~ Sharings

by Apa B. Pant

Maurice Frydman

by Apa B. Pant
(Ed. by Nadhia Sutara)

[This article first appeared in the 1991 volume of Mountain Path,
the magazine of Sri Ramanasramam, in Tiruvannamalai, South India.]

Maurice Frydman was remarkable for recognizing spiritual greatness but never seeking the limelight himself. Maharshi’s Gospel, the first English selection of Sri Bhagavan’s talks, which has been guiding seekers since 1939, was compiled and edited by him, though published anonymously. In his whole life, he never signed or tok credit for any of his groundbreaking work. The sole exception occurred towards the end of his life when “discovered” Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, the Bombay saint and beedie seller, whose teachings so closely resemble Sri Ramana Maharshi’s. His book on Nisargadatta’s teaching – I Am That – was an instant success. Maharaj not only vetted the book before publication and acclaimed Frydman as one who fully understood his teaching but also, after Frydman’s death, he used to daily decorate his portrait with flowers and vermillion along with those of other saints and deities in his room.

Frydman moved closely with J. Krishnamurti for more than fifty years, having met the sage in Europe even before the split with the Theosophical Society, and was his most earnest and dogged questioner, truly living up to Krishnaji’s insistence that nothing be accepted merely ‘on authority’, but rather as the product of one’s persistent questioning and inner felicity. Krishnaji, we are told, never refused a debate with Maurice Frydman.

Frydman was a staunch Gandhian and was very close to the Mahatma, working on a variety of projects, including the designing of the most effective of Gandhiji’s charkas (spinning wheels), the danush-takli. It was so efficient that Ghandhiji was heard to joke: “I’m trying to make more jobs for people, Maurice, not less!’

Sri Swami Ramdas, who gave Frydman sannyas in the 30s, is known to have told him that this was his last birth!

Frydman’s personal biography is no less exceptional. In collecting material on this most extraordinary individual, Mountain Path sought the assistance of Apa B. Pant, retired Indian diplomat and Prince of Aundh, who was Frydman’s intimate friend and disciple for forty years. The following is Sri Pant’s account of his guru’s early life and their subsequent unique relationship.

~~Editor

I must indeed have earned a great deal of punya (spiritual merit) in many a past life to have deserved to meet with such a unique guide, friend and philosopher as Swami Bharatananda, alias Maurice Frydman. Although he ever kept his personality in the background, his influence on events and individuals, always operating simultaneously at different levels of consciousness, has been incalculable.

It was Maurice who was the active instrument for me to meet four of the greatest sages of our times. He propelled me to Sri Ramana Maharshi within a few months of my arrival from England in 1937 after the completion of my studies. With Sri J. Krishnamurti, an encounter that was to last over fifty years started at the instigation of Maurice. It was also Maurice who introduced me to Mahatma Gandhi and I thenceforth became a regular visitor at Sevagram. And finally in 1975, only a few weeks before he left the body, his last act was that of taking me to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

His life of experimentation and of experience was linked up with the message and work of these four great souls. But Maurice made us all – his friends and devotees – fellow-pilgrims on his path, urging, advising, often brow-beating us to be sincere, simple, truthful. He would steadily gaze at you, look into you, through you, with those kindly, piercing eyes silently, compassionately, and uncover instantly all your quirks and problems, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. He would then relentlessly take you to task for your lapses and immediately offer correct, direct, but often undigestible and even disturbing advice. Revolutionary changes have been brought into many lives after a moment’s contact with Maurice Frydman.

That is exactly what happened to me that November in 1937 when I was unexpectedly confronted with Maurice Frydman in Bangalore.

I had just returned from a four-and-a-half-year study period at Oxford and London, a very bright-eyed young lad who imagined himself to be a “revolutionary communist”. I wanted to fight the British Raj and establish communism in India – in fact, a new utopia! I was my father’s, Raj Bhawanrao’s, eldest surviving son. He was 61 years old then, and I was 25. He understood my enthusiasm and also my impulsiveness. He arranged for me to get a 3-month “training” in administration in Mysore State, then the most ideal and well-run of the 675 princely states of India.

Father also gave me a private secretary to look after me, a chauffeur together with a new car, and a servant. Within one week of my arrival in Bangalore I was in full form and thoroughly enjoying myself with this period of “princely” training.

A strict timetable of “visits to institutions and factories”, followed by “briefings and discussions” was arranged. One such visit was to the Government electrical factory on the outskirts of Bangalore. Sri Bharatananda – Maurice Frydman – had been its Director and Chief Executive since 1935.

Being “foreign returned” and a Prince, I was habituated to being treated very deferentially. I, on my side, always wore my best Oxford accent and a condescending princely smile with assumed courtesy. Maurice, on the other hand, was in a very bad mood. A year before, he had taken sannyas and had begun to live according to his vows. When it was reported to Sir Mirza Ismail that his brilliant and efficient Engineer Director had shaved his head and taken sannyas, that he went to work in saffron robes, begged for his daily bread, and gave away all his wages (Rs 3,000 per month) to the poor and needy, the Grand Vizier was furious.

He sent for “that Mr. Frydman” to remind him that he had hired an engineer, not a sannyasi and forbade him henceforth to wear gerua. Maurice, on his side, proferred his resignation on the spot, saying that how and what he ate or wore was his personal matter, and that he must be free to follow his own patter of life so long as “I satisfy all those concerned with the quality of my work as an engineer and manager.” A compromise was finally reached according to which Maurice would have to wear European or Mysore dress only when a VIP visited the factory. As he had to put on a suit for my sake, Maurice was in his darkest mood!

As I got out of the car, Maurice was waiting on the doorstep, but instead of returning my smile, he gruffly said, “Well, young Prince, do you know anything of electricity or will I be wasting my time on you?”

I, of course, quickly stepped back into the car and started to slam the door shut, when Maurice realized his mistake and almost dragged me out of the car. “I did not mean to offend you. Forgive me”, he apologized, and I saw for the first time that winning smile spread over his suntanned face. Within five minutes of all this drama, our vibrations had clicked. And they remained clicked for forty years, until his death on 9th March 1976, and further, till this present time.

From the word go, I was deeply impressed by Maurice’s systematic, well-ordered, highly disciplined personality. His intelligence was overpowering, his simplicity scintillating; his spontaneous, genuine love overwhelming. There was nothing false, superficial or superfluous about Maurice. His response to his environment was always razor-sharp and instantaneous, always compassionate. There was never a gap between what the saw and felt and his immediate action. If he saw a beggar in rags he gave him all his food and shirt as well without ever theorizing about it. There were no dogmas, no theories, no hypotheses; only spontaneous, direct action. He belonged to no political party, religion or “ism”.

Once, in Bombay in 1943, my wife Nalini, who was then practicing surgery (gynaecology) in the villages of my father’s state, Aundh, was talking with him of her work-plan. She spoke of the financial difficulties of poor Aundh in acquiring even the necessary rudimentary equipment. Maurice asked, “How much money do you require immediately?” Nalini said offhand, “Ten thousand rupees”, which was then a large sum. Next morning in walks Murice with Rs. 10,000 – in Rs.100 notes!

“Nalini, start work!” he said. That was the way my guru taught: direct, compassionate action, by practical example.

Maurice Frydman was born in 1894 in the Jewish ghetto of Krakow in Southern Poland, then a part of tsarist Russia.

From the accounts that Maurice gave out grudgingly from time to time during our long and close association, it seems that his family was very poor. His father, a devout Jew, worked in the synagogue. His mother sewed, washed clothes and cooked, and brought up her children as best she could, though there was hardly any money to do so. Maurice did not taste white bread until he was thirteen. He acquired his first toothbrush when he was fifteen!

But Maurice was a born genius. He was reading and writing in the Cyrillic, Roman and Hebrew alphabets, and speaking fluent Russian, Polish, French, English and Hebrew before he was ten. His father wanted Maurice, his eldest son, to become a rabbi and lead a secure, holy and useful life of service to the “chosen people”, who were suffering under the heel of tsarist authority and thus help them survive the persecution generated by the prevalent racial intolerance. However, Maurice’s capabilities were early recognized by his teachers, who thus enabled him to accomplish the all-too-rare feat of a Jew entering the tsarist Russian school in his area. He proved himself exceptionally brilliant and, having stood first amongst 500 boys in his high school final examinations, he sat for the Central Scholarship Examination and got 95%, standing first in the province of Poland. For this he received a State scholarship, and opted for what was then his strongest urge, a course in electrical engineering. Before he was 20 he had about 100 patents to his name for his electrical and mechanical inventions, of which a “talking book” was one.

Soon he was picked up by the laboratories and then research institutes, and by 1925 had traveled over much of Europe and worked in German, Dutch and Danish industrial establishments.

By the age of 25, however, what was to be his life-long urge had come desperately to the surface. He wanted to “see God”. For a few years he had seriously studied the Talmud and other Jewish religious books. Judaism, however, did not satisfy for long the incisive, logical, courageous, non-dogmatic mind of Maurice.

He then converted to Russian Orthodoxy and became a monk, retreating to a solitary monastery in the Carpathian mountains in Southern Poland. One incident during this period clearly illustrates Maurice’s character. It seems that one day “Satan” tempted him to jump over a mighty waterfall to ”prove his faith” in Jesus Christ and the Church. So this intrepid seeker after truth immediately jumped down a 100-foot precipice! He was saved by a few shrubs in which his cassock got entangled. This was typical Maurice! This is what inspired and was loved by thousands during his 78-year span of life on this earth.

By 1926 Maurice had got “sick and tired”, as he once told us, of all orthodox dogmas. “Believe this, don’t do this, do this, follow me – didn’t suit me,” he said. He wanted to seek freely everywhere and try desperately to find out for himself “what all this is about”. It was at about this time that he came in touch with the Theosophical Society and met Annie Besant and J. Krishnamurti. In the Swiss Alps and many times in Saanen in Holland, he met Krishnaji. For nearly fifty years Maurice was “very, very close to Krishnaji”, and the most serious and obstinate questioner of this great seer.

By 1928 he was ready to emigrate to France in search of a job and “new adventures”, as he put it. He arrived in Paris with high hopes, no money and nowhere to stay. But soon he saw an advertisement in Paris Soir about a new electrical factory that was being started in the outskirts of the city. He applied and was immediately accepted. By 1934 he had become General Manager of the factory.

All this while, his real urge to “find and meet God” was not forgotten. He read voraciously books on religion, mysticism and occultism. He continuously experimented on himself with whatever practice he was reading about in the vast section on these subjects in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris.

Then suddenly he hit upon Vedanta. In translation (French and German) he pored over the Upanishads, the Gita, the Mahabharata. Paul Brunton’s books on Ramana Maharshi attracted him greatly. This was his first introduction to the great master and what was, for Maurice, the greatest revelation: “Who am I?”

During this period, Maurice’s one and incessant wish was to reach India somehow. Any wish, when it becomes desperately urgent, is fulfilled, and this was what happened to Maurice.

In 1935 Sir Mirza Ismail, the extraordinary and visionary Diwan of Mysore was on a tour of England and Europe, seeking to recruit able engineering and managerial talent for the projected Government Electrical Factory in Bangalore. The Government had suggested that he visit some important factories in France to facilitate his search. This search led him to the very factory of which Maurice was the Managing Director.

How deeply impressed was this remarkable administrator and statesman, Sir Mirza Ismail, by the personality and work of Maurice Frydman can be gauged by the remark he casually made during his two-hour visit. “Mr. Frydman, I wish you were free to come and at least visit us in Mysore and advise us about development.” Sri Mirza had in mind a replica of this very Paris factory in far-off Bangalore.

Maurice’s reply was again typical of him: “Sir, my bags are packed. I am ready to leave with you!”

Thus Maurice came to India, his dream country, and fulfilled not only his own destiny but helped many like me to fulfill theirs, too.

Within two years of his arrival Maurice had the Government Electrical factory in Bangalore producing transformers, switch-gears, resistors, insulators – all that was urgently required to satisfy the growing need for electrical energy in this modern, progressive state.

Within six months of his arrival in India, Maurice had become an ardent disciple of Sri Ramana Maharshi, the sage of Arunachala. He worked in Bangalore all week and then hurried to Tirunvannamalai to spend his weekends with the Maharshi. Maurice had begged Sri Bhagavan to grant him sannyas. He said he wanted to renounce the world and seek enlightenment. Sri Bhagavan characteristically refused him sannyas saying, “I have no ochre clothes for you, Sir, and you do not need them!”

But Maurice was nothing if he was not pugnaciously adamant and self-willed. He went to Swami Ramdas at Anandashram in Kanhangad and took his vows from him. A Hindu name, Swami Bharatananda, was given to him. He shaved his head, threw away his European clothes, dressed in the saffron robes of a mendicant, and vowed to beg for his food – for which purposes he went to the extent of procuring a traditional begging bowl. This was also typical of Maurice. There was never with him anything “put on” or for show, hypocritical, false or sham. He was always 1,00,000% genuine and it was this earnest adherence to conviction followed by immediate, spontaneous action that spurred him on to fulfill his desire for renunciation when once it had emerged in his soul. But the outward garb and rigid ideas about the meaning of sannyas gradually fell away from him due to his continued contact with Ramana Maharshi and J. Krishnamurti. By 1947 he was free of these externalities.

But this was not before he had his confrontation with Sir Mirza which resulted in our rather stormy first meeting.

From the very first day we met, after the initial conflict, Maurice, as it were, “took me in hand”. Without my knowing it, he started to guide me to the correct path for me. He was far, far ahead of me but would lovingly, patiently wait for me to catch up with him. He was never angry or irritated by my innumerable “princely” (and other) stupidities.

I do not know when we truly became “fellow-pilgrims”. But on that pleasantly cool December morning in 1937 when we reached Ramanashram I felt that something very, very strange and significant was happening to me and that without him to lead me, “IT” could not be happening to me at all.

I think we stayed at the Ashram for a few days. Maurice made me do my daily suryanamaskars in front of the Maharshi. Sri Bhagavan only smiled and said, “After a couple of hours of meditation this sadhana is good for you to loosen up your limbs”. I have never forgotten it, and even at this age (79) I remember those words when I wake up to samsara each dawn and do my suryanamaskars.

At Ramanashram there was simply “NOTHING” – no talk, no listening, no questions, no hoping, no fear, no prayer, no movements of the mind or the intellect at all. But my turbulent, arrogant ego had nothing to grasp on to. In a way it was bewildered but watchful of itself. But it was constantly lost. I could not “figure” it at all.

The first night Maurice and I were in a small hut sleeping on mattresses on the floor. The whole night I heard voices arguing loudly, trumpets blaring, and the beating of big and small drums. I was certain that I did not get a wink of sleep all night.

When I, not a little irritated, shouted at Maurice about all this “hullabaloo” during the night, he said, “Apa, there was no noise. All was joyfully peaceful! Your tortured mind alone made all the noise. Watch it.”

I learned later that the mind may be extremely subtle. It may work faster than the speed of light, yet often it takes longer than your body to make a journey, so that you arrive, as it were, in two installments. Maurice often refused to speak with me for a full twenty-four hours, saying, “Apa, your body only has arrived. I will wait till you arrive before I communicate with you.”

Almost immediately afterwards, Maurice took me to J. Krishnamurti. Krishnaji was spending a few days in Poona that winter, and Rausahib Partwardhan, Achyut Patwardhan, Maurice and I spent as much time as he would allow us during those ten glorious days.

I marveled at the incisive brilliance and insight of Maurice as he challenged and argued almost every point with Krishnaji. It was not the challenge of the arrogant or self-assured pandit. Rather, Maurice responded to what Krishnaji was explaining through his own immediate experience of what he was saying. He was experiencing it at that very moment. In that “duel” between the two of them, there was no memory of the past or any conjecture about the future. It was all happening Now and Here, from moment to moment. It was ever fresh, new and fragrant.

During my fateful visit to Bangalore in 1937, Maurice and I had planned one innovation after another for my father’s small, impoverished state of Aundh. The atmosphere hummed with new ideas and plans for the development of village communities and the introduction of science and technology into them, which was a particularly keen issue with Maurice. “Science and technology must be taken to the villages and made simple for the use of the peasants,” he declared. Thus inspired, I had gone to pay my farewell call on Sir Mirza Ismail. I wanted him to “loan” Maurice to me for six months so that we two together could chalk out a plan for the development of the 75 villages of Aundh. When I had made my appeal, Sir Mirza looked glum and said, “Let your father, the Rajasaheb, write to me, and we will see what we can do for you.”

When the letter from Aundh went out to Bangalore with my father’s signature, back came the answer: “We cannot spare the services of Mr. Maurice Frydman at the moment.” In diplomatic language “at the moment” always means “never” and also “do not write again”. Period

Sir Mirza should have realised that his refusal to lend Maurice to Aundh for a short while would have the opposite effect. And so it happened that as I sat brooding one morning in the Rama Hall of my father’s palace, in walks Maurice Frydman with a bundle of gerua clothes at the end of a stick!

“I have come, Apa,” he said simply. “Sir Mirza cannot dictate to me. I am nobody’s slave. I have left Mysore and come to stay with your permanently. Let us work!”

“Good God!” I exclaimed…. “But…”, I spluttered, “Aundh State cannot afford to pay you Rs.3,000 per month and give you a free house and a car and an office! Why, the highest paid official in the State, the Diwan, gets Rs. 75 with the Muslim chauffeur, Haji Master, next at Rs.70!”

Maurice laughed his rumbling, guttural laugh. “I shall sleep in that corner on the floor, opposite you. Give me an Indian desk of the old style to write on. Your mother will feed me. I have my legs to walk on. You can also walk with me. That is all. We will work together for Aundh. Now give me food!”

That was typical Maurice. Telegraphic, often Morse-code-style staccato speech which carried the necessary meaning without a superfluous word.

It was the pen of Maurice that wrote down the inspired ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, bringing decentralized democracy to the villages of the state of Aundh, which was then ruled by my father.

This “rash” act upset not only the British, but also the other princely states, whose rulers never thought of any authority other than themselves as supreme in their states. Thus we soon found ourselves in that famous mud hut talking with the Mahatma.

The Mahatma briefly greeted Swami Bharatananda with, “So you have caught hold of the poor Raja of Aundh now, and left the rich one in Mysore to his destiny?” The Mahatma then went directly to the point and suggested that in fact the ruler should be “the first servant of the people and the keeper of their conscience”. The drama of all these happenings I have related in two of my books, A Moment in Time and An Unusual Raja, both published by Orient Longman.

After returning from the epoch-making visit to the Mahatma, Maurice literally buried himself in the wilderness of Aundh. He went about on foot visiting each of the 75 villages of the state, and then set up his headquarters under a thorn acacia tree, with little shade to protect him from the elements. This acacia was located in a dry waterless plateau of what is now western Maharashtra, 75 miles east of the capital of Aundh. And it was here that he remained for three years. The daily temperature used to be around 120 degrees F, and at night the mercury would drop suddenly to around 20 degrees F, with a bitter, dry wind. There was no hut or any other shelter for Maurice, so he used to wrap himself in bamboo matting covered with the coarsely woven blankets spun from the local wools. It was very hard tapasya, indeed!

While he was still in the capital of Aundh, Maurice had made the raja abolish capital punishment by a special decree. Now, feeling with full empathy the sorrow and shame of the shackled convicts in the Atpadi jail, he rushed to the capital to beg the Raja for the “loan” of the “most desperate” and dangerous of these convicts for his colony. Bhawanrao, as usual, responded spontaneously to this objective compassion (karuna) of Swami Bharatananda, and, with Haji Abdul Aziz, Maurice established in 1939 the first ever “Free Prison”, not only in Aundh, but in the whole of India.

These “dangerous desperadoes” were allowed to bring their families to Swatantrapur (City of the Free), where they could, on parole, visit their own villages as well. It was a revolution in itself. It brought a new dimension to the whole range of relationships between man and man, man and authority, and man and nature. These ”free” citizens dug a huge well which, in that arid desert area, was a miracle in itself. It struck a pocket of extremely sweet water in the sandy loam soil, and plenty of it. Hundreds from Atpadi and other villages visited this well and sat with wonderment and devotion in their eyes at the feet of this cherubic foreigner in sannyasi clothes with the enchanting smile and the perpetual glint of mischief in his eyes. The poor peasants of Aundh always felt purified in the presence of “the Swami”, whose karuna left an indelible mark on the villagers of Aundh.

Swatantrapur still exists and tries to survive. Haji Abdul “Master”, now 91, visits it from time to time, and his eyes fill with tears when he thinks and feels the presence of Maurice there.

It was also around this time that Maurice became inspired with the idea of an Indo-Polish library. Uma Devi, a genteel and celebrated Polish aristocrat, had come to India a few years before Maurice and was already well set in the Ramana Maharshi – Krishnamurti – Mahatma Gandhi circuit. I do not know whether they ever met each other in Poland, but they teamed up in India to produce about 50 books through this Indo-Polish library. All of them were translations of original Sanskrit texts. How this “treasonable” literature was smuggled, chiefly through Polish prisoners of war in India, is a thrilling story in itself. Thousands of copies of these books entered Poland and now the demand for such books there is growing apace.

The sufferings and sad plight of the Tibetans in 1958-59 – the total overwhelming of an ancient, compassionate culture – was devastatingly disturbing to Maurice. He was staying with us in Sikim at that time, watching the Tibetans fleeing in terror by the thousands and being helplessly lost in India. They were seeking shelter in the land of the birth of Gautama the Buddha, but they had no shelter, not to mention comfort. The government of Jawaharlal Nehru did not know what, where or how to do “something” for them. It was dangerous to try to settle them near the Indo-Tibetan frontiers. Spies and agents provocateurs were everywhere, preparing for the 1962 “war of liberation” on India. Maurice saw all this not through the eyes of a diplomat or politician who plays for power, but as a simple, compassionate human being. For him, to feel was to act.

One day he sat down and drafted a letter portraying his anguish, as from me to Prime Minister Nehru, which he carried himself to Delhi. He then sat in the Prime Minister’s office until the latter agreed to write letters to various state governments to grant land for the use of the Tibetan refugees. Armed with these letters, Maurice, at his own expense, traveled to various states where state land above 3,500 feet was available. For two long hard years he ceaselessly laboured, touring the whole of India seeking suitable sites where the poor, neglected Tibetans could be settled. He cajoled, shouted, brow-beat bureaucrats, politicians, priests, peasants – but got land and money to create the settlements where thousands of uprooted Tibetans were rehabilitated. Were it not for Maurice this would never have happened. History will certainly record a deep sense of gratitude to Maurice Frydman – Polish Jew and Indian mystic-saint – for the inestimable and timely help that he brought for the preservation of Tibet’s distinct, precious culture and identity.

Ekagrata, single-pointedness, can achieve anything, he used to say to us, who were always grateful to him.

Whether with Bhagavan, the Mahatma or J. Krishnamurti, Maurice’s method of questioning everything, experimenting and experiencing for himself the truth at each level, and then alone accepting it, was always infallible. Even the Mahatma’s experiments with food paled before those Maurice tried on himself. He always had a queer range of eatables and drinkables on the table when one sat to eat with him. One never knew what to expect nor dared one ask what they were made of. In Atpadi, together with another food experimenter, Dr. Appa Bhagwat, he extended his experiment to include a variety of grasses, roots, leaves, flowers, tree barks, and even earth. How he survived these experiments on himself is nothing short of a miracle.

Once, whilst staying with us in Sikkim, he and his constant companion and fellow-pilgrim, Hilla Petit, a gracious Parsi lady, and her adopted daughter, Babulal, were crossing a windy pass in the high Himalayas. But Maurice had to be carried in a litter because, having undertaken some new experiment in dieting, he was incapable of staying on his horse. At the pass some 16,700 feet heigh, the bearers of the litter decided that Maurice had died and left him in the cold snowy rubble of the glacier and ran away! Tibetans are generally afraid of corpses. Only a rescue team from ten miles away bringing flasks of hot coffee and warm blankets saved Maurice from actually fulfilling the Tibetans’ fears. Experiment and experience – even unto death – this was his credo. He knew no fear. For Death he had only Love – which, as he proclaimed through his objective compassionate action, conquers all – even death.

“The sage is dying”, whispered a soft, sad voice over the trunk phone from Bombay. “He is asking for you. Come as soon as you can.”

So my wife and I rushed, with Avalokita our youngest, his favourite, whom he had blessed in Sikkim when she was only a few months old.

When we arrived Hilla, the doctors and nurses all complained to me that Maurice was refusing to eat or take medicine. Hilla and Babulal were in tears. They implored me to “make” Maurice eat and take his medicine, as if any one could ever make him do anything that he didn’t want to do!

There he lay in his familiar room, with everything meticulously clean and in its proper place. As I approached him, he shouted at me, “Apa, who is dying?”

The next day he drove everyone out of the room, ordering them to leave him alone with me. Then he said, “Apa, I hear the music, I see the bright light. Who dies? No one is dying. This diseased body is keeping me away from that Harmony and Beauty. Do not let them keep me in this body. Go now in peace.”

The next day we were all at his bedside as he breathed his last three breaths – “Hari Om!” Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was also by his side. I asked him, “Maharaj, where is Maurice going? What is happening to him?”

He replied, “Nothing is happening. No one is dying, for no one was born.”

“Then why this sense of sorrow, emptiness, loss?” I asked.

“Who is feeling sorrow, emptiness, loss?” he asked.

And within hours, in the presence of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, the remains of what we called Maurice Frydman were consumed in the electric fire. The elements returned to their original order.

In one of his talks, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj has said that attachment to name and form (nama-rupa) creates fear in man’s heart. One who knows that he has no name or form, who is Nothing, will be afraid of nothing, including death. Maurice had reached the state of shunyata (nothingness, emptiness), he lived shunyata, and the egos he touched were thrown into a bottomless well, while their souls caught a glimpse of this ineffable state.

Nevertheless, in a way quite tangible to me, Maurice is not gone. He is, as always, here and now, a constant inspiration to love, to serve, to be fearless, sincere, and full of joy.

Back to Sharings Page

~Top of Page