Nisargadatta Maharaj: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices

Nisargadatta Maharaj was a Bombay shopkeeper who taught one instruction: stay with the sense I am. A factual guide to his life, I Am That, the practice, the criticism, and how he differs from Ramana Maharshi.

Who was Nisargadatta Maharaj?

Nisargadatta Maharaj was an Indian teacher of Advaita Vedanta who lived and taught in Bombay, born in 1897 and died on 8 September 1981. He was born Maruti Shivrampant Kambli into a family with roots in Kandalgaon, a village in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. After his father died he went to Bombay as a young man, worked as a junior clerk, and then set up his own retail trade selling beedis, the cheap hand-rolled cigarettes smoked across India. He married and had children, and stayed a householder and a tradesman all his life. In 1933 a friend took him to Siddharameshwar Maharaj, a teacher of the Inchegiri branch of the Navnath Sampradaya, who gave him instruction and a mantra. Siddharameshwar died in 1936. Nisargadatta Maharaj left Bombay to wander as a mendicant, turned back before getting far, and resumed his trade. From the middle of the century onward he received visitors in a small mezzanine room above his home in the Khetwadi area of Girgaon, and taught there, in Marathi, for the rest of his life.

The setting matters more than it looks. Nisargadatta Maharaj had no ashram, no estate, no organization and no fundraising apparatus. Visitors climbed a ladder-like stair into a low loft in a crowded tenement district, sat on the floor with perhaps a dozen other people, and asked questions through whichever translator was present that day. Sessions ran morning and evening around the devotional singing he kept up from his tradition. Nothing about the arrangement was designed to impress, and by most accounts he had little patience with visitors who wanted atmosphere rather than answers. He was not a Sanskrit scholar and did not present himself as one; his frame of reference was Marathi devotional literature and what his own teacher had told him. Western seekers arrived in numbers only in the last decade of his life, after the English publication of his talks. He kept teaching through the illness that killed him.

What does the name Nisargadatta mean?

The name is a Sanskrit compound built from nisarga, the natural state, and datta, given. Accounts of his life associate the name with verses he composed rather than with a monastic initiation, since Nisargadatta Maharaj never took sannyasa and remained a married shopkeeper. His birth name was Maruti Shivrampant Kambli. Maharaj is an honorific common in Marathi devotional lineages, not a title he conferred on himself.

Did Nisargadatta Maharaj have a job while he was teaching?

Yes. Nisargadatta Maharaj sold beedis from a small shop in Bombay and supported a family from that trade, teaching upstairs in the same building around his working hours. He used this against visitors who thought realization required renunciation, arguing that the sense of being is equally available to a shopkeeper and a monk. It also shaped the texture of the talks, which are short, practical and impatient rather than discursive.

What did Nisargadatta Maharaj actually teach?

Nisargadatta Maharaj taught that the one thing you know directly and without evidence is that you are, and that this bare sense of being, the I am, is the only material worth working with. Everything else you believe about yourself, he argued, is acquired information: a name, a birth date, a body, a history, a set of preferences, all of it received from other people and stored. Strip that away and what remains is not nothing, but a wordless certainty of existing. His instruction was to hold attention on that and refuse to be drawn back into the acquired material. In his framing the I am is not the self in the ordinary sense; it is a signpost, a first appearance that arises with the body and depends on it, absent in deep sleep and gone at death. He described consciousness as a product of the food-fed body, a position that sounds materialist until you see where he takes it. He denied that a person is an entity and refused to give visitors more concepts to carry. Most of his answers work by subtraction.

What separates nisargadatta teachings from most spiritual instruction is the refusal to offer improvement. He was not proposing a calmer mind, a better life, healing, or a stable good feeling, and he tended to dismiss questions framed that way. When visitors asked about problems he often redirected them to the questioner rather than the question: who is it that has this trouble, and is that one real. He accepted that people have concerns and told them to deal with those concerns practically, which is a different thing from treating them as spiritual material. He also insisted the teaching was useless as information. Reading the words and agreeing with them, in his view, only added a layer of belief on top of the old ones, and he was contemptuous of visitors who could recite Vedanta but had never spent an hour holding to their own sense of being. The teaching is closer to one sustained act of attention than to a body of knowledge, which is why the books repeat themselves.

What did Nisargadatta Maharaj mean by the sense I am?

He meant the felt, wordless certainty that you exist, prior to any description of what you are. Nisargadatta Maharaj distinguished this from the thought I am, which is a mental event, and from I am this or I am that, which are identifications with body, role and memory. The sense of being is what remains when those attributes are set aside and is present continuously in waking life without needing to be produced. He called it the only capital a seeker starts with.

Did Nisargadatta Maharaj think the world is an illusion?

He argued that the world as you know it appears within consciousness and has no independent existence apart from it, the standard Advaita position, but he was not saying objects vanish or that ordinary life can be ignored. Nisargadatta Maharaj kept a shop and paid bills. His point was about status rather than existence: the world is real as appearance and unreal as a self-standing thing containing you.

Did Nisargadatta Maharaj teach that there is no free will?

He taught that the person who imagines itself the doer is not what you are, so the question of that person's freedom is misconceived. How strongly this was pressed varies sharply between translators, and the flat denial of doership most associated with Ramesh Balsekar is stronger than what appears in I Am That. Readers should treat the no-free-will formulation as one rendering of Nisargadatta Maharaj rather than a settled statement of his position.

What is the book I Am That, and how reliable is it?

I Am That is the 1973 collection of dialogues that made Nisargadatta Maharaj known outside India, translated from Marathi and compiled by Maurice Frydman and published in Bombay by Chetana, with Sudhakar S. Dikshit as editor. It runs to roughly a hundred numbered conversations, each headed by a topic and built the same way: a visitor puts a question, often a long and carefully constructed one, and Nisargadatta Maharaj answers in a few lines, frequently by rejecting the assumption inside the question. Frydman was a Polish-born engineer who had spent years in India and had earlier connections with Ramana Maharshi and with Jiddu Krishnamurti, and he brought real literary skill to the job. That skill is also the main caution. The English of I Am That is elegant, expansive and quotable, while people who sat in the room have described the spoken Marathi as terse, repetitive and often abrupt. The book is a faithful record of the teaching rather than a transcript of the sentences, and it is best read as Frydman's presentation of Nisargadatta Maharaj rather than as verbatim speech.

Read it the way it was made and it works well. Each dialogue is self-contained, so the book does not need to be taken in order, and reading two or three exchanges slowly gets more out of it than reading fifty. The repetition across chapters is not padding; the same instruction is approached from a hundred angles because visitors kept arriving with different versions of the same misunderstanding. Newcomers often find the first fifty pages impenetrable and then something clicks around a passage that says nothing new. It is also worth noticing what the book does not contain. There is very little biography, no system, no graded stages, no exercises beyond the central one, and almost no comment on other traditions. Anyone wanting a structured course will find the absence frustrating. The later collections edited by Jean Dunn are drier and less beautiful, and some readers find them more trustworthy for that reason.

Where does the title I Am That come from?

The English title echoes the Upanishadic identification of the innermost sense of being with reality itself, the formula that what you are and what is are not two different things. It is an interpretive title chosen for the English edition rather than a phrase Nisargadatta Maharaj repeated as a slogan. In the dialogues he works almost entirely with the first half of it, the bare I am, and treats the identification as something discovered rather than asserted.

Which other books record nisargadatta teachings?

The late talks edited by the American student Jean Dunn appeared as Seeds of Consciousness, Prior to Consciousness and Consciousness and the Absolute, the last drawn from the final period when Nisargadatta Maharaj was dying of throat cancer. Robert Powell assembled further anthologies from tape recordings, including The Ultimate Medicine and The Nectar of Immortality. These are closer to the recorded sessions than I Am That and show a noticeably different emphasis.

How do you practice i am meditation the way Nisargadatta Maharaj taught it?

The practice is to locate the wordless sense that you exist and keep attention on it, returning whenever attention drifts. Sit somewhere ordinary; posture is not the point and Nisargadatta Maharaj never made requirements about it. Close your eyes and let the breath settle for a minute without managing it. Then notice that you are here. Not your body, not your name, not the day you have had, but the plain fact of being present, which is evident before you think about it. That noticing is the object. Stay with it. Within seconds the mind will supply commentary, a memory, a plan for tomorrow; each time, drop the content and come back to the bare sense of being, without arguing with the thought. Ten to twenty minutes is plenty, once in the morning and once in the evening. The second half of the practice happens outside the session: several times during the day, in a queue or on a walk, stop for thirty seconds and find the same sense of being while your eyes are open and life is going on around you.

Three errors account for most of the difficulty. The first is turning I am into a mantra and repeating the words, which produces a pleasant verbal loop and nothing else; the words point at a felt sense and should be dropped once the sense is located. The second is looking for a specific experience, a light or a rush, and treating its absence as failure. Nothing is supposed to happen. The third is trying to find the sense of being somewhere, usually behind the eyes or in the chest, which turns the practice into body scanning. It has no location. Expect the first two weeks to be dull, and expect drowsiness, since attention with no content resembles the approach to sleep. If you want a measure of progress, the honest one is not how long you sit but how often the sense of being turns up unprompted during an ordinary day, and that increases over months rather than days.

How long did Nisargadatta Maharaj say the practice takes?

He gave no schedule and was dismissive of questions about timing, though accounts of his own case describe him holding to his teacher's instruction steadily for roughly three years after meeting Siddharameshwar Maharaj in 1933. Nisargadatta Maharaj credited the result to taking the instruction on trust and not deviating from it rather than to any technique. Treat that as his account of himself, not a timetable.

Can you practice i am meditation while working?

Yes, and Nisargadatta Maharaj arranged his own life that way, running a shop while teaching upstairs. The portable version is brief and frequent: pause during whatever you are doing, register the sense of being for a few breaths without closing your eyes, then carry on. This is the part most readers skip and it is the part that makes the sitting worth anything, because the aim is a sense of being that survives contact with an ordinary Tuesday.

What should you do when nothing seems to be happening?

Continue, and stop checking. The flatness is expected, because the sense of being has no features to enjoy and the mind reads featurelessness as failure. If the practice becomes genuinely inert for weeks, shorten the sessions rather than lengthening them and add more short daytime pauses. Nisargadatta Maharaj generally answered this complaint by pointing out that the one who is bored and impatient is exactly the assumed person the practice is examining.

What did Nisargadatta Maharaj mean by going prior to consciousness?

In his later years Nisargadatta Maharaj shifted emphasis from resting in the sense I am to what is there before the sense I am appears. His argument was that consciousness itself is a temporary phenomenon. It arises with the body, is sustained by food, lapses every night in deep sleep, and ends when the body ends. If that is so, then the I am, however subtle and however far it is from ordinary self-image, is still an appearance and therefore still not what you ultimately are. What he pointed to beyond it he described in negative terms, as the state prior to consciousness, prior to beingness, corresponding to what Vedanta calls the Absolute or Parabrahman. He also redefined birth in these terms: what was born was not you but the sense of being, which appeared some time in infancy and will disappear. The practical consequence is that the I am is a tool. You take it up, use it to get free of identification with the person, and are eventually finished with it too. This is the material that dominates the late talks edited by Jean Dunn.

The shift explains why the books disagree in tone. I Am That mostly urges the reader toward the sense of being and treats it as the goal worth reaching; the late transcripts treat it as an intermediate position and press past it, sometimes bluntly enough to disturb readers who arrived through the earlier book. Whether this is a change in Nisargadatta Maharaj's own understanding, a change in what he thought worth saying to the visitors in front of him, or an artifact of who was translating, cannot be settled from the printed record alone. What can be said is that the later material is less consoling. It offers no continuing individual, no personal afterlife and no reassurance about the survival of anything you recognize as yourself. Readers looking for comfort about death do not find it there. These are his claims about what precedes and outlasts experience, not demonstrated facts, and he offered no evidence for them beyond the instruction to look.

Did Nisargadatta Maharaj believe in reincarnation?

He treated the question as badly posed. Nisargadatta Maharaj argued that what people call birth is the arising of the sense of being and what they call death is its disappearance, so there is no persisting individual to travel between lives. He would sometimes accept rebirth as a description of how things look from inside the assumption of being a person, then dismantle the assumption. It is a colder position than most popular presentations of Indian spirituality.

What is the difference between the I am and the Absolute in advaita nisargadatta?

The I am is the first appearance, the sense of being that comes with the body and goes with it, and in nisargadatta teachings it is the working tool of the whole practice. The Absolute is what Nisargadatta Maharaj said remains when even that appearance is gone, and it cannot be experienced, since experience requires the consciousness that has been set aside. He described it only by negation, which is why the late talks can feel like a series of withdrawals rather than a description.

Where did nisargadatta teachings come from?

Nisargadatta Maharaj took his teaching from Siddharameshwar Maharaj, whom he met in 1933 and who died in 1936, and through him from the Inchegiri branch of the Navnath Sampradaya, a Maharashtrian lineage whose earlier teacher Bhausaheb Maharaj emphasized sustained mantra repetition. Siddharameshwar's contribution was to push the line toward a more direct approach, distinguishing between a slow accumulative path and a faster one that goes straight at the question of identity, a distinction preserved in the talks published in English as Master of Self-Realization and Amrut Laya. That direct approach is what Nisargadatta Maharaj received and then taught for four decades. Behind the lineage sits the Marathi devotional tradition of the poet-saints Dnyaneshwar, Eknath and Tukaram, and the manual of Samarth Ramdas, the Dasbodh. This background is easy to miss in the English books, because Frydman's I Am That presents the teaching almost as bare philosophy. In the room it came with mantra initiation for those who wanted it, with morning and evening devotional singing, and with a photograph of Siddharameshwar Maharaj that he treated with unmistakable reverence.

The devotional side complicates the way he is usually read in the West. A teacher who says there is no person and no path is easy to turn into an argument, and harder to turn into one if he is also singing to his guru's picture twice a day. Nisargadatta Maharaj saw no tension there; in his framing devotion to the teacher is a use of the sense of being rather than a belief about a man. He also credited his own result to obedience: he was told what to attend to, he believed his teacher rather than his own doubts, and he did it. That is a lineage attitude, and it sits awkwardly with the self-directed way most readers now approach the books. Anyone taking up the practice from a book alone is taking the method without the container it grew in, which is workable but is a departure from the original arrangement.

Who was Siddharameshwar Maharaj?

Siddharameshwar Maharaj was the teacher of the Inchegiri line who initiated Nisargadatta Maharaj in 1933 and died in 1936, and his talks have since been published in English as Master of Self-Realization and Amrut Laya. He argued that the traditional slow route of accumulated practice could be replaced by a direct examination of what one takes oneself to be. Nisargadatta Maharaj consistently credited him for everything and made no claim to have invented the method himself.

What is the Navnath Sampradaya?

The Navnath Sampradaya is an Indian lineage tracing itself to nine legendary adepts, the nine Naths, with branches spread across western India and a strong presence in Maharashtra. The Inchegiri branch, to which Nisargadatta Maharaj belonged through Siddharameshwar Maharaj and Bhausaheb Maharaj before him, combined mantra practice and devotional singing with Advaita instruction. Its historical claims about the nine Naths are traditional and hagiographic rather than documented history.

Who did Nisargadatta Maharaj influence?

The clearest line of influence runs through the people who translated and edited him. Maurice Frydman produced I Am That and effectively created his Western reputation. Ramesh Balsekar, a Bank of India executive who translated at the sessions during the later years, went on to teach in his own right in Bombay and drew a substantial Western following, and teachers who studied with Balsekar, among them Wayne Liquorman, carried a version of the material further. Jean Dunn edited the final talks and Robert Powell assembled anthologies from the tapes. Beyond that circle, I Am That became one of the standard texts of the Western nondual scene from the 1970s onward and is cited constantly by teachers who never met Nisargadatta Maharaj. He founded no organization, appointed no successor that can be documented, and left no institutional structure, so claims of transmission from him are difficult to verify. His influence traveled through a book, which is a different thing from a lineage.

The influence also runs in a direction he would probably not have chosen. Because the teaching can be compressed into a few striking sentences, it lends itself to being quoted rather than practiced, and a great deal of what now circulates under his name is a slogan detached from the sustained attention he asked for. Writers who spent time in the room, David Godman among those who have described the scene in detail, have pointed out how much of the arrangement drops out of the popular picture: the mantra, the singing, the tradition, the years of unglamorous effort. What survives in transmission is the epigram, and that is unusually pronounced in his case because I Am That is so quotable. A reader coming to him now receives him through several layers, translation, editing, and forty years of secondary use.

Who was Ramesh Balsekar?

Ramesh Balsekar was an Indian banker who translated for Nisargadatta Maharaj during the later years of the talks and afterwards taught independently in Bombay, drawing many Western students and publishing extensively. His own emphasis fell heavily on the absence of personal doership. Whether that emphasis reflects Nisargadatta Maharaj accurately or reflects Balsekar's own reading is genuinely disputed among people who attended the sessions, and readers should hold the two teachers apart.

Did Nisargadatta Maharaj have Western students?

Yes, particularly in the last decade of his life once I Am That circulated abroad. The American editor Jean Dunn worked closely with him in the final years and prepared the late talks for publication, and the Dutch teacher Alexander Smit was among the European visitors who came to the Khetwadi room. Nisargadatta Maharaj gave mantra initiation to some foreign visitors, which was not universally approved of by traditionalists within his own milieu.

How does advaita nisargadatta differ from Ramana Maharshi's self-inquiry?

The nearest adjacent teacher is Ramana Maharshi, and the methods differ in a way that matters in practice. Ramana Maharshi taught atma vichara, the question who am I, in which attention traces the I-thought back toward its source and the question is used as a lever. Nisargadatta Maharaj did not ask a question; he told visitors to stay with the answer already given, the bare sense of being, and simply not leave it. One approach interrogates, the other abides. The circumstances differ as much as the method. Ramana Maharshi lived from adolescence at Arunachala in Tamil Nadu, in an ashram that grew up around him, and was known for silence and gentleness. Nisargadatta Maharaj was a married Bombay shopkeeper who argued with people in a cramped upstairs room and could be brusque to the point of rudeness with visitors he thought were wasting his time. Both worked toward the same Advaita conclusion, but the temperature is not the same and neither is the entry point.

Two further comparisons are worth drawing. Against Jiddu Krishnamurti, who rejected method, tradition and authority outright, Nisargadatta Maharaj looks conservative: he kept a lineage, kept a mantra, kept devotion to his teacher, and gave a specific instruction to be repeated daily. Against the neo-Advaita teachers who quote him, he looks demanding, because they typically drop the practice and the tradition while keeping the conclusion that there is nobody to practice. Against Ramana Maharshi again, the useful distinction for a beginner is what to do when the mind supplies an answer. In Ramana Maharshi's method any answer becomes fresh material for the question. In the approach of Nisargadatta Maharaj there is no question to feed, so answers are content to be dropped as you return to the sense of being. People whose self-inquiry turns into internal debate often do better with the second, and people who find bare abiding driftless do better with the first.

Should a beginner start with Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta Maharaj?

Either works, and the choice is mostly temperamental. Ramana Maharshi's who am I gives the mind something active to do and suits people who need a handle. The instruction from Nisargadatta Maharaj to rest in the sense of being is simpler to state and harder to sustain, and suits people who already find quiet attention natural. Trying to run both at once usually produces confusion, so pick one and give it a few months before switching.

Did Nisargadatta Maharaj criticize other teachers?

He said very little about other teachers and generally refused to compare traditions, treating such questions as a distraction from the visitor's own practice. Nisargadatta Maharaj was more likely to attack the questioner's motive for asking than the teacher being asked about. What he did criticize sharply was the accumulation of spiritual information, including information taken from his own talks, on the grounds that it substitutes reading for attention.

What criticism and controversy surround Nisargadatta Maharaj?

The most substantial criticism concerns the record rather than the man. Nisargadatta Maharaj spoke Marathi and almost everything available in English passed through interpreters of uneven skill, so the question of what he actually said is live. People who attended the sessions, including David Godman, have described noticeable differences between translators and have noted that Maurice Frydman's I Am That reads far more literary and expansive than the terse spoken Marathi. The renderings associated with Ramesh Balsekar are disputed in a sharper way, with the objection that Balsekar's own emphasis on the absence of doership shaped the answers he produced. Beyond translation, traditional Vedantins have criticized him for lacking scriptural training and formal qualification, since he was a shopkeeper with no Sanskrit learning who never took sannyasa. Personal criticism is mostly a matter of temperament: visitors' accounts describe him shouting at questioners and dismissing people abruptly. He also sold and smoked beedis for most of his life and died of throat cancer.

There is no documented scandal here of the kind attached to several twentieth-century Indian teachers, no financial empire, no allegations of abuse, and no organization that could have concealed one. That is worth stating plainly, because absence of controversy is itself part of the record. The substantive limits are elsewhere. His central claims, about what precedes birth and outlasts consciousness, are not testable and were never presented with argument or evidence; they are assertions to be tried out, and a reader who treats them as established fact has misread the situation. The practice is also poorly suited to some people. It gives no support for depression, anxiety disorders or trauma, and sustained attention to bare existence can intensify dissociation or derealization in anyone prone to it. Anyone in acute distress needs treatment rather than this, and anyone who wants a teaching that improves ordinary life will find that Nisargadatta Maharaj declined to offer one.

Is I Am That an accurate record of what Nisargadatta Maharaj said?

It is an accurate record of the teaching and an unreliable record of the sentences. Maurice Frydman compiled and translated it with a heavy editorial hand, and witnesses have said the English is smoother and more elaborate than the Marathi it came from. This is not an accusation of bad faith; Frydman was producing a readable book from spoken exchanges. It does mean that quoting I Am That as the literal words of Nisargadatta Maharaj overstates what the text can support.

Who should avoid nisargadatta teachings?

Anyone in acute psychiatric distress, anyone currently working through trauma, and anyone with a history of dissociation or derealization should approach this material cautiously or not at all, since prolonged attention to bare existence with no grounding object can make those states worse. It also suits nobody who needs structure, progress markers or community, because Nisargadatta Maharaj provided none of those. Practical life problems need practical help, which he did not pretend to supply.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Nisargadatta Maharaj write any of his own books?

Almost none. Nisargadatta Maharaj taught by talking, in Marathi, to whoever climbed the stairs to his room, and the books that carry his name are transcripts of those exchanges assembled by visitors, translators and editors. I Am That was compiled by Maurice Frydman, the late talks were edited by Jean Dunn, and Robert Powell assembled further anthologies from tape recordings. A small amount of Marathi material is attributed more directly to him, but the body of work in English is a record made by other people, which is why different volumes can sound like different men.

Which Nisargadatta Maharaj book should you read first?

Start with I Am That, the 1973 collection translated by Maurice Frydman, because it is the fullest single record and the one everything else responds to. Read it in short passages rather than straight through; the dialogues repeat deliberately. After that, the late talks edited by Jean Dunn, Prior to Consciousness and Consciousness and the Absolute, show Nisargadatta Maharaj pressing past the sense of being altogether. If the early book feels too polished, the late ones are blunter and closer to the room.

How long should you sit for i am meditation?

Ten to twenty minutes, once or twice a day, is enough to start, and short repeated sessions suit this practice better than long ones. The aim is not endurance but familiarity, so that the sense of being can be noticed while you are walking, waiting or working. Attention on bare existence tends to thin out after fifteen or twenty minutes and turn into daydreaming. Stopping while it is still clear, then picking it up again later in the day, keeps the thread live.

Do you need a guru or a mantra to follow nisargadatta teachings?

Not for the core practice, though Nisargadatta Maharaj himself worked within a tradition that used both. He belonged to the Navnath Sampradaya through the Inchegiri line, gave a mantra to visitors who asked, and kept daily devotional singing in his room. He also told questioners repeatedly that attention to the sense of being was the essential thing and that they already had everything required for it. A reader can take the instruction and work with it alone; what a reader cannot get alone is correction from someone watching the practice go wrong.

Is advaita nisargadatta the same thing as neo-Advaita?

No, though neo-Advaita teachers quote him constantly. Nisargadatta Maharaj asked visitors to do something sustained over months and years, held to a lineage with mantra and devotional practice, and treated the sense I am as a discipline rather than a slogan. The neo-Advaita position, associated with the wider circle around Ramesh Balsekar and later Western teachers, tends to say there is no one to practice and no path to walk, so effort is beside the point. Critics of that position argue it borrows his conclusions and discards the work he asked for.

What did Nisargadatta Maharaj die of?

Throat cancer. Nisargadatta Maharaj died in Bombay on 8 September 1981, having been ill and visibly declining through the previous year while still receiving visitors and speaking, often with difficulty. He had sold and smoked hand-rolled beedi cigarettes for much of his working life, a point critics raise and admirers pass over. The talks recorded during that final period, edited by Jean Dunn, are the harshest and most stripped down material attributed to him.

How is i am meditation different from mindfulness meditation?

Mindfulness practice attends to changing content: breath, sensation, sound, thought as it comes and goes. The i am meditation associated with Nisargadatta Maharaj deliberately ignores content and attends to the fact of being aware at all, the wordless sense that you exist, which does not change while the content does. Mindfulness usually aims at a workable relationship with experience, including calmer attention and less reactivity. Nisargadatta Maharaj was not offering that; he argued that sustained attention to bare existence eventually shows the person you take yourself to be is not what you are.