Cheap I Am That I Am: Experience the Teaching of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (DVD) (Maurizio Benazzo) Price

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Customer Reviews of I Am That I Am: Experience the Teaching of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Wasted Money for people who love Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I did not listen to other reviewers when they said do not to buy this DVD because I love Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and there is not much footage of him available. <
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>This DVD is about what Stephen Wolinsky thinks Nisargadatta taught. The product description states "The Complete Teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj" which is true but they forgot to add on the end "according to Stephen Wolinsky". <
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>I believe Stephen made this DVD with the best of intentions but he is definitely NOT enlightened and therefore not qualified to teach the words of the master. He is simply a student like you or me. His interpretations are at times clear and useful but at other times his own theory. The beauty of Nisargadatta's teachings is there simplicity, Wolinsky's explinations on the other hand can get complicated. Also at times Dr. Wolinsky's can go on ad nauseam especially when he is giving his experiential exercise. Dr. Stephen Wolinsky is often unable to explain himself clearly in one take as can plainly been seen by the numerous edits/cuts during his explanations. <
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>And don't be fooled by the product description saying you are going to get "extraordinary video material includes a 30 minutes subtitled question and answer session with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj". Yes, you do get 30 minutes of extraordinary video footage, extraordinarily bad quality audio with haphazard subtitles and bad translation into English. Unless you are very familiar with Nisargadatta's material then this won't mean much to you. Reading one page of I AM THAT would be far more beneficial then watching these 30 minutes. There is very little merit to this watching this video footage other than seeing Nisargadatta light up a cigar or cigarette much to my surprise! Did he know they were bad for him? I wanted to reach out and take them away from him just to see his reaction! Now that would be a good test wouldn't it?

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A misguided teaching and I'll tell you exactly why.
Stephen Wolinsky is a fundamentalist. All fundamentalism is essentially a literary problem. Fundamentalists read language in an overly concrete way and consequently don't understand the paradoxes of language or perceive irony well. At one point in this DVD Wolinsky tells a story about Maharaj asking him if he understands who he really is, and when Stephen replies no then Maharaj tells him to "shut up until he does". It is ironic that he tells this story on this DVD. Maharaj tells him to shut up and he makes a DVD maligning maharaj teaching, The maligning isn't intentional, of course. I believe Stephen made this DVD with the best of intentions. But I can understand the outrage of the reviewers who felt he is borrowing the name of Maharaj to peddle his own teachings. This DVD is more about what Stephen Wolinsky thinks than it is about what Maharaj actually taught. <
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>The I am that I am is the consciousness that perceives. Our problem is that we identify with the contents of that consciousness rather than the consciousness itself. That is to say we identify with the thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions etc. that consciousness perceives. The ego, itself, is essentially only a thought. As Stephen often quotes Maharaj as saying in this DVD, "the fluids (in the brain presumably) come together and the I appears". The ego is a thought that so called "unenlightened" people are unconsciously identifying as themselves. Stephen is in a real bind, because he is identifying with the contents of his consciousness that are thoughts saying this is all an illusion and I am not identifying with the contents of my consciousness. I am afraid that people who have taken what Stephen has said as a true sign post to the goal are in danger of falling into this same bind. <
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>The ego is unable to feel its own being, as you might well imagine because it is only a thought, a thing. And there is no thing that is conscious of itself. Consciousness, itself, is a no-thing, something that Stephen parrots but doesn't really seem to understand. While we are unconsciously identifying ourselves with our ego we feel the ego's lack of being able to sense its own being, it becomes our lack. The ego desperately seeks to find completion through other things with which it identifies. This is the desire of which the Buddha spoke. But the ego ultimately can't find satisfaction through other things so this desire, itself, becomes more primary than the thing in which it identifies. Seeing this clearly is a very important step in ending it. Essentially what Stephen is doing is telling you to identify with thoughts that you don't exist. For an ego of a "spiritual seeker" this seems like a wonderful thing in which to identify. Of course it is just a form of spiritual materialism, a spiritual belief or practice that helps reinforce one's unconscious identification with the ego. I wonder if anybody who praised this video a year ago feels the same way now, or has the effect of identifying with the thought I don't exist worn off leading them on to other teachings in which to identify? My concern for you, and why I am writing this review, is that you not to fall into this trap. This might sound like exactly what you want to hear, "the ego doesn't exist, I am free!" But if you identify with this you are moving farther away from the goal, which is to stop identifying with the contents of your consciousness and understand, instead, that what you really are is the consciousness itself, is being, itself, is completeness, itself. It is elusive because, again, the conscious is a no-thing. It is like understanding that space is more substantive than the things contained within space. <
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>Ultimately, as we find out in the second DVD, Stephen is selling something he calls Post-deconstruction. This is a pretentious and unfortunate title to have used. In the first DVD Stephen tells us that Jacque Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction and applied it as one of the terms for his critical theory, is the inventor of Post-Modernism. This is like claiming Al Gore invented the internet. First off academics disagree on the starting date of Post-Modernism, with several dates preceding the date of Derrida's own birth. What Derrida was, was a Post-structuralist who's technique of deconstruction has played an important role in one flavor of Post-Modernism. So it is doubtful that Stephen really understands the subtle intricacies of the technique of deconstruction, which he has chosen for the title of his belief system. Granted, it is a negative belief system, a nihilistic belief system, but a belief system nonetheless. <
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>Stephen, in true fundamentalist fashion, even entitles his second second DVD, Nirvana Means Extinction. Which it does literally, but here is what noted Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman has to say about that: <
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>Nirvana, the name for the final reality realized by an enlightened being, literally means "extinguished," blow out," or "gone out," The spiritual climate in the Buddha's time was derived from numerous movements of ascetic intellectuals, who were sick of fettered, unenlightened life, who saw it as unendingly miserable, and who sought annihilation of the mind as well as the body through intense, transcending samadhi. To help them, the Buddha presented the nirvana he had found in slightly dualistic light, as if it were the final extinction they so fervently desired. <
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>Stephen's second DVD is almost solely about a dualistic nihilism, presented as the advaita Vedanta (non dual) teachings of Maharaj, through his "Post-deconstruction" belief system, pretty much demonstrating that he is as equally ignorant of deconstruction and Buddhism as he is about the teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. <
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>I think one reviewer said it best when he said that Stephen is selling snake oil, but I wanted to explain in some detail why this is true. This video, however, does have one redeeming quality, and that is the many stories that he tells about Maharaj. In this one respect I feel that he really does know what he is talking about and presents the personality of Maharaj forcefully. <
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Solid Gold
To anyone actively integrating the teaching of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, perhaps at first the interpretations given by narrator/meditation guide Stephen H. Wolinsky in this excellent film will seem superfluous. But repeated viewing will relax the tendency to minimalize Nisargadatta's realization in this way and allow the viewer to experience Dr. Wolinsky's intimate understanding of the core realization of the Self that is at the heart of I AM THAT I AM. The inclusion of actual footage of Nisargadatta puttering around his modest domicile, honoring images of the Navanath Sampradya lineage and uncompromisingly correcting misguided ego-manifestations of visitors while Bombay traffic bleats through the walls and someone bangs away with hammer and nails is solid gold.