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Religious Book Store > Religious books beginning with I
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I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta |
Author: Nisargadatta Maharaj
Published: 1990-06 |
List price: $26.95
Our price: $26.95
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Customer comments on this selection.
 The Only Entrance to All Facts
Nisargadatta Maharaj was born into Indian rural poverty, drifted to the city, married, supported a family by selling cheap cigarettes. He found a guru, learnt a simple spiritual method, practised it devotedly and in three years "realised", to use the jargon. Gradually "spiritual seekers" began to beat a path to his shabby door. He died in 1981.
I haven't yet worked out why this book is so excellent. No poetry, no eloquence, no indelible stories, no mind-stopping koans. Sri Maharaj lacks the saintly radiance of a Ramana Maharshi: he is a no-nonsense Jñani (one who knows,) his manner is straightforward, cantankerous at times. He teaches only what his teacher taught him:
You think you are a body with a name, a home, with parents, a history, an identity. You are wrong. You are the boundless, changeless, formless Unnameable Reality that always was and always will be. So long as you fail to realise this, you suffer. The easiest way to realise is to concentrate on the pure sense of being - I Am - without content or specification.
Walt Whitman described this as "the thought of identity, yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts."
All kinds of people come to him with all kinds of problems or questions; all are answered with the same teaching. Every word carries conviction, as a heavy weight falling leaves a deep mark in the ground. Nondualism was not a philosophy for Sri Maharaj, not a slogan to sell books, but the reality he lived at every moment. The sense of his presence carries over even through the printed word.
This book is for everyone interested in "spirituality", and for some who aren't. It's as accessible as the latest New Age bestseller but as profound as the Hindu tradition itself.
Truly inspirational
What makes this a particularly effective book is that Nisargadatta tells it exactly as it is after assessing each of the needs of those who approached him with their own issues. He often did not mince words because he knew that only by being so direct would these people grasp exactly what he knew they needed to grasp. Many other "gurus" aren't like that in the interest of being too "polite". But not Nisargadatta. His real talent or even genius was forcefully penetrating through the obstinate ego driven misconceptions as few others in history could do(at least in his own Advaita tradition).
Simply the facts.
Like many seekers who've spent decades "searching and never finding", I have a bookshelf full of books that did nothing more then compound the growing frustration while attemptng to resolve the basic question "Who am I?".Everything in our culture points to the "mind" as the source of all solutions; if you "do" this you will "get" this, often brilliantly presented formulas (The Secret etc) that do nothing other than lead "believers" even further into more suffering and end up on the long list of failed efforts.So it was with great amazement that I discovered
the non-duality works of Nisargadatta Maharaj.If you are ready to end the futile mind based "paths to nowhere"search and discover the shockingly simple truth, read this book.
A Classic of Yoga
This is one of my favorite books off all time. Spiritual, accessible, non dogmatic, written by a true spiritual master.
I invite you to explore its gifts and wisdom.
 Amazing book, but poor printing
This is indeed a spiritual classic that I have found incredibly engaging, as well as enlightening. The patient eloquence of Sri Nisargadatta when occasionally confronted with the frustrated and confused ignorance of the interviewer's questions is quite humorous - often like a parent talking to a child.
The one thing that disappoints me is the quality of the printing - at least with my copy. On most pages it is so bad that some words are missing letters, or part of a letter and much of the printed text is so light that it appears the printing press was low on ink. It's not so bad that it's unreadable, just somewhat annoying. Perhaps this is the exception and not the rule. It's just a shame that one of my favorite books has such poor quality printing. Hence the 4 stars.
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