About Nisargadatta Maharaj Much has been made about Sri Nisargadatta’s forcefully electric style in presenting and teaching the Truth of What We Are for his listeners—a style that could quickly turn explosive and blazing—with severely pointed words, coarse speech (even untranslated cusswords), personally challenging impolite remarks, outrageous statements, and those famously fierce gazes and dramatic movements and extravagant gestures performed like a great thespian orator—hands loudly clapping or slapping down onto his thighs, a finger suddenly extended upward or sideward or jabbed toward the listener. Not only did the Maharaj sometimes insult his own Hindu tradition (e.g., irreverent humorous puns on the names of the gods and goddesses), he often insulted or testily confronted his own students and visitors. David Godman, author of valuable books on Ramana Maharshi and his disciples, recalls in his colorful and insightful memoir of visits with Maharaj: We all got shouted at on various occasions, and we all got told off from time to time because of things we did or said. We were all a little fearful of him because we never knew when the next eruption would come. We had all come to have the dirt beaten out of us, in the same way that the dhobis [washer-folk] clean clothes by smashing them on rocks. Maharaj smashed our egos, our minds and our concepts on the immovable rock of the Self because he knew that in most cases that was the only way to help us. Switching metaphors, we might say that Maharaj functioned as just the right kind of irritant to get inside our egoic shell, thenceforth to begin his work of making out of us a big, beautiful, bursting-forth Pearl of Enlightenment.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 03:33:50 +0000
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