Consciousness and the Absolute. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj is one of those rarest of individuals who had truly undergone a radical transformation, and everybody knew it. He was a poor shopkeeper in India, who listened to the words of a guru, and utterly trusted and believed in his words. In the course of three years it transformed him and he became “realized”. With little education, and no self promotion, people from around the world began to seek him out, because of the profound presence they felt around him. His realization was that we are not the body, nor the brain, nor memories, or emotions, but pure consciousness/beingness – the “I Am” with nothing added. That this was our true state and everything else we “struggle” with, such as our “problems” are just a dreamlike play acted out in consciousness and not reality.
In this Consciousness and the Absolute, his last book Maharaj hammers away at the need to let go of our attachment to our “food bodies” as ourselves. He demonstrates again and again that we are more than the food we have consumed throughout our lives and the mental concepts we have collected along the way. He challenges listeners to think it through to the beginning and realize we have always been, and that we appeared in consciousness only because of our body. That in fact, we have no beginning and no end. That we are beyond our bodies, beyond consciousness and that our true place belongs in “the Absolute“. This is very advanced teachings he shared with his closest followers near the time of his death from throat cancer. So he went straight to the core of his teachings- no time to mince words. This would not be a good text for someone just wanting to seek peace and harmony. That would be “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. This are very straight forward, knock-you-upside-the-head talks about cutting through the mental clutter we believe about ourselves and getting to the reality of who we are.
