The Ultimate Medicine is not for those who like their spirituality watered down, but for serious students searching for awareness. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981) lived and taught in a small apartment in the slums of Bombay. A realized master of the Tantric Nath lineage, he supported himself and his family by selling cheap goods in a small booth on the streets outside his tenement for many years. His life exemplified the concept of absolute nonduality of being. In this volume, Maharaj shares the highest truth of nonduality in his own unique way. His teaching style is abrupt, provocative, and immensely profound, cutting to the core and wasting little effort on inessentials. His terse but potent sayings are known for their ability to trigger shifts in consciousness, just by hearing or reading them. "The point is that man freed from his fetters is morality personified. Such a man therefore does not need any moralistic injunctions in order to live righteously. Free a man from his bondage and thereafter everything else will take care of itself. On the other hand, man in his unredeemed state cannot possibly live morally, no matter what moral teaching he is given. It is an intrinsic impossibility, for his very foundation is immorality. That is, he lives a lie, a basic contradiction: functioning in all his relationships as the separate entity he believes himself to be, whereas in reality no such separation exists. His every action therefore does violence to other 'selves' and other 'creatures,' which are only manifestations of the unitary consciousness. So Society had to invent some restraints in order to protect itself from its own worst excesses and thereby maintain some kind of status quo. The resulting arbitrary rules, which vary with place and time and therefore are purely relative, it calls 'morality,' and by upholding this man-invented 'idea' as the highest good-oftentimes sanctioned by religious 'revelation' and scriptures-society has provided man with one more excuse to disregard the quest for liberation or relegate it to a fairly low priority in his scheme of things."
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Cutting to the core!:
The Ultimate Medicine, Dialogues with a Realized Master, is Nisargadatta Maharaj in the final years of his life. His earlier work, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, is a classic and the core message of Advaita Vedanta. The Ultimate Medicine continues where I Am That leaves off, cutting to the core of the message. Nisargadatta points directly at that I AM prior to thoughts, prior to the experience and idea of being a "person". His illness took away the patience to deal with the normal... more info
The key to Self-Realistaion through knowledge:
Unlike the first book produced on Nisargadatta, "I AM THAT" which was stripped bare of all religious trappings, the discussions recorded in "The Ultimate Medicine" between Nisargadatta and his visitors have many more references to Hindu terminology and concepts. I would therefore recommend that anyone new to Nisragadatta's teachings begin with "I AM THAT". Something I found very interesting in this book were the discussions that centered around one understanding one's birth, which is not really... more info
More Dialogues about Self:
After reading I AM THAT, I expected (based on readers' reviews) this book to be less tedious and more for advanced "seekers". I was disappointed. Maharaji gives us more detailed dialogues about who we really are. We are SPIRIT, not a body. He explains that consciousness comes into the body on birth and exits the body on "death". He tells us death is an illusion. In a nutshell, anything that is not REAL (eternal) does not come from God. Thus the body is an illusion because it does not last forever. If we... more info
Beyond Consciousness:
This book is a collection of some of the later question and answer sessions between Sri Nisargadatta and visitors from around the world. After finishing `I Am That' I read this book. There is a noticeable difference between the words of Nisargadatta in the two books. `I Am That' is unquestionably the better of the books, and the pinnacle of Maharaj's teachings. During His earlier days, Maharaj was eager to teach, and would continually answer beginners questions. In this book, which collects talks... more info
