bobby devito

In the 1970s, seekers from Europe and America climbed a narrow staircase in a crowded Bombay neighbourhood to sit with an old man in a tiny room. He had no ashram, no organisation and no credentials. For most of his life, he had sold cheap cigarettes. His name was Maruti Kambli. He was born in 1897, grew up in a village, and moved to Bombay as a young man to support his family after his father died. He started as a junior clerk. Then he opened a small shop selling bidis, the cheap hand-rolled cigarettes of India’s working poor. In time he owned eight of them. He married and had four children. Nothing about him looked spiritual.. In 1933, a friend took him to meet a teacher named Siddharameshwar Maharaj. The teacher gave him one instruction. You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Stay with the simple sense of "I AM," and give your attention to nothing else. Most people would have nodded and gone home. Maruti did exactly what he was told. Between customers, while counting money, while walking home, he kept returning to that bare feeling of being. Not "I am a shopkeeper." Not "I am a father." Just "I am." Three years later, his teacher died. In 1937, Maruti left Bombay and wandered across India for about eight months. On the journey home, something in him settled for good. As he later put it, nothing was wrong anymore. But here is the part almost nobody knows. He went back to the shop. He kept selling cigarettes for almost thirty more years. He lost his wife, and later a daughter. He kept going to work, and he kept answering anyone who climbed up to his little room with a question. The world would come to know him as: Nisargadatta Maharaj. In 1973, a Polish-born seeker named Maurice Frydman translated his talks into English. The major publishers turned the book down, so a small Indian press printed it instead. It was called I Am That. Today it is considered one of the great classics of non-duality. And the people who climbed his stairs got the same answer the shopkeeper got in 1933. Ask him about chakras, past lives or visions, and he would wave it away and turn you back to the one who was asking. Think about what that means. One of the clearest teachers of the 20th century never lived in a cave. He never wore robes. He never left his street. The instruction that changed his life fit between two customers. Most of us are waiting for the right conditions. > The retreat. > The quiet house. > The year we’ll finally have time. As if what we are can only be found somewhere else. He didn’t need a different life. He needed to find out who was living this one.