Ramesh Balsekar

I recently came across a gem of a book by Ramesh Balsekar called, Enlightened Living: The Self-Realized State. The significant thing for me is that I have had a love/hate relationship with Ramesh’s books for a while. However, Enlightened Living has won me over.

Ramesh has had a very unusual life. He was born in 1919 and is currently 89 years old. For ten years, Ramesh was the Chief Executive Officer for the Bank of India. Ramesh led the bank’s expansion of hundreds of branches in India and abroad, as well as being responsible for thousands of employees. He also was an avid golfer.

After mandatory at age 60, Ramesh entered a new stage of life by becoming the translator for his a guru he just learned about from a magazine article. His guru was Nisargadatta Maharaji, a major name in advaita.

Ramesh is a major writer of advaita, writing 25 books. He started writing books at the age of 75 (yes, he wrote more than one book a year. His first book Ripples was published in 1994). Although I have only read a few of his books, the ones that I read I found to be somewhat theoretically cold and difficult to understand. I attempted to read his The Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding. I ended up with a major headache because his writing on the topic of consciousness is so heady. For me, it was as exciting as reading a book about advanced mathematics, and I am not very good in mathematics.

I also read The Wisdom of Balsekar, which is a compilation of his writings from other books. Most of Ramesh’s writings referenced in this book are just a few paragraphs long and are under various topics, such as Desire, Ego, Fear, Free Will, Grace, etc. It is easier reading than The Final Truth, but I still found his writings somewhat cold.

I spent a year with Ramesh in daily meditations from his book, A Net of Jewels. Once again, the reading was not difficult but the writing was still somewhat cold.

Image my surprise when I bought Enlightened Living, which was published in 2007. (Yes, I had not given up on Ramesh, despite my misgivings on his writing). This is by far his most personal book where he opens up a little and tells us personal information about his life and his struggles. Ramesh talks about the Buddha a lot, which sort of surprised me. But most importantly, he talks about trying to put advaita or nondualism in practical living.

The following is from Enlightened Living:

“Would it ever be possible for me to live my life with the total acceptance that I am not the doer of any action, when I would be forced to accept the punishment of the society in which I live for actions that society rightly considers my actions? Indeed, in these circumstances would anyone be able to live his life as the non-doer of any action?...

“We all know in fact that the Buddha lived for many years with the total acceptance that he cannot be the doer of any action, and yet continued to suffer the pain of the punishment of society.

“For me that answer was good enough for me to try to live the same way. I have done that for the last twenty-five years and must confess that I found no difficulty at all.”

Ramesh goes on to tackle issues such as ego, free will, genes and conditioning, God’s Will, etc. Here he writes about the ego:

“The basis of functioning of the manifestation, that we know as daily living, has always been interhuman relationships between ‘me’ and the ‘other.’ And for such a relationship to happen the Source had to create ‘ego.’ The ego is identification of the Source, as Impersonal Consciousness, with each human object and its name, as a separate entity. The relationship between one ego and another — is the basis of much of the happiness or unhappiness of the human being.”

Enlightened Living also includes chapters of some famous Masters, as well as some of their writings. Ramesh also comments about the Masters. The book includes an array of Masters: from Adi Shankara to Ramakrishma Paramahamsa, from Ashtavakra to Ramana Maharshi, from Jnaneshwara to Nisargadatta Maharaj and Sengtsan.

Ramesh points out to expect to see flaws in the Masters because they are human beings and are still bound by genes and conditioning. Here is a quote:

“It was reported that Ramana Maharshi once came out the Ashram and saw a European gentleman relaxing in a rocking chair in the verandah of his residence. Bhagwan is suppposed to have said to the person who was with him, ‘Why is he pampering his body like this?’”

Ramesh goes on to say that this was a conditioning response by Ramana. He was raised in a family that had few chairs. Ramesh says, “It was likely that a mat was spread and people sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. It was on the basis of this conditioning that the remark happened to be made about the rocking chair.”

For me, the importance of this book is not the chapters about the Masters but the sections where Ramesh talks about Ramesh and describing his daily life. He even shows humor, as this quote from his book illustrates:

“What about personal duty and responsibility? This is the real joker in the pack. With the total acceptance that nothing can happen unless it the Will of God, according to Cosmic Law, the question of personal duty and responsibility is as irrelevant as legs on a snake.”

Ramesh is sometime asked at his advanced age how is it that he has the energy, enthusiasm, and freshness of a child. Ramesh answers this way: “Perhaps it is because I have been lucky enough to be able to accept life as it happens and, therefore, not to go against the flow of life.”

Finally, Ramesh talks about his enlightenment. He describes it as no whistles and bells. When Ramesh was doing translation for his guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, he writes:

“I had the clean, distinct feeling that I was not doing the translation as a separate ego-entity but that the translation was happening: I could hardly wait for Maharaj to conclude the point concerned; it was as if I knew what he was going to say, and the translation poured out like a smooth flow of water.

“After the talk was over, several people told me that I was ‘in form’ that morning, that never was my translation so effective. I was, of course, happy to hear that.

“After that morning, the question never arose: Am I self-realized, am I enlightened? All that I found that I seemed to be at peace with myself all the time: never uncomfortable with myself (whether at the moment I was enjoying myself or I was in pain), never uncomfortable with the other. Also, I found that I was no longer bothered about the questions concerning the meaning or purpose of life, am I doing enough in my life to relieve the suffering of others, what is ‘enlightenment,’ etc etc.?

Skipping a few paragraphs, Ramesh concludes: “When the load of suffering has disappeared, and I am at peace with myself — never uncomfortable with myself, never uncomfortable with others — who cares what enlightenment or self-realization means?”

On reflection of the book Enlightened Living, I discovered something about myself that I had not been able to put in words before — that I am a sucker for stories of personal transformation. Even with works of fiction, I enjoy books when the characters are evolving.