A shopkeeper in Bombay, introduced by a friend to a teacher named Siddharameshwar Maharaj, he received a single instruction: attend to the sense "I am," and give attention to nothing else. He asked for nothing more elaborate — no breathing method, no scripture, no ritual.

He kept to that one instruction for about two and a half years, until his guru's death in November 1936. He later said he trusted the words completely and simply held to them — and that trust, not any special effort, was what brought him what he called realization.

For decades he received visitors in a small room above his shop, talking with anyone who climbed the stairs. In 1973 a student, Maurice Frydman, published translated transcripts of those talks as I Am That — and readers in Europe and North America began arriving too.

He died in Bombay on 8 September 1981, still keeping visitors in the same small flat until near the end. He had always said he was pointing at something already present in everyone who asked, not teaching a system of his own.