I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj: Before the Labels

Ask someone who they are and the answer usually includes a role: engineer, parent, founder, friend. Those descriptions help us place one another. In I Am That, Nisargadatta Maharaj asks us to attend to the sense of being before supplying the description.

That makes the book an interesting companion to Ramana Maharshi’s Who Am I?. Both invite an investigation of identity, though reading them as interchangeable instructions can flatten their individual voices.

What is I Am That about?

I Am That is a collection of dialogues with Nisargadatta, translated from Marathi by Maurice Frydman and edited by Sudhakar S. Dikshit. Its opening chapter turns towards the sense “I am”. Throughout the dialogues, the distinction between awareness and identification with a particular person is central. See the text and its opening dialogue.

Nisargadatta is making claims about reality and the Self. The argument needs to be read as spiritual philosophy; an experience of noticing thoughts cannot establish all of it.

When a description becomes a condition of worth

Imagine someone who has led a team for many years. The role ends, and the calendar becomes unusually quiet. Losing the work may bring practical concerns. But another difficulty can appear: without the role, it becomes harder to say who one is.

The role named a responsibility. After it ends, the person still has a life to account for, but may no longer know how to introduce it.

The same can happen with less flattering identities. Someone who once failed begins treating “failure” as a permanent name. A regretted decision becomes an entire biography. We can be attached to an accusation against ourselves as firmly as to a compliment.