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