of things. He likened the experience to looking all over for a misplaced piece of jewelry until realizing that it has been around our neck all along. We are that we seek and that “the Absolute Consciousness alone is our real nature”.

His technique in helping seekers remember they already are this Supreme Self or Atman was Vicahra (Self-Inquiry). This process involves seeking the source of the ego as the “I-thought” through asking the question “Who am I?”. He stated that “one destroys the ego by seeking its identity” and since “the ego has no real existence, it will automatically vanish, and Reality will shine by itself in all its glory”. This he called the “direct method”. It is interesting to note that he differentiated between dhyana (meditation) and vicahra by stating that the latter destroys the ego by revealing its lack of reality while the first, although initially useful, can only succeed in quieting the mind temporarily. The mind will always erupt and assert the ego as real.

Sri Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi was the personal incarnation of what we westerners consider a guru. A humble, kind and just man with no possessions but a loin cloth, a metal water jug and a walking stick. He revealed his true grasp of the inherent oneness of all phenomena by his even handed treatment of all sentient beings whether humans of all social ranks, animals or plants. His concern for the welfare of animals and plants around him are specially moving. He worked hand in hand with devotees in attending to the tens of thousands of seekers who poured in over the years for darshan, never asking nor accepting preferential treatment. He did not even have a separate living quarters. For most of his life he resided in the same hall where he received visitors and conducted his teaching.

He was diagnosed with malignant cancer in his arm one year prior to his death. He constantly reminded the devotees that if they had listened to his teachings there was no need for grieving. That nothing is lost by death except for the body, one was not born and hence can not die. When begged to stay alive and not leave this realm, he would reply:
“Where could I go? I am here”. Upon his death in the eve of April 14, 1950, an enormous star we seen by all present slowly passing over the peak of Arunachala.

http://www.namarupa.org/magazine/nr02.php

You might have come across his name on the cover of the classic giant I Am That. He was the man who tape recorded conversations in the Marathi dialect with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and then translated and pushed to publish the book. What you might not know is that he carried out that deed late in his life after five decades of service to India directly and to the world of spiritual seekers at large. The people that he came across and was in deep relationship with included J. Krishnamurti, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi besides Maharaj. Furthermore, he was also involved with the liberation of India from English rule in the state of Aundh by writing the constitution there as well as being active in the villages of the state. Later on, he spent years pushing the Indian government for and receiving land and money to create the settlements where thousands of uprooted Tibetans escaped the Chinese invasion.

Maurice Frydman was born in the Jewish ghetto of Krakow, Poland in 1894. Being an exceptionally bright student, he excelled in school and studied electrical engineering. He was fluent in Hebrew, English, French, Russian, German and added to that Hindi later in
life. His seeking started at a young age and involved delving into Judaism and studying the Talmud. He followed this by becoming a monk in the Russian Orthodox church. This path also did not feed his thirst and he was said to have been fed up with all dogmas. His brilliance in his school did pave the way for him to drastically change his life from his humble beginning. He had many patents to his name by the age of twenty when he moved to Europe for his studies and started work.

During this time he came across his first teacher J. Krishnamurti in Switzerland. This meeting was prior to Krishnamurti’s break with the Theosophical Society and the relationship lasted many decades. Maurice was known to be a fierce debater with Krishnamurti whom he held in high regards. He would organize meetings for him as well as translate some of his work into French. After a period of several years, in 1928 he made a more permanent move to Paris to start a job at an electrical factory. In Paris he came across Brunton’s book on Ramana Maharshi that started a burning desire to go to India.

His wish came true several years later when in 1935 he was offered a job to set up an engineering firm in Mysore, which he accepted. In his early years in India in the late 1930s he found Ramana Maharshi and spent time with the Bhagavan. As one of the regular devotees, many of his questions and the master’s response were recorded in Maharshi’s Gospel. Ramana said of Frydman “He belongs only here to India. Somehow he was born abroad, but has come again here”.

Concurrently he came into relationship with Mahatma Gandhi and was involved with his
struggle to free India from British rule. It was during this time in 1938 that he asked the Raja of Aundh province to help Gandhi’s cause by freeing his control of the seventy two village property which the Raja agreed to. He then drew up a draft of declaration of independence which then was given to Gandhi. He in turn wrote the constitution of the state, giving full authority to the people of the state, a rare event in pre independent India. An interesting side fact is that during his time with Gandhiji Frydman worked on and improved on the design of the cotton spinning wheels that became synonymous with Gandhi and his movement.

Frydman’s family perished in Poland during WWII and he never returned there after that.
At this juncture in his life he gave up on his job and worldly possessions. He took on the robe of a sannyasi under Sri Swami Ramdas who named him Bharatananda; a robe he later gave up as being meaningless while living the spirit of it to his death. From this time on, he did give up his salary to the needy around him. He had no room for symbols and spiritual materialism that did not reflect true ripeness; he found them to be shallow and counter productive. He regretted his inability to take further use of Ramana Maharshi’s teachings while the Bhagavan was alive. He wrote after his death “Now He is still with us, but no longer so easily accessible. To find Him again we must overcome the very obstacles which prevented us form seeing Him as He was and going with Him where he wanted to take us. It was Tamas and Rajas – fear and desire that stood in the way – the desire of the pleasure of the past and fear of austere responsibility of a higher state of being. It was the same old story- the threshold of maturity of mind and heart which most of refuse to cross”.

Maurice Frydman died in Bombay on March 9th of 1976 with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj by his side. A beautiful event ends this incredible life. During his last days of life Frydman gets a visit by a professional nurse he does not know. The nurse had been visited in a dream by an old man in a loin cloth telling her to go and take care of Frydman. Frydman refuses to accept the nurse’s offer. As the nurse is leaving she walks past a picture of the old man that had visited her in her dream. Upon telling Frydman this, he accepts her offer and allows her to take care of him. The picture: it was Ramana Maharshi who had left his body over three decades prior.

Excerpts taken from:
Dr M. Sadashiva Rao Vol. 19, No. 5 The Maharshi
Apa B Bant, 1991 Volume of Mountain Path

Written for Namrupa Issue 10 Volume 05, November 2009
http://www.namarupa.org/volumes/1005.php