Teachers

Is Ram Tzu a SAGE,

Perhaps he is all of these. Perhaps he is Nothing at all.

One thing is for certain, his is one of the freshest voices we have heard on the “spiritual scene” in quite a while.

For Ram Tzu, only Nothing is truly sacred.

No Way #1

No Way #20

No Way #75

Ram Tzu writes

No Way #83

Ram Tzu writes

No Way #49

No Way #24

Ram Tzu writes

No Way #93

You like the idea of
Being on a journey.
You like the idea
That you’re going somewhere.
You think
If you’re going somewhere
You might get somewhere.
You’re seduced by
The prospect of progress.
It’s a measure of your discontent.
Ram Tzu knows this…
You can’t get here
From there.

Ram Tzu writes

All excerpts from “NO WAY” copyright © 1999 Advaita Fellowship
GET “NO WAY FOR THE SPIRITUALLY ADVANCED” AS A BOOK

• OR AS AN AUDIO DOWNLOAD READ BY THE AUTHOR

HEAR RAM TZU (AKA WAYNE LIQUORMAN) SPEAK AROUND THE WORLD

Meeting Ramesh

Wayne Liquorman was both a spiritual seeker and a family man with a successful export business, when he met his first and final guru, Ramesh Balsekar, in September 1987. In April 1989 the process of seeking ended when enlightenment happened through the body-mind mechanism called Wayne.

Wayne describes the event as being “of interest only to seekers.” His first book, No Way: A Guide For the Spiritually ‘Advanced’ was published in 1990 under the pen name Ram Tzu because he “didn’t want a bunch of miserable seekers cluttering up his living room.”

In fact, Wayne did not speak publicly until Ramesh asked him to do so during a visit to India in 1996. When he returned home, word had spread, and he started receiving requests to speak across the country, and then around the world.

The enlightenment event and its aftermath are described in Wayne’s second book, Acceptance of What IS, published in 2000. He is also the author of Never Mind… A journey into Non-duality, and the editor of Consciousness Speaks and several other books by Ramesh Balsekar, who referred to Wayne as his “spiritual son.” Since then he has written Enlightenment Is Not What You Think, and The Way of Powerlessness: Advaita and The 12 Step of Recovery. His most recent book, Hello My Loves: 10 years of writings to seekers of Truth, was published in 2015.

You are welcome to attend any of Wayne’s Talks

You can come with questions or just listen. His home Talks are livecast through this website. You can view his schedule at CALENDAR, where you’ll also find advice for out-of-town visitors. Ram Tzu (aka Wayne Liquorman) gives talks at his home in California, and throughout the world. You’re invited to meet him in person or tune into the live webcast. And you’ll find transcripts of his talks at NEWSLETTERS & TRANSCRIPTS and video at VIDEOS. You can order any of Wayne’s books, as well as CD’s and DVD’s of his talks, in our SHOP.

The teaching, as it happens through Wayne, is pure Advaita (non-duality), uniquely presented in an uncompromising, sometimes humorous way, without religious dogma or new age veneer. In his Talks, Wayne is without agenda, speaking only in response to seeker’s questions. He talks about Consciousness: the ground of all being, the source and the substance of everything.

“This Advaita, as I talk about it, is not actually a philosophy, because it does not hold any tenets. It is simply a collection of pointers and concepts, and it posits that none of them are true in an absolute sense. This teaching is not about conveying the truth. It is about prying away the limitations and misconceptions about how things are.”

from Never Mind

Wayne’s message is clear and simple

Although he may suggest areas for further inquiry, Wayne offers no cures, practices, or miracles to reach enlightenment. He invites you to bring your most cherished beliefs to his Talks. If you are really fortunate, you may leave without them.

“When you think about this Awakening, which is an impersonal event which happens through a body-mind mechanism, you have to assume, because of your own lifetime of experience, that there is someone there for whom this experience happens. You can’t imagine an impersonal happening of that kind, or what an impersonal experiential state would be, because there is no such thing as an impersonal experiential state. It is incomprehensible, literally incomprehensible. Yet that is what it is…”

from Acceptance of What IS

What is a Talk like?

The video below is from recent Talk at Wayne’s home. The False Sense of Authorship, beliefs and The Understanding are discussed, and Wayne points the seeker to look directly into the Truth for himself.

Wayne describes Ramesh as concluding his Guru Purnima talk in 1996 by saying:

“You should all come back tomorrow, tomorrow Wayne will be giving the Talk.” In that moment I could never have imagined where the Teaching would carry me… all the towns and cities and countries… all the men and women, old and young, some swelling with new life others preparing to die, all the hearts ready to burst open, all the brows unfurrowed and all the eyes bright with a new Understanding. What a surprise and delight this life is! I consider myself to be amongst the most fortunate of men, to have found my guru in Ramesh and to have been filled, a most unlikely vessel to carry this magnificent Teaching.

Here’s an audio recording of that first Talk. There was plenty of traffic noise at Ramesh’s, but it’s interesting to hear how little the Teaching has changed, despite Wayne’s recent refinement of terms.

The late Advaita sage, Ramesh S. Balsekar was a disciple of Nisargadatta Maharaj, himself a renowned Advaita master. Balsekar was drawn to Advaita as a boy, and particularly enjoyed reading about the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Wei Wu Wei as an adult. After his retirement from banking, Ramesh discovered Nisargadatta Maharaj, who became his guru. Ramesh wrote nearly 50 books on Advaita, and starting in 1982, he met spiritual seekers daily at his home in Mumbai. He died September 27, 2009.

The Editor’s Notes for Balsekar’s book Consciousness Speaks recount the highlights of Ramesh’s life, and hint at the enthusiastic devotion that contact with this delightful teacher could inspire:

“The mere incident of enlightenment does not necessarily confer an ability to communicate the concomitant understanding. However, in Ramesh’s case that ability has assumed remarkable depth. This organism known as Ramesh is amply endowed with compassion, patience, humor and eloquence. Though the dialogues in his books can convey but a fraction of the impact that his presence can have, as you read you may get a sense of the energy that fills the room as Ramesh warms to his subject.

“Still, what is most remarkable about Ramesh is his very ordinariness and the very ordinariness of his teaching. Though elaborate theoretical structures may be erected around it — his concept of the working mind and the thinking mind would be a good example of this — the essence of the teaching is simplicity itself. He offers no miracles, no cures, no special powers; in fact, all he really offers is Nothing, that Nothing, that we all truly are.

“And while it is often said that Ramesh appears ordinary, no one could ever say he is mediocre. It is his complete lack of pretense that moderates the light of his accomplishments from a blinding brilliance to a warm glow. In his education, both in India and at the London School of Economics, he was always near the top of his class but never at the top of his class. In his leisure pursuits, as a body builder, competitive badminton player and golfer his standings were always superior though rarely superlative.

“Ramesh married Sharda in 1940 and they raised three children. The eldest was Ajit, brilliant but with a life-long history of health problems. He died in 1990 at the age of forty-nine. Next came his daughter, Jaya, who married and then moved to Bangalore where she runs a successful dairy business. His youngest son, Shivdas, is also married and is the senior executive in the Indian branch of a multi-national pharmaceutical company.

“It was in his career, which began in 1940 as a clerk in the Bank of India, that Ramesh’s brilliance truly shone through. Despite lacking a burning ambition, he steadily rose through the ranks until his retirement in 1977 as that bank’s General Manager (what is known in the U.S. as company president or CEO). During his ten years of service as its head, he guided the bank through its most rapid and successful growth period, overseeing the hiring of thousands of people and the opening of hundreds of new branches in India and around the globe.

“Shortly after his mandatory retirement at age sixty, Ramesh read a magazine article about a guru named Nisargadatta Maharaj who was teaching about Advaita (non-duality) in a poor area of Bombay. It was a subject in which he had always had a keen interest. He went to hear him, knew at once that this was his ultimate guru and within three or four months began translating for Maharaj at his daily morning talks. It was not long before Ramesh too experienced the ultimate understanding.

“Retired bank president, golfer, husband and father doesn’t fit the stereotype of an Indian guru… and perhaps that accounts, at least in part, for the fact that 90% of the people who come to him are Westerners. His background and education combine with his understanding to make him a master who is an ideal bridge between East and West, the spiritual and the material.”

Ramesh Balsekar touched the lives of a generation of spiritual seekers, seekers drawn to a deeper investigation into the experience of being alive. He was an energetic, imaginative, unpredictable teacher. We loved his compassion, clarity, questioning spirit and encouragement, and his humanity also left a deep mark.

Twenty-two years ago Ramesh came into my life… To have been able to walk beside him for all this time and to have been able to bow at his feet has been for me the greatest of life’s blessings. I shall miss not being able to sit with Ramesh, to watch a cricket match together or to share some chocolate or to laugh at some silly joke he reads from the newspaper. It is not the greatness of the man I will miss most — his greatness remains undiminished by his death — it is the little things, the human things.

– Wayne Liquorman

A Net of Jewels

Possibly the best loved of Ramesh’s books, A Net of Jewels: Daily Meditations for Seekers of Truth was compiled by Wayne’s friend, Gary Starbuck. The format is brilliant, inviting a gentle savoring of each jewel. We’ve had a selection of meditations drawn from the book here on the website since it first came out in 1996. Others have followed suit, including a Yahoo group that emails a jewel every day, and now an app for your Android device.

• MEDITATIONS, HERE ON THIS SITE
• THE ANDROID APP
• THE YAHOO GROUP

Remembering Ramesh

• WAYNE LOOKS BACK, A FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD.

Ramesh’s Teaching

• TRANSCRIPT OF TWO TALKS WITH RAMESH – PDF
• YOUTUBE VIDEOS
• RAMESH BALSEKAR WEBSITE
• LIST OF RAMESH’S BOOKS
• BOOKS IN OUR STORE
• EBOOKS ON AMAZON
• VIDEOS IN OUR STORE

Early Influences on Ramesh

• RAMANA MAHARSHI
• WEI WU WEI

The great Advaita Sage Nisargadatta Maharaj was born Maruti Kampli to devout Hindu parents on a small farm south of Mumbai in 1897. He left at 18 and settled in Mumbai.

In spite of his poverty and lack of formal education, a forceful personality and desire for independence led him to start a string of eight retail shops that eventually employed 30 people. He also married and fathered four children.

“A tremendously complex work is going on all the time in your brain and body, are you conscious of it? Not at all. Yet for an outsider all seems to be going on intelligently and purposefully. Why not admit that one’s entire personal life may sink largely below the threshold of consciousness and yet proceed sanely and smoothly… A healthy body, a healthy mind live largely unperceived by their owner; only occasionally, through pain or suffering do they call for attention and insight. Why not extend the same to the entire personal life?”

He did not follow any particular course.

He had an interest in spiritual matters that worldly success did not satisfy, and in 1933 he was convinced to meet a friend’s guru – Siddharameshwar Maharaj. He quickly became a disciple and took the name Nisargadatta Maharaj. Shortly after the death of his guru in 1936, Nisargadatta attained realization.

“My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense ‘I am’ and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures.”

He left his family and business, expecting to live a life of renunciation in the Himalayas. He wandered for several years until persuaded by another of his guru’s disciples to return to his family responsibilties and the life of a householder – he saw that a life of dispassionate action would be more fruitful.

“Sometimes I feel I am everything, I call that Love. Sometimes I feel I am nothing, I call that Wisdom. Between Love and Wisdom my life continuously flows.”

You can be described only in terms of what you are not.

He lived in Mumbai for the rest of his life, selling cigarettes in the one shop that had survived his absense. A small crowd gathered often at the shop to hear him talk about the non-dual nature of reality, and after he retired in 1966 he gave talks at his apartment twice a day. Many of the talks were recorded and transcribed, and a few were filmed.

Maurice Frydman translated 101 of the talks and published them in 1973 in India as I AM THAT. Frydman’s earlier associations with Gandhi and Ramana Maharshi had made him famous in spiritual circles, and through the promotion of this book he introduced Nisargadatta to English-speaking people around the world. The appearance of this remarkable and powerfully resonant book drew so many people to Bombay that Nisargadatta said with some exaggeration, “I used to have a quiet life, but I AM THAT has turned my house into a railway station platform.”

“The seeker is he who is in search of himself… To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not.

Discover all that you are not — body, feelings thoughts, time, space, this or that — nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive.

The clearer you understand on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realise that you are the limitless being.”

from I AM THAT

That sprouts and grows and brings forth flowers and fruits.

In the talks at his apartment, Maharaj was open to sincere questions, but intolerant of spiritual speculation and theories. He aggressively directed seekers away from preconceptions and scripture, and toward direct experience. He was often the very opposite of the stereotypical gentle patient guru. He would challenge, contradict, criticize, scowl and shout in an effort to get his questioners not to understand him, but to understand themselves.

“What you have learned here becomes the seed. You may forget it apparently. But it will live, and in due season sprout and grow and bring forth flowers and fruits. All will happen by itself. You need not do anything: only do not prevent it.”

One of Maharaj’s notable Western devotee’s was a California woman named Jean Dunn. Like Frydman, Dunn had spent time with Ramana Maharshi before his death in 1950, and that association led her in 1978 to write an article about Maharaj’s teaching for The Mountain Path, the journal of Sri Ramanasramam. It was an article that attracted the attention of the then recently retired Ramesh Balsekar, who subsequently read I AM THAT and sought out Maharaj’s Talks.

An eBook called I Am Unborn, prepared from notes of Maharaj’s 1979 talks is available here for free as a 130 PAGE PDF FILE.

You cannot realize your Self.

I AM THAT was finally published in the United States in 1982, shortly after Maharaj’s death in 1981, and at about the same time as three more English language books compiled by Jean Dunn. Two of Dunn’s books, Seeds of Consciousness and Consciousness and the Absolute, (as well as I AM THAT are AVAILABLE IN OUR SHOP.

“In Nisarga [nature] everything is time-bound (seasons, sowing, reaping, etc.), but nature itself is not time-bound. Nature is neither male nor female. Many Avatars come and go, but nature is not affected. The story of nature is emanating from all the impressions taken in your mind since birth. So long as you are holding these memories there will be no knowledge of Self. If you just study whatever has happened in nature, like history, great lives, etc., you cannot realize your Self. You have to go within. Whatever great things have happened in nature, however powerful, still they disappear right here. These situations appear and disappear. This is actually abstract, what is solid here is the knowledge ‘I AM’. It is invisible before the birth and after the death of the body, and while it is visible it is a solid thing. Many great Sages have appeared and disappeared because of the powerful seed ‘I AM’…

You may experience Brahma even, but that experience will not remain. All experiences are due to the cell ‘I AM’…

What can Roosevelt or Gandhi do now? In the very places which they were commanding changes have taken place. Why don’t they talk? When the prana leaves the body even great Sages cannot speak.”

from Seeds of Consciousness

Although Ramana said almost nothing to Paul Brunton during his visit in 1931, the publication of Brunton’s A Search In Secret India made them both famous. The notoriety brought Somerset Maugham, Mercedes de Acosta, Julian P. Johnson, Arthur Osborne, Maurice Frydman, Merston Ethel, Henri Cartier-Bresson and many other Westerners to Ramana’s ashram. The avalanche of publications they sparked, presented this unique and now beloved sage to a wider world. Almost as unusual as Ramana’s obviously spontaneous and beautiful realization was his willingness to overlook the tradition of caste in sharing it with Americans and Europeans.

Realization is the result of the Guru’s Grace more than of teachings, lectures, meditations, etcetera. These are only secondary.

Ramana Maharshi quoted by Munagala Venkataramiah in
Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi

The final truth, as Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj and all the sages before them have clearly stated, is that there is neither creation nor destruction, neither birth nor death, neither destiny nor free will, neither any path nor any achievement. All there is is Consciousness.

from Who Cares? by Ramesh Balsekar

Even after his death in 1950, there was enough interest to keep Ramana’s ashram going, for many more books, and starting in 1964 for a magazine. Ramesh first heard of Nisargadatta Maharaj when the book I Am That came out, and was reviewed in the magazine. Ramesh wrote, “It had such an impact on me that I went to see Maharaj straight away. And the first day I knew ‘I am home, this is where I belong.’ I went to Maharaj in 1978, exactly a year after I retired.”

Thoughts alone make up the mind;
And of all thoughts the ‘I’ thought is
the root.
What is called mind is but the notion
‘I’.

from Upades Saram by Ramesh Balsekar

In 1927 Ramana composed a thirty verse poem summarizing his teaching. Unlike other writings, he composed this as an integral work without revision. He considered it important enough to prepare in four of the major Indian languages. What follows is a portion of an English-language interpretation by Ramesh Balsekar’s disciple Shirish Murthy.

Advaita is a Sanskrit word meaning not two. It points to the indivisible or non-dual nature of reality. Although it’s associated in India with Vedanta as part of traditional Hindu religious life, here it is not taught as part of any religion at all, and has absolutely no tenets or dogma.

The Advaita Fellowship supports the teaching of Wayne Liquorman (Ram Tzu), Ramesh Balsekar, and Nisargadatta Maharaj. It pays for Wayne’s speaking tours, and to publish books and videos. Wayne holds about 100 home satsang meetings every year, and the Fellowship webcasts them live through this website.

The Fellowship was started by Wayne and several seeker-friends in 1988 to support more U.S. speaking tours by Ramesh Balsekar. It also financed the Advaita Press, starting with Experiencing The Teaching and NO WAY for the Spiritually “Advanced”. Since these activities haven’t paid for themselves additional money has always been needed. By 1994 it was apparent a more formal structure would make fundraising easier under U.S. law, and the Fellowship became a 501c(3) non-profit foundation.

Shortly after Ramesh directed Wayne to speak about Advaita in 1996, seekers requested he visit them in Atlanta. Soon these requests were taking Wayne across the U.S., and then to Australia and Western Europe, and as far east as Russia. Annual retreats to Hawaii were held for many years, eventually being replaced with a retreat on Ibiza.

You are welcome to join us in these activities. The whole universe conspires to make them happen! If you are moved to contribute, we’re grateful. If you’re unable to contribute financially, there are plenty of activities and resources here that are completely free.

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