Self-Love, The Original Dream: Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s Direct Pointers To Reality

Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj was one of the most significant spiritual teachers of Non-Duality of his time. His powerful non-dual teachings continue to impact spiritual seekers from all over the world, decades after his passing. Maharaj spoke in his mother tongue, Marathi, and a translator would then translate his words into English. It goes without saying that the translator had to be finely tuned not only to Maharaj’s teachings but also to the subtle nuances of his language, his singular vocabulary of spiritual terms and his distinctive teaching idiom.

Those who had the good fortune of being in Maharaj’s presence reiterate that the intensity of his teaching was at its peak in the last five years before he shed his body. In those years, a relatively young disciple, Shri Dinkar Kshirsagar, sat at Maharaj’s satsangs with a notebook. Every time Maharaj said something which impacted him – it could be a sentence or an entire chunk of conversation – Dinkar-ji would jot it down faithfully, making note of the exact Marathi words used by Maharaj. Though he did not jot down every single word spoken by Maharaj during satsang, his meticulous unfiltered ‘excerpts’ comprised the very essence of the Living Teaching manifesting through Maharaj. They accurately reflected Maharaj’s intensity, his steadfast rootedness in the Self and his utterly natural, intention-less compassion for the spiritual seeker.

These talks were first published in Marathi in a book titled Atmaprem. They were subsequently translated into English by Shri Mohan Gaitonde, Maharaj’s ‘evening’ translator, who had the privilege of being with him from 1979 to 1981. This translation is made special by one outstanding fact: years of intuitively translating Maharaj, and that too in his presence, bestowed upon Gaitonde-ji an invaluable gift – an ‘ear’ for Maharaj’s voice and tone. In other words, for his subtlest nuance. For spiritual seekers, keen on accessing Maharaj’s original teachings, this has indeed turned out to be a wonderful gift.