Nisargadatta Maharaj is my guru. I never met the man.
Some will think that’s absurd. They may be correct—I’m not
speaking for them or others.
Thirty years ago, a psychological therapist summed up my
personal conditioning this way: your mother taught you to be absolutely afraid
of the world and your father completely failed to introduce you to the world.
I was obsessed in knowing the world. I didn’t trust the
world to teach me about itself.
So I read books. I became obsessed with certain viewpoints
until ultimately I discovered their weakness. I moved on to another book. Another
viewpoint.
The first time I read Nisargadatta’s I Am That, I was
enthralled, but I stopped midway at some point—I was appalled at something I
had read. But his words kept haunting me. Six months later, I had forgotten why
I had been horrified, reread the chapter in question, and couldn’t find
anything repulsive—only wisdom. So, in my second attempt, I finished reading
the book.
For a third act, I read Ramesh Balsekar’s Pointers from
Nisargadatta, the Jean Dunn translations, and the Robert Powell
translations. Meanwhile I was rereading I Am That and tweeting phrases
under my @Nisargadatta_M avatar—which continues to this day. To paraphrase one of my earlier teachers: something is happening but I don’t know what it is.
Exactly! There is no viewpoint.
I still read books for recreation as well. It was in such a
manner I began reading Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. It
wasn’t pleasurable, so I stopped. Of course, that’s Gurdjieff’s point. So I’m
not speaking for him or others.
One thing I did appreciate from the first page of
Gurdjieff’s three-volume Coyote tale is the first page, Friendly Advice, in
which he advises one should read his “written expositions thrice.” The first is
in a mechanized way. The second is as one person to another. And the third is
to “fathom the gist.” I did read his Friendly Advice three times.
Nisargadatta says to his listeners, and therefore to the reader, that he, Nisargadatta Maharaj, is Consciousness speaking to
Consciousness.
