PicoBlog

“Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you.”

If reading worked like marriage — one book only, ’til death do us part — I would forgo the titanic pleasures of Tolstoy; I’d cast aside the cozy solace of Conan Doyle; I would even give up the deep, reliable companionship of Alice Munro. Instead, when it came time to settle down, I would pledge my devotion to an eccentric yellow book that reads in places as if it were written by a random-phrase generator and that looks, production-wise, like the sort of thing that shaven-headed young men would thrust at passersby outside a temple.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s I Am That is the most precious book in my collection — and a book that I, who never shut up about books, hardly ever mention. What could I say? Its language is so peculiar, its value so difficult to explain, its format so artless that I feel oddly protective of it, like an eccentric friend whom you hesitate to bring home for fear that her idiosyncrasies will overshadow her charms.

Well, here goes nothing. 

I Am That is, first of all, not really by Nisargadatta Maharaj at all. It is, rather, a collection of dialogues between Maharaj and sundry global visitors (“I am a Swede by birth,” “By profession I am a physician,”). These dialogues were recorded and, when necessary, translated by one of Maharaj’s British devotees. Maharaj was a Bombay shopkeeper about whom, by the mid-1960’s, the word had gotten out — he was, despite his absence of religious affiliation, despite his humble trappings, the real thing. Awakened. Enlightened. One who could, with a mere flick of his playful intelligence, untangle the gnarled neurosis-knots of all comers.  

And for five-hundred-and-thirty-four serif-less pages, that’s what he does. 

Questioner: As I look at you, you seem to be a poor man with very limited means, facing all the problems of poverty and old age, like everybody else.

Maharaj: Were I very rich, what difference would it make? I am what I am. What else can I be? I am neither rich nor poor, I am myself.

Q: Yet, you are experiencing pleasure and pain.

M: I am experiencing these in consciousness, but I am neither consciousness, nor its content.

These few lines are enough to give you a sense of the book’s pattern, its recurrent situation — an unhappy, usually-Western questioner drives full speed into the fog bank of Maharaj’s elusive tranquility. Sometimes the questioner works himself into a near-rage of baffled longing (just tell me, in plain English, what to DO). And sometimes the questioner charges in believing that he himself is a spiritual force to be reckoned with (“I had some inner experiences on my own and I would like to compare notes,”) and so the dialogue unfolds as a kind of accidental comedy: the questioner seeking an Olympian panel-discussion between peers; Maharaj gently re-ascending to his altar.

This sounds, as a reading experience, as if it would be both repetitious and frustratingly opaque, and it often is. But the frustration persists only as long as you continue to mistake the book for an ink-and-paper information-delivery mechanism. A few dialogues in, it dawns on you (with a faint tingling on the back of the neck, a barely perceptible sound like a grandfather clock ticking in the next room) that this is not a book you read, in the sense that you read Middlemarch or even Siddartha. It’s a book that you take, like a drug. 

The part of you that you typically send forth into books — the keen intelligence armed with its UniBall and half-remembered college course — might be bored, confused, exasperated. But the part of you that knows that part — the part of you that, come to think of it, knows every part — is having a very strange experience indeed. That part, the evasive but essential inner citizen, is being recognized, summoned forth, called in from the sidelines where it usually slumbers un-consulted. Me?, says its hoarse and unfamiliar voice. You, says Maharaj. That is this book’s peculiar power: it speaks at a pitch that registers as gibberish to the everyday self but as celestial sense to the higher self — the one, or the thing, about whom it is hard to be much more articulate than That. The book speaks to That.

But what is it saying? And what, for that matter, am I saying?

The great fact of existence, shouted from the rooftops by neuroscientists and meditators and barefoot denizens of remote internet cafes, is that our perceptual experience is a kind of a hallucination. Being alive is less a matter of pointing our sensory equipment outward and configuring the results than it is of conjuring a world with our brains and then using our senses to verify, intermittently, that what we’ve conjured isn’t so far off as to prevent us from eating or mating. In other words, we don’t need to wait on Mark Zuckerberg in order to take up residence in a virtual world; we are already there, and always have been.

This realization — the thinness, the artificiality, of our everyday experience — has a lot of juice, in terms of the potential for reducing suffering. But that juice turns out to be maddeningly difficult to extract.

Because it isn’t merely your experience of the table across the room that you’ve conjured up. It’s your experience of you. The very locus of all your pain, all your worry, all your dread — that is a mind-mirage too. Unclench the self-creation muscle (as you do in deep sleep) and watch as all sense of there being a problem disappears. But that turns out to be the nub of the problem. 

Every now and then, in political coverage, you come across the Upton Sinclair line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Imagine, then, the difficulty in getting someone to understand something when his very existence depends on his not understanding it. Every time we seek to un-clench the muscles of self-creation, we have millions of years of evolution screeching in our ears: DO NOT DO THIS! STOP IT! DEADBOLT YOUR DOOR AND CHECK AGAIN WHETHER YOU TURNED OFF THE STOVE!

Against this voice humanity’s best and brightest contend in vain. Robert Wright puts out the lucid and lovely Why Buddhism is True (which covers much the same ground), and our small, clenched selves say “Thank you, very interesting, I’ll give that five stars on Goodreads and go right along with my business.” Someone sends you a Rumi poem and you shiver, forward it to your sister-in-law, and get back to your email. The walls of the self are insurmountable.

Which is where Nisargadatta Maharaj and his wall-vaulting book come in.

A couple hundred pages into I Am That, an unhappy Frenchman comes into Maharaj’s shop. “I do not know how to get free from fear… The mind just cannot stop working… How often I tell myself: enough, please stop, enough of this endless chatter of sentences repeated round and round!”

Maharaj offers some of his standard advice — to go back to the infant’s sense of bare existence, before it became overlaid with concepts and identities — but the Frenchman won’t be comforted: “Your ideas are very attractive — intellectually, but emotionally I do not respond.”

So Maharaj tries another tack: 

You need not stop thinking. Just cease being interested. It is disinterestedness that liberates. Don’t hold on, that is all. The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you.

The book doesn’t report whether the Frenchman, hearing this, keeled over, or started to sob, or levitated. All evidence is that he didn’t — Maharaj was, as he says, in the business of planting seeds, however unpromising the soil; they would grow in due time. 

But what those sentences do for me as a reader is more than the entire Eastern Religions section of the library. The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you. There’s an Emersonian urgency to the tone here — comma-less exhortations, short words. The simultaneous simplicity and strangeness of the image — a world of rings, a self of hooks — is its seal of authenticity. I can’t say that I know how to follow the advice, exactly — but then again I wouldn’t. The advice isn’t for me. It’s for That. And That knows precisely what Maharaj means; how could it not? That spoke the words. That is the canvas on which is painted every Frenchman and guru, every book and reader, every bit of perplexity and enlightenment that has ever existed.

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