Perennial Teacher Profile

Nisargadatta Maharaj was an Indian spiritual teacher and, throughout a good chunk of the 20th century, one of the world’s best-known proponents of Advaita Vedānta (aka nondualism). A Mumbai resident, Nisargadatta led a simple life as a shopkeeper. He became widely known after the publication of many of his talks in I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a book that introduced nonduality to Western audiences.

As was the custom of the day, Nisargadatta married young, raised children, and worked as a small shopkeeper selling bidis (hand-rolled cigarettes). But for as long as he could remember he’d had a deep inner yearning for truth. In his mid-30s, he met his guru Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj, who gave him a very simple, yet profound instruction to follow: to constantly meditate on the idea that: “You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are.”

Nisargadatta claimed that after a three years of intense meditation on the inner sense of I Am, the ego / self he’d long held himself to be fully and completely collapsed to reveal the Oneness he’d always been.

That same teaching – to remain steadfastly focused on the inner-most sense of being – is the one he drilled into his own students – students who flocked to his small, noisy (street-side) apartment. Nisargadatta was pointed and unflinching in his talks and he did not suffer fools or those who simply came to argue their own rigid beliefs.

The published collection of his talks became a mainstay in the homes of spiritual seekers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and is still widely hailed as a spiritual masterpiece.

(1897–1981)

"When I say ‘I am’, I do not mean a separate entity with a body as its nucleus, I mean the totality of being, the ocean of consciousness, the entire universe of all that is known. I have nothing to desire for I am complete forever."