About Nisargadatta

Hello, Robert. Thanks for posting the Gathering videos and thanks to Ricardo Madrazo for making them. It felt a bit like being there. If we get through this virus thing and there is another gathering like that, I hope to be there.

You mentioned Nisargadatta and said that he’d been “an influence on a lot of us,” and I assume you included yourself in that. So, would you please say how? And you said that Nisargadatta was a philosopher. Would you go into that, please?
Cheers, Arthur.

Agua, 2020

Hi, Arthur.
I am happy to see those videos out there, and also thank Ricardo for making them. I see them as a de-hypnotic corrective to so-called “spirituality,” which, to me, is most often not a way out of the trance of becoming, but a way to prolong and deepen it.

From my perspective, nothing is becoming anything. What you are, you already are. This has been said countless times in numberless ways: now is all that exists. The rest is memory, fantasy, and a storm of desires and fears, both known consciously and unknown, that project a world—my world—onto the mysterious, invisible, unknowable unknowingness.

To put it more simply, what we see, feel, think, and otherwise experience is a version, not “Truth.” On seeing that, I say, we are awake, regardless of whatever human foibles and failings may apply.

I had my dive into Nisargadatta in the 90s. I Am That. Nisargadatta said that only one person, Maurice Frydman, ever understood him. Perhaps if he were around now, he might say that I understood him . . . or not.

In any case, his ideas are dense and challenging, and frequently inconsistent with one another. That is one of his best features, in my view. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I agree, and by that standard, Nisargadatta will never be accused of having a little mind, although it appears to me that many who imagine themselves in his “lineage” do have little minds. They are the ones, after all, who did not understand him, as he said.

"God," Nisargadatta said, "is only an idea in your mind. The fact is you. The only thing you know for sure is: here and now I am." All the rest, he said, was projection, by which he meant that each of us lives in a different world—a world of our own creation—and that this cannot be avoided. That’s just how I see it. He and I have different backgrounds, but we seem to coincide precisely on this.

We may not concur on his notion that consciousness is like a canvas on which we are painting the world of our own creation. As I see it, we don’t know what consciousness is or how it comes to be, and when I look into it, I cannot separate consciousness from the painting supposedly projected upon it or from the supposed painter, but that’s a different question.

The main point here is that we humans tend to live in a trance state, a state of confusion in which we believe that our subjectivity is somehow not subjectivity but that we can come to know “Truth” as if we could judge such matters objectively.

I am put off by “teachers” who prattle about “Truth" and who beckon you to accept their version of "reality." I don’t want to hear such claims. Tell me what you don’t know, not what you think you do. We are, as Nisargadatta said, and as I say, making our own worlds, including what we regard as true. If we notice that subjectivity and can admit it to ourselves, there will be nothing left to cling to, no hope at all, and nothing to defend.

That will be freefall without a parachute, which is what I mean by the word “awake.” No certainty, no becoming, only the here and now. If the self-appointed teachers saw this for one minute, they would not talk as they do and would stop trying to make everyone believe what they believe. That project is a failure from the beginning—just another layer of delusion.

The essence of my message is don't put anyone above you. Speculation about "reality" is 100 percent escapism, no matter what it's called—spirituality, religion, or whatever—and I want no part of it. I have no idea who or what "myself' is, and never will. Part of what I call "awake" is the absolute rejection of a split between the so-called spiritual and the mundane, or the spiritual and the physical, or the body and the soul. And that really would be "nonduality."

I have been trying for years to make this clear, and it feels as if I have broken through. The Gathering videos and my two books, The Ten Thousand Things and Depending On No-Thing, seem clear and straightforward to me, and I am happy to hear that you find them so.