Nisargadatta Maharaj was an enlightened master who lived in Bombay, India from 1897 to 1981. He was a simple merchant who had a small sundries shop in the tenaments of Bombay and sold tobacco and biddis, or hand-rolled cigarettes. In this respect he resembles the great protestant mystic Jacob Boehm, who was a simple shoemaker all his life.
Nisargadatta's guru, Siddharameshwar Maharaj, gave him some simple instructions: "You are not who you think you are. Find out what you truly are. Behind every thought, image, feeling and sensation is the sense of 'I am.' Become aware of that sense of 'I am' and look behind it.'"
What did he mean? First of all, he meant that the egoic sense of separate existence supports all subsequent concepts and thoughts. That sense of "I am" or "I am a separate entity" is the root thought that brings into being all others.
But behind even the root thought is something else. That something else is pure awareness, which has no qualities of any kind except that of being aware. It is neither for nor against anything but accepts all that is as simply reality—"what is." It is not the body or the mind or anything else, but prior to all that.
But as Nisargadatta pointed out many times, to realise this intellectually does no good. It must be realised in a different way, in a realm where thought does not apply.
That sounds complicated, but it isn't. If you sit down in a quiet place and close your eyes, you can become aware of your own awareness. And you can abide there, and as you do it will gradually "expand," so to speak.
That's what Nisargadatta himself did. Here are his exact words: "All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence." And he did this not on a mountain top, but in the midst of a noisy tenament in his "spare time"—while involved in running a business. Proceeding like this with great earnestness, he became self-realised in 3 years.
—jim sloman, 11/15/00 for Nov 15
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