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The Experience of Nothingness: Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's Talks on Realizing the Infinite

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These are among the final talks that Nisargadatta gave in the last year of his life or so. In this powerful book of Q & A between teacher and seeker we have some extremely detailed and terse teachings on the Nature of Reality.
Nisargadatta's answers cut to the chase and go right to the Heart of the Absolute. One of the reasons for the sharpness of the teachings is because he is physically suffering due to throat cancer and nevertheless continues to teach throughout his illness (he continued to teach until hours before his physical death).
For those that don't know his work too well, what is considered his main work is I AM THAT, which is recommended to begin the study of his teachings, after I AM THAT came a series of about 6 books, all within the last 2 years of his life. The post I AM THAT books are all uncompromisingly direct and sharp. He speaks only from realization of the Unborn state and gives all his discources from there, making it tricky to understand for some. With the combination of being ill and with 42 years of teaching experience at this point, he keeps his talks very focused.
In this great work, we see his expertise in that he doesn't just point to the Absolute reality with a lot of poetic words, he also deconstructs your preciously held self. He tirelessly breaks down concepts and spiritual ideas we don't want to let go of. One can say in this work we are privledged to see very "advanced" teachings. Teachings that will appeal to seekers that can go beyond just pretty ideas of spirituality, bliss out states, any form of personal gain whatsoever (because you're understanding yourself as the Impersonal Reality). He even challenges one particular seeker in this book to leave spirituality because he knows that this particular seeker is caught up being a "spiritual seeker" and isn't ready to go beyond the body-mind sense, he fears death of the personality. No flowery, superficial hand holding here!
The essence of his teachings is: understand your "I am-ness" or consciousness, go deeply into that and awake from your daydream as that body-mind entity you think you are and apperceive yourself as the Unborn.
I felt deeply privledged to read this wonderful book.

"What do you understand by the word dream? Is not the dream something like a drama, a play?...To one who really understands what has been said here, a dream is no different from what is seen in the waking state: both are plays of consciousness... We call one thing the waking state, another thing the dream, but in essence both are events happening in the consciousness and essentially they are not different."

" When you are liberated from the body/mind sense, so that you are not the body mind, that itself is liberation."<BR Nisargadatta Maharaj

If you want a book that will help you feel good and be successful in this life... this isn't the one. This is for that soul that simple wants the straightest, truest answers possible, from someone who was fearless in his search of reality. I've read three of Nisargadatta's books (including the classic "I Am That"), and this one takes the reader further than any of the others. He challenges the reader to go beyond even the "I Am" state and realize an even deeper, broader reality. This following quote sums up much of his focus in the book...

"Even this primary concept, "I-am-ness," is dishonest, just because it is still only a concept. Finally, one has to transcend that also and be in the nirvikalpa state, which means the concept-free state. Then you have no concept at all, not even of "I am." In that state one does not know that one is. This state is known as Parabrahman: Brahman transcended. Brahman is manifest; Parabrahman is beyond that, prior to that: the Absolute." (page 123)

These are among the last teachings of Sri Nisargadatta and he shared them in a way that was simple, bold and powerful. Again and again he challenges seekers to question who/what they really are... like turning the camera on yourself.

"Your true meaning cannot be grasped or captured by words. You can never be equated with any words, because you are prior to words." (page 159)

I think this book is best read slowly and absorbed for whatever gifts it brings to you.

I'm glad this isn't the only Nisargadatta book I've looked at because It might have been the last. In this book of Q/A sessions it's not hard to tell he has grown weary of the questions. He seems to have been ill during much of the time that this book transpired and mentions several times he is tired of physical existence and wants to go. he even goes as far as to tell a few seekers to give up and persue some type of social work. Not at all the exciting and profound work of "I am That" which looks to rival most of Maharshi's teaching.

This is the final volume, in the series of 3 edited collections, of talks given by the Master Nisaragadatta Maharaj.

At this point, Maharaj was dying of cancer, and by all accounts, in great pain.

He was described once as "a tiger". These talks demonstrate why. His prey though is not human or animal flesh, but concepts. His weapons, not claws, but logic, and the firmest conviction in his understanding.

Ultimately, Maharaj's talks destroy his listeners' and the reader's concepts. He asks them to take apart their own idea of themselves. To deconstruct their self image, and to "see" they are not the body, or the mind that they normally take themselves to be.

His pursuit of the questioner's concepts is relentless. Again and again, he demonstrates that the only capital anyone can have is "I am". The body, and the contents of mind can all be seen; and anything seen cannot be what one is. Instead he says, like a man digging a well, one should keep digging until he finds water. The self. At bottom, there is only this sense of beingness. What elsewhere, he calls the sense of presence. Consciousness itself.

He doesn't stop there. Unlike so many other teachers, gurus and sages, Nisargadatta takes students and readers further in the path of self enquiry. This consciousness, he says, is not personal. It arrives with a body and the life force, which themselves appear by accident. And, mistakenly it identifies with the body it has arisen in.

This, he says is the basic error. Of mistaken identity. There are no such things as individuals. Each apparent individual is made of the same matter and arrives here by the same means: the fluids of its parents, food, and the life force. And each only knows itself as an individual by appearance in the consciousness of others.

This consciousness is not personal. If the reader suspends belief for a moment and asks what if this were true? If this beingness were not personal. What would this mean?

Well then, what appears is just that, an appearance, in a single universal consciousness. And, Consciousness itself is the vehicle of all existence. No consciousness - no world, no existence.

And so, concludes Maharaj, all this then is the play of consciousness. Like a dream world. And nothing is.

The final understanding, the ultimate truth which Maharaj embodied and grasped so firmly, is that all -including consciousness itself- arises from nothing, that is No Thing. That which cannot be seen or heard or felt. That which is the ground for all experience, by which all objects and individuals to perceive those objects are possible - but in itself, is no thing.

And that nothing, is our ultimate I-dentity - the Source of all, from which all the worlds and consciousness arises.

"The experience of nothingness", is like so much of Maharaj's wisdom - a delicious paradox. For if there is no one, and no thing at the heart of all, then who is there to experience anything?

What then, can any"one" do? The apparent individual, can only Just Be, says Maharaj. Stay with that beingness, he repeats to students, in the sense of "I am", and the understanding will arise. The understanding that one is not really one, but All; and yet at the same time, this All is No thing. Not an object at all, that can be conceived or perceived. But the original Subject, the container of all apparent objects- no thing. What others have called the self. "Our" original nature. What we were, according to Maharaj eight days before conception. Unawareness.

This volume cannot be recommended highly enough. Its ultimate truth will, once planted, blossom in its readers.

Clearly expounds the nature of the experience at the heart & soul of this school of profound teaching. i.e. the ultimate goal of the spirtual quest.

Reading this book I felt that words used in it did not convey the original meaning. This 'defect' of language was referred to in another review as 'dualism'; it is as if the words 'crack' and when this happens there is no meaning left.

The "I-am-ness" Sri Nisargadatta continously talks about is called in the Yoga Sutrats 'asmita' - it has often been translated as 'I-sense' and 'pure Ego'. Yoga Sutras have many good commentaries and to understand Sri Nisargadatta some commentaries on his teachings would be a good help.

I happened to read Ayya Khema's autobiographic book 'I Give You My Life' a few days before I read 'The Experience of Nothingness' and in this book her experience in Bombay when she visited Maharaj. What happened?

First Sri Nisargadatta started to ask her questions about herself; she writes: 'I had come to hear his words of wisdom and did not want to talk about myself in front of all those people. But he gave me no peace... at the end he said I was on the right path but not enlightened yet.'

She continues: 'In retrospect, I would like to say that he was so sure of what he was about and fervently engaged in it that it was hard to see him as an enlightened person.'