Nisargadatta Maharaj’s Teachings: Beyond “I Am”?
Nisargadatta Maharaj was a cigarette vendor from Mumbai who became one of the most direct and uncompromising teachers of nonduality in the 20th century. His dialogues are collected in the book, I Am That.
The cornerstone of Nisargadatta's teaching is the primary and most fundamental experience available to every sentient being: the sense of presence, the raw feeling of “I am.” He insists that this is the only place to start any genuine inquiry into reality. Before we identify as a man or woman, rich or poor, happy or sad, there is a fundamental knowing, the sheer fact of being, of consciousness itself. This “I Am” is the immediate given, the subjective sense that “I exist.”
Nisargadatta states that the entire manifest world appears within this “I Am” consciousness. Like images in a dream, thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and the external world arise and play out within this field of knowing. The error, he says, is identifying the “I am” with the body-mind. This identification, “I am this body,” “I am this mind,“ “I am this person with this history,” is the root illusion, the cause of all suffering, bondage, and the sense of separation from reality.
However, Nisargadatta emphasizes that the “I Am,” while the necessary starting point and the arena of manifestation, is not the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality, which he sometimes refers to as the Absolute, exists prior to the sense of “I Am.” This Absolute is beyond description, beyond concepts, beyond time, beyond space, beyond causation, even beyond being and non-being. This timeless, boundless, uncaused ultimate source is also changeless and utterly unaffected by any appearance or experience within it.
But perhaps a simpler way to understand this framework is to not relegate consciousness to something that arises from “the Absolute.” Instead, we say that consciousness, even prior to manifestation,* is the Absolute. It is not necessary to have a third thing, an Absolute something else, in addition to consciousness. Here, we say consciousness is all there is.