I have studied Nisargadatta since 1986. I was fortunate enough to meet Jean Dunn in 1987 as well as Ramesh Balsekar about the same time I met Robert Adams in 1989, and more or les laid Maharaj aside for the next seven years. I and many of Robert's students would ask him his opinions of Maharaj or his teachings. Robert did not care for Nisargadatta because "He was too rude." Robert said he used to torture Ramesh unmercefully during the time Robert was with Ramana.
In the late 1990s I began a deeper study of Maharaj depending more on Robert Powell's books that were far clearer and much more detailed tha Jean Dunn's. I began to really understand Nisargada, But also recognized that Maharaj was frequenly inconsistent and he also interlaced his talks with unending references to various hindu ontology concepts that distracted rather than clarified.
He made himself hard to undertand by being sloppy in his talks especially when he was speaking of issues that he considered the highest or final teachings. This study lasted for 15 years until I had an entirely new enlightenment experience entirely outside of the Advaita or any non-dual teaching.
This awakening event entirely eclipsed my many experiences with Robert and Jean. I experienced both realization of the Manifest Self and of God at the same time. I entered the divine, the kingdom of God and was brought alive into the Manifest Self of awareness of the life force within.
Yes, Nisargdatta spoke about the life force and also beingness, but in an abstract way with the usual distracting stories or terms he often used. I was never able to "feel" that Maharaj actually experienced that which he wrote about, and instead quickly transitioned to discussing the witness and nothingness instead, the experience of which was supposedly entirely outside of consciousness. Therefore his freuent discussions of this subject were often most confusing.
The early Nisargadatta, the one who wrote Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization, was a Bhakta, a lover, a devotee who spoke of God, saints, devotion, and chanting. None of this Bhakta remains evident in his last teachings between 1979 and 1982. His Witness concept and experience had totally swallowed the loving Nisargadatta. It should not have.
It is this world of light, love, energy, and the divine I awakened to in 2010. It is from this possition I discuss the spiritual developmental steps that are often almost hidden in his eachings, but also add a step Maharaj did not take: joyfully returning to the marketplace. This marketplace is the mundane world I left after I enetered the divine, God, Manifest Self. That is, rather than resting in the Witness, I reentered my human self, consciousness itself, and played there, exploring beingness, the underlying life force, feltandplayed with spiritual energies which I called the Voice of God. Robert sometimes had praised me because in the 90s, I never experienced or spoke of them.
I will speak of these later, but in this essay I wanted to clarify the existential spiritual developmental steps he seemed to speak about in his own chaotic way, and speak of them based on my many years of study.
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Step one:
Watch the body closely. Scan the body frequently, running the attention from toes to scalp over and over many times a day. One needs to know their body as perceive by consciousness, and not as learned knowledge from books, teachers, or previous experience.
Step two:
Realize that You, whatever that is, are definitely not the body. Your body is something perceived by you. It is an object, not part of the subject.
Step three:
Realize that you, from your present state of knowledge, are spirit, that which Ramana Maharishi also called the self, which he was always aware of. From Ramana's level of understanding, you are pure spirit, awareness, that which apprehends the body and the world.
Step four:
Stay here for a time, constantly aware of the body in the world, and that spirit is that awareness. With Constant observation, you realize you are are a "spiritual" entity within the body feeling the totality.
Step five:
The fundamental state of the human spiritual being is called beingness, a state of silence, joy, bliss, and sheer happiness. Just rest in this beingness as your resting state. Accept it as your base world. You are now far from the mistaken knowledge that you are your body. Now unhappiness rarely touches you. You have found the divine, which is separate from the mundane world, and in a sense, you live above the mundane world and the body. You knowboth but choose the divine, because there you are happy.
Step six:
Constantly be aware of your beingness by resting there and making it very, very familiar. At this point will begin to realize you are not the divine, are not beingness, happiness, or bliss. You are beyond all of these as the Witness.
Step seven:
In a deep sense you will realize that you can only be It, the Witness, you cannot be aware of that which witnesses everything else. It is altogether beyond the mundane, and also beyond divine, spiritual. It is altogether beyond existence. It is this incomplete understanding that makes you think the Witness is immortal, but immortal relates to a quality of entities within the mundane.
Step eight:
When this is fully realized, and you own the knowledge that you are not of this world, not of consciousness, really not of awareness, you realize you are from "nothingness"anotheresoteric term that make you think it is real because you named it.
Now you realize the uselessness and imaginary nature of all knowledge, from physics and chemistry, to all knowledge we have of ourselves and others. We rest in not knowing, emptiness, being truly stupid.
Step nine:
After resting in this knowledge of no knowledge for some time, you will probably find you are bored and that your practice is very dry. So at some point, you return your attention back to consciousness, to beingness, to energies, to bliss, and beingness is your basic state, your resting state. This point, you will realize you have escaped from nothingness, and you could totally throw yourself into life, playing inside of consciousness as your own play yard. This point is never made clear by Nisargadatta, it brings us back to the marketplace where we live life in the combination of mundane and divine, fully involved in life, getting to know the life force which permeates your own beingness. For all intents and purposes, this is your manifest self as opposed to the transcendent witness, which is beyond life and death. This is the experience of Self spoken about in the Ashtavakra Gita, which is not Nisargadatta's world, or the world of Robert Adams.
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