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#3446 - Tuesday, February 17,
2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
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 Maruti.
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 from 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 his 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 clerk in an
office, but resigned the job in disgust. He then took petty
trading as a haberdasher and started a shop for selling
children’s clothes, tobacco 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 Navnath 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
of 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 a 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-realisation.
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 warm-hearted and
tender, shrewdly humorous, absolutely fearless and absolutely
true -- inspiring, guiding and supporting all who come to him.
Any attempt to write a biographical not 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.
~ ~ ~
From... I Am That, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj