Showing posts with label philosophy of Sri Ramana. Show all posts

Wednesday, 25 December 2024

Aruṇācala Tattuvam and Dīpa-Darśaṉa Tattuvam: The Reality of Arunachala and Seeing Deepam

Friday 13th December 2024 was Kārttikai Deepam, which is an annual festival celebrated in the Tamil month of Kārttikai (mid-November to mid-December) on the day on which the moon is in conjunction with the constellation Pleiades (known in Sanskrit as kṛttikā and in Tamil as kārttikai), which always coincides with the full moon or comes one or two days before or after it. At 6pm on this day a beacon light or dīpam (popularly spelt deepam) is lit on the summit of Arunachala, and continues to burn for about ten days.

Thursday, 12 September 2024

Pure intransitive awareness alone is real consciousness and what actually exists

In section 16.1 of A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications Robert Lawrence Kuhn quoted some extracts from personal communication I had with him regarding what Bhagavan taught about consciousness or awareness, so this article is a copy of what I had written to him (with references added in the body of the text instead of in footnotes):

Monday, 31 January 2022

Āṉma-Viddai: Tamil text, transliteration and translation

The path of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra) that Bhagavan taught us is the direct and easy means to eradicate ego, the root and foundation of all our troubles, but there is a widespread belief that it is a very difficult path and therefore suitable only for a few spiritually mature aspirants. Even among the devotees who lived with him this was a widely held belief, as Muruganar discovered to his surprise in the following way.

Tuesday, 7 September 2021

Other people seem to be real because we seem to be a person

A friend asked me, ‘As we believe there is only one dreamer so why is it that when this dreamer awakens all don’t awaken?’, in reply to which I wrote:

Sunday, 29 August 2021

Is anything other than ourself intrinsically existent?

A friend wrote to me:

Thank you very much for all your contributions to elucidate Bhagavan’s teachings. One of the points (or implications?) of the teachings that confuses me the most is the statement that the world that I’m so sure exists independently of ‘me’ is exactly a dream (yes, the difficulty is "exactly", or maybe "literally"?). In fact, strangely, that statement didn’t shock me too much in the sense that I naturally had some acceptance for it the first time I heard about it. However, after much thinking (although I know that one can’t intellectually figure this thing out), I still can’t figure out how one can reject the following alternative hypothesis. Please help explain if you find some time. Sorry for the English because I’m not a native speaker.

Wednesday, 12 May 2021

Could what exists ever not exist?

A friend wrote to me:

I recently watched your YouTube video discussing the above verse [the first maṅgalam verse of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu] as I was having some troubles understanding it. I have a few questions that have not been cleared yet. It is about the first sentence of that verse:

Monday, 22 March 2021

The second and third paragraphs of Nāṉ Ār?

In this article I will discuss the history behind the second paragraph of Nāṉ Ār? and the practical and philosophical significance of what Bhagavan teaches us in the third paragraph.

Thursday, 18 February 2021

In what sense is ego actually just pure awareness?

In my previous article, In what sense is it true to say ‘everything is one’?, I wrote:

So Bhagavan is the ultimate reductionist: All phenomena are just thoughts; thoughts are just mind; mind is just ego; and if instead of looking at anything else we look keenly at ourself alone, we will find that ego is actually just pure awareness. Therefore pure awareness is all that actually exists: it is ‘one only without a second’ (ēkam ēva advitīyam).

Tuesday, 2 February 2021

In what sense is it true to say ‘everything is one’?

A friend wrote to me recently, ‘I think I got this part wrong: “Everyone is oneself”. You would say I am saying “Many is one”, right? What would you say? There is just one?’, in reply to which I wrote:

Friday, 18 December 2020

If everything is predestined, how can the law of karma be true?

Last month a friend wrote to me posing two questions, ‘If everything is predestined, how can the law of karma be true? And if it is true, how can everything be predestined?’, to which he offered his own answers based on his understanding of Bhagavan’s teachings. This article is adapted from the replies I wrote to this and several subsequent emails, because what Bhagavan taught us about the law of karma in general and the scope of predetermination in particular is an area of his teachings that have been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted, and hence I am often asked about this subject.

Wednesday, 11 November 2020

If this world is just a dream, why should we justify to others that it is so?

Yesterday a friend called Asiakas posted a comment on one of my videos, 2020-03-14 Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK: discussion with Michael James on Ēkāṉma Pañcakam verse 4, asking, ‘Dear Michael. Why try to justify that this world is a dream? Do we try to justify to people in our dreams, that it is a dream? Who realizes it is a dream?’, but before I had time to reply to this it was deleted. However, these are questions that deserve a reply, so the following is my reply to them:

Sunday, 1 November 2020

We can practise self-abidance only by being self-attentive

A friend asked me to adjudicate on a disagreement that he and another friend had about self-abidance and self-investigation. One of them believed that “the terms ‘self-abidance’ and ‘self-investigation’ mean two different things. That is, according to his understanding, in self-abidance we do not use our sharp mind (nun mati or kurnda mati). However, in self-investigation, we are using our sharp mind (nun mati or kurnda mati)”, whereas the other believed that “both these terms, ‘self-abidance’ and ‘self-investigation’ mean the same thing as long as we are practising self-attentiveness. These terms — self-abidance and self-investigation — are just two different ways of describing the practice of atma-vichara”.

The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to them:

Friday, 16 October 2020

The direct path to direct perception of our real nature

A friend wrote to me recently:

I wondered if you could shine some light on something regarding Ramana’s Enlightenment for me. I’ve always thought that when the moment of Enlightenment transpires for anyone that it is instantaneous & does not involve time, even though there may have been a Spiritual progression up to that point. It is commonly said that when Ramana laid down & watched the death of his self at that point he was instantly Enlightened.

Tuesday, 8 September 2020

The return of the prodigal son

A friend wrote to me recently asking:

If all the Bhagavan’s teachings are telling us to ignore the world and only look within, then why does the world of thoughts and things manifest at all? Is it there for us to be seduced by to suffer in until we voluntarily start the journey home to the only true reality, the I am? Is this the meaning of the Parable of the prodigal son in Christianity?
In reply to her I wrote:

Sunday, 21 June 2020

How do we remember being asleep?

A friend wrote to me today asking, ‘In the deep sleep state, it is said that there is no mind. In that case, what is it that carries through the information back to the waking state that one has experienced deep sleep? Is the mind present but it is dormant (thereby registering experience and creating memory)? In other words, is there anything other than the true I (I-I) in the deep sleep state?’, in reply to which I wrote:

Wednesday, 17 June 2020

What exists and shines in sleep is nothing other than pure awareness

Yesterday I discussed with a friend called Murthy what Bhagavan pointed out to us about what exists and what we are aware of in sleep, and our discussion is recorded in the video 2020-06-16 Michael and Murthy discuss the non-existence of ego and its five sheaths in sleep:

Thursday, 28 May 2020

Though we are not aware of any phenomena in sleep, we are aware of our own existence, ‘I am’

A friend recently wrote to me:

There is something I find hard to “understand”. You say that Sri Ramana Maharshi said that when we are in deep sleep, without dreams, that we have let go of the ego and are still aware of our self existence.

How can we know that, when seemingly there is no awareness in that time? It leads me to think that if the oneness of the true self, of existence/god itself is nothing, no experience at all, then why would I want to get there? While there is suffering in this life with the ego here, there is also pleasure. As I get closer to non-attachment I suffer far less (I witness the suffering), but if I achieve complete non-attachment I will cease to exist in this way. In my form as a human I reach states of freedom and happiness but I am experiencing/aware of that. In sleep (and therefore death) am I really experiencing that?

Monday, 9 March 2020

Though we appear in two distinct modes, we are just one awareness

When I woke up on Saturday morning, a fresh clarity occurred to me. If I try to put this clarity into words, as I will do in this article, it is what I knew already, but somehow on that morning I saw it with a fresh clarity. In words I cannot actually express this clarity, but I can explain what it is about: that is, what it is that somehow became more clear.

Sunday, 2 February 2020

There are many interpretations of advaita, but Bhagavan’s teachings are the simplest, clearest and deepest

In a comment on my previous article, To know what we actually are, we need to cease being interested in any person, a friend called Mouna referred to one of my recent videos, 2020-01-19 Yo Soy Tu Mismo: Michael James discusses why Bhagavan’s path is a path of unlearning, and wrote:
Michael mentioned in one of his recent videos (I’ll be paraphrasing) that one of the problems of vedantic teachings is that historically, the simple teachings of the Upanishads started to be complicated to understand because all the commentaries, and the commentaries on the commentaries (and the commentaries on the commentaries on the commentaries!) appeared...

Sunday, 15 December 2019

Why do we need to distinguish ourself as ego from whatever person we seem to be?

A friend recently wrote a comment saying ‘I cannot easily see the importance of stressing the necessity of a clear distinction between ego and person’, and while considering what to reply to him I remembered a reply that I had written to another friend back in April regarding the importance of this distinction, which at the time I had intended to adapt as an article, but in the midst of other work it had somehow slipped down my mental list of priorities. Therefore in the first four sections of this article I will reproduce the reply I wrote in April, and then in the final section I will reply specifically to the recent comment asking about this distinction.

Friday, 8 November 2019

Ego seems to exist only when we look elsewhere, away from ourself

In a comment on one of my recent videos, 2019-11-02 Sri Ramana Center, Houston: discussion with Michael James on Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu verse 34, a friend asked, “At 50:50 you say that asking why the ego has arisen or how it has arisen is like asking how was the son of the barren woman born. Isn’t ‘how the ego arose’ a permissible question, considering that Bhagavan has explained it in Uḷḷadu Narpadu himself, this question of how the ego came into existence? Can a good understanding of how the ego came into existence also help us in our attempts to destroy it with vichara?”, in reply to which I wrote:

Monday, 29 July 2019

Why does ego rise again from manōlaya and not from manōnāśa?

In a comment on my previous article, Is there any such thing as ‘biological awareness’?, a friend called Abhilash wrote: ‘Could you clarify this confusion on deep sleep. We understand that in deep sleep ego is subdued, given this is the case when we wake up, how the memory that I slept well and did not know anything is obtained. If only awareness and ignorance were present during deep-sleep who reports this experience of absence back to ego in the waking state. As awareness transcends time/space/causality how can we say “awareness” possesses memory? Kindly clarify’.

Wednesday, 24 July 2019

Is there any such thing as ‘biological awareness’?

A friend recently wrote to me: ‘People seem to have a hard time grasping Bhagavan’s teachings. Would it not be easier just to tell them thoughts are an illusion, so pure biological awareness is the true self, especially because biologically changes will happen in the brain that will solidify this learner behavior over time, and once they reach this state, the ugly term of biological awareness will get burned along with the ego in the pyre?’ The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to this:

Friday, 28 June 2019

How can there be any experience without something that is experiencing it?

In four comments on one of my recent articles, In what sense and to what extent do we remember what we were aware of in sleep?, a friend called Lewis asked several questions about awareness, experience, ego and appearance that can be adequately answered only by carefully considering some of the fundamental principles of Bhagavan’s teachings, so in this article I will try to answer his questions in the clear light of those principles.

Monday, 24 June 2019

How can we be sure that we can wake up from this dream of our present life?

Yesterday in a comment on one of my videos, 2019-01-12 Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK: discussion with Michael James on Nāṉ Ār? paragraph 14, a friend called Saroj wrote:
Thank you for this video, Michael. We can think of the dream state only with respect to (what seems to be) the waking state. So when Bhagavan says that waking state also is only a dream, how to understand this statement? Since we know the dream state only with respect to this waking state, if the waking state too is a dream, then there is no longer any standard left against which to place dream and thus to make sense of it. Typing this question, it seems like the standard must be the state of deep sleep. So basically, there is no state that can be called the waking state? Only dream and sleep? Also, it seems like no rational person will deny that this world is quite possibly only a dream or mental imagination. But how can we be sure that we can ‘wake’ up from this dream, and how? Bhagavan has taught that this is possible, should we take this on faith? And try to experience it ourselves through our practice? I ask because previously, I have followed several different people, some whose teachings were very superficial although at that time I may have felt otherwise, but with Bhagavan’s teachings I feel sure that I don’t have to search any further, I don’t have to dig any more wells, as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa said in an analogy. But this feeling is not sufficiently empowered by a clarity of understanding Bhagavan’s teachings or doing deep self-investigation, but largely just a feeling in my heart, if [I] may put it like that. So I am still very immature and lacking in both bhakti and vairagya.
The following is my reply to this:

Tuesday, 11 June 2019

In what sense and to what extent do we remember what we were aware of in sleep?

In a comment on one of my recent articles, How to practise self-enquiry (ātma-vicāra)?, a friend called Rajat Sancheti wrote:
If I give it some thought, and try to recall last night’s dream, it becomes quite clear that in dream I am aware of myself without being aware of this body. But if I try to see the same thing (that I am aware of myself without being aware of this body) regarding dreamless sleep, it is not very clear. Why is it that the memory of having existed in dream is much clearer than the memory of having existed in dreamless sleep? Or is it that in the case of dream, what is clearer to me is only the memory of having existed as some body, and not the memory of simply existing?

Sunday, 31 March 2019

Whatever jñāna we believe we see in anyone else is false

In the introduction to my previous article, Is it possible to have a ‘direct but temporary experience of the self’ or to watch the disappearance of the I-thought?, I had written that in my next article I would discuss the idea that Poonja could somehow give people an experience that bypassed the need for ‘a rather intense, vigilant practice that took place over a long period of time’, but I have not yet finished writing that article, and in the meanwhile I have written this article in response to one of the comments on my previous article, so I am posting this one now and and will post the other one later.

Friday, 15 February 2019

Thoughts and dreams appear only in the self-ignorant view of ourself as ego, not in the clear view of ourself as we actually are

A few months ago a friend wrote to me asking about a passage attributed to Annamalai Swami, but which I later found was a misquoted version of a passage from the book Annamalai Swami: Final Talks (perhaps because it had been translated from English into some other language and then back into English again), so I first replied regarding the wording of the misquoted version, and after finding the original passage I wrote another reply more appropriate to that wording. This article is adapted from these two replies.

Tuesday, 12 February 2019

What is the correct meaning of ‘Be in the now’?

A friend recently wrote to me asking whether Bhagavan’s teachings can be compared to those of Zen masters such as ‘Be in the now’, ‘Mindfulness’ and so on, which he said seem to have ‘similar meaning and understanding, because when we’re in the now and here we don’t have thoughts flowing and hence remain in the self’, and he added that he thinks Bhagavan addressed this in verse 15 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu. The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to him.

Saturday, 2 February 2019

In a dream there is only one dreamer, and if the one dreamer wakes up the entire dream will come to an end

A friend recently wrote to me:
I understand that there is one ego, which creates the illusion of many people and a world. If one person in this illusion, i.e. you or I, becomes realized, how is that going to destroy the ego as a whole? When Ramana became realized, this didn’t stop the world appearing for me. I know Ramana when asked about others said there are no others and if all is a dream of course he is correct, but others myself including continue to dream we exist despite Ramana becoming enlightened. Is realization a gradual breaking down of the ego individual by individual?

My second question: What is Shakti? I have looked it up and it seems to say it is energy which creates and that it is part of who we naturally are. This seems contradictory to how I now see realization as being. I now see realization as a kind of nothingness, not dissimilar to deep sleep. Can you remind me is this correct? Is shakti the same as ego and the cause of illusion?

The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to her:

Thursday, 31 January 2019

To understand consciousness can we rely upon the observations and theories of neuroscience?

Recently a friend wrote to me saying that he was caring for his mother, who was in the final stages of dying because of a brain tumour, and that for a year he had been watching the effect it had on her: ‘I followed every moment of her conscious disappearance and with all her reports about that till three days ago when she fell into a terminal coma, just breathing. [...] Layer by layer I observed her fading away: abstract reasoning, language, sight, taste, calculation, self-perception, memory, emotions, equilibrium, movement, then faces recognition, space time comprehension, till the sleeping mode during the day, sudden change of mood, personality, then fear, sorrow, and now coma, tomorrow death’.

He also wrote about the connection between the changes that had been taking place in his mother’s perception, behaviour, understanding, character, response to stimuli and so on and the parts of her brain that were progressively affected by cancer cells, and what neuroscience says about such things, including the idea that ‘consciousness is only an emergent property of the brain’. He wrote that therefore ‘I have to surrender to the hard fact of the causal relation between brain and consciousness’, and asked what Bhagavan’s teachings have to say about such matters. The first section of this article is adapted from my reply to this, and the second section is adapted from my reply to what he wrote in response to my first reply.


Wednesday, 30 January 2019

What is deluded is not our real nature but only ego

In my previous article, How to be self-attentive even while we are engaged in other activities?, I adapted a reply that I had written to a friend. In another email the same friend asked ‘How did the ego come about?’ and wrote:
Am I correct to say the following? At the beginning, there was only true self. Then, somehow or other, it deluded itself and believed it to be the ego — which is the root of everything. Then, the ego got reborn over and over. What we are trying to do now is to turn what seems to be the ego within and in so doing, the ego dissolves, revealing true self that it always has been — and thus, ending all our sufferings.

My question is: If our true self is always only aware of itself, how did it delude itself at the very beginning? The “I thought” arises only if one looks outside, correct? So, if our true self is only aware of itself, how does it delude itself to begin with?


Sunday, 13 May 2018

The ego is the sole cause, creator, source, substance and foundation of all other things

In a comment on one of my recent articles, The ego does not actually exist, but it seems to exist, and only so long as it seems to exist do all other things seem to exist, a friend called Salazar wrote, ‘Did anybody on this blog wonder who is perceiving the thoughts which come into awareness? That what is aware of thoughts cannot be the creator of these thoughts, because a thought is an object apart from that “observer”’. This article is written in reply to this comment and another one written by him.

Saturday, 10 March 2018

If we investigate the ego closely enough we will see that it is only brahman, but however closely we investigate the world we can never thereby see that it is brahman

After telling me that he is now reading Ramana Maharshi: The Crown Jewel of Advaita by John Grimes, a friend sent me two WhatsApp messages saying:
I am ‘excited’. For the first time I read about or understood the distinction between the illusory nature of the world and that of the individual — John Grimes’ book p. 147 and 148. Seeing the rope as snake and seeing the white conch shell as yellow conch shell due to the unseen or unrecognized yellow glass. Wonderful explanation that struck me.

Brahman manifesting as world, but seeing only the world as real is illusion like seeing the rope as snake. The individual though only brahman, and also felt as I, but due to ego (yellow glass), mistaking I as me or mine.

Thus while both are illusions, the second one is that in aspect or nature of ‘I’, although I is seen or experienced. When the ignorance is removed, it will be known that it is brahman that was being all the while experienced hitherto also as ‘I’ — that is there are not two ‘I’s.



The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to him:

Wednesday, 28 February 2018

Our existence is self-evident, because we shine by our own light of pure self-awareness

In a comment on one of my recent articles, Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu: Tamil text, transliteration and translation, a friend called Sanjay wrote:
Michael once wrote to me (in reply to one of my emails):

The mind knows that the chair is a chair, an object of wood, etc., but this is not what the chair actually is. If we analyse a little deeper, both the chair and the wood are ideas in our mind, and we have no way of proving to ourself that any chair or wood actually exists independent of our ideas of them. Hence Bhagavan says that the whole world is nothing but ideas or thoughts, as for example in the fourth and fourteenth paragraphs of Nan Yar?:
Except thoughts [or ideas], there is separately no such thing as ‘world’.

What is called the world is only thought.
Referring to this, another friend using the pseudonym ‘ādhāra’ wrote a comment saying:
However, Bhagavan did not say that we as an ego are excluded from the “world”. On the contrary it is said that we are part of the world in waking and dreaming. So we can conclude that we too are only an idea or a thought or a projection.

We definitely do not even have proof/evidence that we exist independent of our idea of that. Therefore we cannot reasonable/well-founded have to presume that we are more than an idea. There is no evidence to support this thesis.

Nevertheless we can put our trust in Bhagavan Ramana because he inspires confidence and looks trustworthy. To follow Bhagavan’s teaching is even urgently necessary.
The following is my reply to this:

Thursday, 4 January 2018

In what sense does Bhagavan generally use the terms பொருள் (poruḷ) and வஸ்து (vastu)?

In my previous article, Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu first maṅgalam verse: what exists is only thought-free awareness, which is called ‘heart’, so being as it is is alone meditating on it, I translated the term ‘உள்ளபொருள்’ (uḷḷa-poruḷ), which Bhagavan uses in the first and third lines of the first maṅgalam verse of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu, as ‘the existing substance’, ‘actual substance’ or ‘real substance’, and I explained that உள்ள (uḷḷa) is a relative or adjectival participle that means ‘existing’, ‘actual’ or ‘real’, and பொருள் (poruḷ) is a noun that has a range of meanings, including thing (any thing, but particularly a thing that really exists or a thing of value), meaning, subject-matter, substance, essence, reality or wealth, but in this context means ‘substance’ or ‘reality’.

In a comment on that article a friend called Mouna asked me why I chose to translate பொருள் (poruḷ) as ‘substance’ rather than ‘reality’:

Monday, 1 January 2018

Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu first maṅgalam verse: what exists is only thought-free awareness, which is called ‘heart’, so being as it is is alone meditating on it

As I explained in my previous article, Upadēśa Kaliveṇbā: the extended version of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu, over the coming months (or perhaps years, if other work gets in my way) I hope to be able to publish a series of forty-two articles each of which will be a detailed explanation of one of the verses of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu along with its kaliveṇbā extension or extensions, so this article is the first in this series.

No commentary on the verses of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu can be considered complete or entirely comprehensive, because however much one may explain and discuss them there will always be room for further explanations and discussions from different perspectives, so the explanations I will be giving in this series of articles will be far from complete. However my aim is to give at least a basic explanation of each verse, enough to make its profound and rich meaning clear and to enable each reader to do their own reflection (manana) on it.

Thursday, 28 December 2017

Upadēśa Kaliveṇbā: the extended version of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu

Sri Muruganar had collected twenty-one verses that Bhagavan had composed on various occasions, and in July 1928 he asked Bhagavan to compose some more verses in order to form a work of forty verses (like four ancient Tamil poems each of which consisted of forty verses, namely Iṉṉā Nāṟpadu, Iṉiyavai Nāṟpadu, Kār Nāṟpadu and Kaḷavaṙi Nāṟpadu) elucidating the nature of reality and the means to attain it. Accordingly on the 21st July 1928 Bhagavan began to compose more verses on this subject, and in order to arrange them into a logical order and to form them into coherent text, he and Muruganar would discuss in detail the progress of the work, where gaps needed to be filled, and which of the original twenty-one verses should be retained and which discarded.

Friday, 20 October 2017

Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu: Tamil text, transliteration and translation

As I explained at the beginning of my previous article, Upadēśa Undiyār: Tamil text, transliteration and translation, Nāṉ Ār?, Upadēśa Undiyār and Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu are the three texts in which Bhagavan expressed the fundamental principles of his teachings in the most clear, coherent, comprehensive and systematic manner, which is why these are the three texts that I cite most frequently on this blog, and therefore friends often ask me for my complete translation of each of them. My translation of Nāṉ Ār? has been available on my website for many years, and for a long time I have been meaning to post my complete translations of Upadēśa Undiyār and Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu there also, but somehow I did not get round to doing so till recently, when I finally decided that I should put it off no longer. Therefore having posted my translation of Upadēśa Undiyār in my previous article, in this one I give a fresh translation of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu, which is a carefully revised and refined version of all my earlier translations of it.

Thursday, 24 August 2017

The ego is a spurious entity, but an entity nonetheless, until we investigate it keenly enough to see that it does not actually exist

A friend wrote to me yesterday:
You prefer using ‘ourself’ or ‘oneself’ or ‘I’ instead of ‘the Self’. It is because by using ‘the Self’ we tend to objectify ourself. So this point is clear. But then why do we use ‘the ego’? Are we likewise not objectifying ourself by using ‘the ego’?
The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to him:

Tuesday, 25 July 2017

What is aware of the absence of the ego and mind in sleep?

A friend wrote to me today asking:
If pure awareness simply is and is not aware of anything else because only it exists, and the ego is not there during deep sleep, what knows the absence of the ego and mind during deep sleep?

After waking up, I know for a fact that the ego-mind wasn’t there (in deep sleep). I also know that (due to not having investigated keenly enough) it appears to be here now (in waking).

So my question is, what is aware of both the presence of the ego-mind in waking/dream and its absence in deep sleep? It can’t be pure awareness nor the ego-mind itself.
The following is what I replied to him:

Thursday, 6 July 2017

What we actually are is just pure self-awareness: awareness that is aware of nothing other than itself

A friend recently wrote to me:
You say that the Self is always self-aware. What about then the concept of Parabrahman (where awareness isn’t aware that it is aware). Isn’t this a contradiction? Ramesh Balsekar used this phrase a lot in his teaching for instance.

Can you comment on this please.
The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to him:

Wednesday, 28 June 2017

There is absolutely no difference between sleep and pure self-awareness (ātma-jñāna)

After I wrote the reply that I reproduced in the article I posted here yesterday, namely Māyā is nothing but our own mind, so it seems to exist only when we seem to be this mind, the friend to whom I wrote it replied, ‘Thank you, Michael, but I assume ‘realisation’ is not quite the same as deep sleep?’, to which I replied:

Tuesday, 27 June 2017

Māyā is nothing but our own mind, so it seems to exist only when we seem to be this mind

A friend wrote to me today:
Someone wrote this on FB yesterday and I am getting confused again because I thought the idea of becoming realised is to put an end to Maya:

“According to Adi Shankara (7th century father of modern non-dual philosophy), Maya is eternal. At no point does “form” cease to exist. It (maya/form) never had a beginning because it is eternal. It will also never have an end. The difference between enlightened and unenlightened is in the mind only. The universe doesn’t disappear. The mind ceases to be confused about the nature of one’s own Self. Bodies may come and go but the enlightened mind is not attached to them or identified with them. Yet they come and go like clouds in the sky.”

Why do people have different ideas on self-realisation?
The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to her:

Wednesday, 7 June 2017

Why should we believe that dream is anything other than a fabrication of our dreaming mind?

A friend wrote to me last night saying that his father and brother believe that when one dreams ‘the dream is really you leaving the physical body and going to some other realm and interacting with other souls’, and that he always had trouble believing this idea, but asked me: ‘What is the best argument philosophically to counter such an assertion?’ The following is what I replied to him:

Saturday, 27 May 2017

Do we need to do anything at all?

During a recent meeting of the Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK, which was recorded on the video 2017-05-13 Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK: discussion with Michael James on importance of practice, a friend called Alasdair was questioning me, and from 33.46 to 39.51 our dialogue was as follows:
Alasdair: OK, so, if I am lying in bed, and I manage to remind myself that the first thing I have got to think of is ‘who am I?’ and keep the ‘I’-current running, but I also know that shortly after I get out of bed I have got to do certain things in the kitchen, or I have got certain tasks to …

Michael: Who has all these tasks?

A: The little ‘I’, and it is precisely that which …

M: No, it is not the little ‘I’. The little ‘I’ doesn’t have any tasks. It’s Alasdair who has all these tasks, isn’t it?

Tuesday, 2 May 2017

Does anything exist independent of our perception of it?

In a comment on my previous article, Why is effort required for us to go deep in our practice of self-investigation?, a friend called Samarender Reddy asked:
Take the case of anesthesia. I may be undergoing an operation, for which anesthesia is given. Under the influence of anesthesia, I am unaware or do not perceive the world. But once the operation is done and the anesthetic wears off and I wake up, I might see a big scar with stitches on my abdomen. Can I not thereby conclude that the world existed during the anesthesia for the operation to have taken place even though I was not perceiving it due to the effect of anesthesia. Otherwise, how to account for the fact of the scar on the abdomen, and the consequent relief from pain I might be experiencing. If the world did not exist when I was under anesthesia, then how did the operation take place, as evidenced by the scar and relief of symptoms, and maybe, say, even a specimen of my gallbladder taken out. And if we so concede that the world existed during anesthesia, then analogously can we not conclude that the world exists even during deep sleep. Perception is not the only means to establish a fact, right, with inference and verbal testimony being the other means of knowledge to establish a fact. In the case of anesthesia and deep sleep, while I cannot resort to perception as a means of knowledge to establish the fact of the existence of the world during those states, but surely inference (with regard to cause-and-effect) and the verbal testimony of others can lead me to conclude that the world does indeed exist during anesthesia and deep sleep, right?
In reply to this I wrote the following comment:

Sunday, 26 February 2017

I certainly exist, but I am not necessarily what I seem to be

A friend wrote to me recently explaining how he feels most of the time, and he started by saying, ‘I know for sure, that whatever I say, think or do, there is no “I” who is doing anything’, so the following is adapted from what I replied to him:

Sunday, 19 February 2017

What is the difference between God and the ego?

After I wrote the article What is the difference between pure awareness and the ego, and how are they related? yesterday, the same friend replied asking me to explain to her the difference between īśvara and the ego, so the following is what I replied to her:

Saturday, 18 February 2017

What is the difference between pure awareness and the ego, and how are they related?

A friend recently wrote asking me to explain the difference between awareness and consciousness and how consciousness is connected to the ego, so the following is what I wrote in reply to her:

Saturday, 28 January 2017

Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu verse 12: other than the real awareness that we actually are, there is nothing to know or make known

In section 16 of one of my recent articles, What is aware of everything other than ourself is only the ego and not ourself as we actually are, I quoted and discussed verse 12 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu, after reading which a friend who has translated many of my articles into Italian and posted them on his blog , La Caverna del Cuore, wrote asking me to explain the exact meaning and implication of a word in the third sentence that I had translated as ‘for causing to know’. Since this is a very significant word that has a deep and broad meaning in this context, I will explain its significance in this article.

Sunday, 22 January 2017

Wednesday, 14 December 2016

Is it possible for us to see anything other than ourself as ‘the Self’?

On one of my recent articles, The observer is the observed only when we observe ourself alone, a friend called Zubin wrote a comment in which he ended by saying:
I also think it is possible (and I don’t say this to be proud, it is just what I experience) that any adjunct of the ego can be seen as the Self, and as such it is still self-attendance. For example, I can see a thought (frustration, sadness, etc.) running through and I can immediately see that that thought-feeling is infused with, made up of, awareness/consciousness, and it subsides back into awareness/consciousness when it is looked at directly.

I think looking at anger as anger gives the ego life, but looking at the Self in everything, including anger is, I hope, still self-enquiry.
What sees adjuncts or any other phenomena is only the ego, and since the ego is a mistaken awareness of ourself, how can it ever see ‘the Self’ (ourself as we actually are)? If it did see ‘the Self’ even for a moment, it would cease to be the ego and would therefore cease seeing any adjuncts or other phenomena. Therefore in this article I will try to explain to Zubin the fallacy in the beliefs that he has expressed in this comment.

Wednesday, 23 November 2016

Why does Bhagavan sometimes say that the ātma-jñāni is aware of the body and world?

In the comments on several of my recent articles there has been an ongoing discussion regarding the question of whether or not the ātma-jñāni is aware of the world, because many friends are convinced by Bhagavan’s teachings that all phenomena (second and third persons) seem to exist only in the self-ignorant view of the ego (the first person), and that therefore when the ego is dissolved forever in the clear light of ātma-jñāna (pure self-awareness) no phenomena will seem to exist, whereas other friends seem to believe that even though the ātma-jñāni is nothing but brahman itself, it is still somehow operating through a body and mind and is therefore aware of that body and of the surrounding world. The latter group of friends often cite passages from Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi and other records of his oral teachings that seem to support their point of view, and they have even found verses in Guru Vācaka Kōvai and passages in Sadhu Om’s writings that likewise seem to support it.

During the course of this discussion, a friend called Bob wrote a comment on one of my recent articles, The difference between vivarta vāda and ajāta vāda is not just semantic but substantive, in which he cited a passage from The Path of Sri Ramana that had been referred to several times by other friends and remarked ‘Hopefully Michael can shed some light on the deep meaning of this passage for us’, because he conceded that it seems to support the belief that ‘the jnani still experiences the world / multiplicity but experiences everything as itself’, even though his own belief is that ‘the jnani / myself as I really am does not experience the world / body or duality of any kind’, in support of which he cited a translation by Sadhu Om and me of the kaliveṇbā version of verse 26 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu and a note regarding it from pages 58-9 of Sri Ramanopadesa Noonmalai. Therefore the following is my reply to this comment.

Monday, 21 November 2016

What is the correct meaning of ajāta vāda?

In a comment on my previous article, The difference between vivarta vāda and ajāta vāda is not just semantic but substantive, a friend called Venkat questioned my understanding of the meaning of ajāta vāda, citing something that I wrote in the sixth section of that article, What is unborn (ajāta) is only pure self-awareness, and since it is the infinite whole, nothing else actually exists, namely ‘ajāta vāda is the contention that no creation has ever occurred even as an illusory appearance’, and then arguing:
Michael I think that you might be incorrect in your understanding of the advaitic meaning of ajata vada. I cannot argue with you on what Bhagavan Ramana meant by it.

Gaudapada’s famous ajata verse occurs in the second chapter of his karika. If this verse is taken in context of the verses that precede and follow it, it is clear that Gaudapada does indeed mean that there is no real creation of the world or the jiva, and that both are illusions.

30: This Atman, though non-separate from all these, appears as it were separate. One who knows this truly interprets the meaning of the Vedas without hesitation
31: As are dreams and illusions or a castle in the air seen in the sky, so is the universe viewed by the wise in the Vedanta
32: There is no dissolution, no birth, none in bondage, none aspiring for wisdom, no seeker of liberation and none liberated. This is the absolute truth.
33: This (the Atman) is imagined both as unreal objects that are perceived as the non-duality. The objects are imagined in the non-duality itself. Therefore non-duality alone is the highest bliss.

Sankara’s commentary on v32 is also worth reading, though quite long. Relevant extracts:

“This verse sums up the meaning of the chapter. When duality is perceived to be illusory and Atman alone is known as the sole Reality, then it is clearly established that all our experiences, ordinary or religious, verily pertain to the domain of ignorance.”

“Thus duality being non-different from mental imagination cannot have a beginning or an end . . . Therefore it is established that duality is a mere illusion of the mind. Hence it is well-said that the Ultimate Reality is the absence of destruction, etc, on account of the non-existence of duality (which exists only in the imagination of the mind”.

My understanding is that srsti-drsti vada says first the world is created and then jivas evolve from it thereafter. Then, vivartha vada takes a step back to say that actually the jiva’s perceiving creates the world. And ajata vada then takes a further step back to point out that the jiva itself is an illusion, a superimposition on the atman.
In this article, therefore, I will try to explain more clearly why the correct meaning of ajāta vāda is the contention that no vivarta (illusion or false appearance) has ever been born or come into existence at all.

Tuesday, 4 October 2016

Why does the term ‘I am’ refer not just to our ego but to what we actually are?

In a comment on my previous article, ‘I am’ is the reality, ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’ is the ego, a friend called Mouna raised several objections to what I had written in it, so in this article I will try to reply to his objections.

Monday, 1 August 2016

The observer is the observed only when we observe ourself alone

In a recent comment on one of my earlier articles, ‘Observation without the observer’ and ‘choiceless awareness’: Why the teachings of J. Krishnamurti are diametrically opposed to those of Sri Ramana, a friend called Zubin wrote:
I read a lot of Krishnamurti when younger, and I do agree that his approach may have been unnecessarily complicated.

Krishnamurti focused on self-exploration of one’s mind. If you are angry, dissect it to find out what is deeper than it, etc. In effect, you would be looking at all the little adjuncts of the ego to see each one as false.

But ultimately, Krishnamurti’s main theme was “The Observer is the Observed”, which he repeated frequently.

So, in that sense, there is no difference in Krishnamurti’s ultimate teaching and Ramana’s. When you do self-enquiry you are Self looking at Self. When you are looking at the feeling of I AM, the looker is also that same I AM feeling, or, in other words, the observer is the observed.
The following is my reply to him:

Saturday, 2 July 2016

Names and forms are all just thoughts, so we can free ourself from them only by investigating their root, our ego

A friend recently sent me a long email in which she began by saying, ‘The ego generates words in consciousness. The ego presents in consciousness as streams of words which form the so-called “stream of consciousness”’, and then went on to express her reflections on this idea, saying for example, ‘We all know how the mind races at times with endless streams of words which form thoughts of countless subjects, fears, hopes, memories, etc.’, and ‘Language forms words into thoughts, objects, events, time, space, memories, etc. creating the dream of a populated earth in a vast universe’, and she explained how she tries to apply such ideas in her practice of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra). The following article is my reply to her.

Wednesday, 22 June 2016

When can there be total recognition that the world is unreal?

A friend recently wrote to me, ‘Could you tell me whether realisation would be like deep sleep with no world present or would there still be a world but with total recognition that it is unreal. I feel driven to understand but seem to be going round in circles’, to which I replied:

Sunday, 8 May 2016

The ego is the thinker, not the act of thinking

In a comment on my previous article, The person we seem to be is a form composed of five sheaths, a friend called Ann Onymous wrote, ‘Ego is the very thinking that there is, or even seems to be an ego’, but this is confusing an action with the actor, mistaking the former (the thinking) to be the latter (the thinker). Thinking that there is an ego or that there is no ego, that it actually exists or just seems to exist, or thinking any other thought about it or about anything else cannot be the ego, because thinking is an action, whereas the ego is the thinker, the one who does that action.

If the ego were the act of thinking, we could investigate it simply by observing our thinking, which is obviously not the case. To investigate this ego we must ignore all thinking and observe only the thinker, the one who is aware of thinking and of the thoughts produced by thinking. Therefore it is necessary for us to clearly distinguish the thinker from its thinking, and also from whatever it thinks.

Thursday, 5 May 2016

The person we seem to be is a form composed of five sheaths

In a pair of comments that I wrote in reply to some other comments on my previous article, Self-investigation (ātma-vicāra) entails nothing more than just being persistently and tenaciously self-attentive, I explained:
What is a person? It is a set of phenomena centred around a particular body, and it has both physical and mental features. Though its physical and mental features change over time, however extreme those changes may be we identify it as the same person because it is the same body that displays those changing features. It starts its life as a baby, and it may end it as an old man or woman, but throughout its life and in spite of all its changes it is the same person. As we all know, there seem to be many people in this world, and each of them seem to be sentient, but what makes them seem to be so?

Sunday, 28 February 2016

The role of logic in developing a clear, coherent and uncomplicated understanding of Bhagavan’s teachings

In my previous article, Why should we believe what Bhagavan taught us?, particularly in the first nine sections, I discussed the logic that he used in order to explain to us why we should believe the fundamental principles of his teachings, which prompted several friends to write comments asking for further clarification or expressing their own views about this subject. Therefore in this article I will start in the first five sections by reproducing and expanding upon the replies that I wrote to such comments written by a friend called Wittgenstein, and then in the next seven sections I will reply to two of the comments written by another friend called Venkat.

Wednesday, 11 November 2015

Sleep is our natural state of pure self-awareness

In the first comment on my previous article, What happens to our mind in sleep?, an anonymous friend wrote: ‘It cannot be correct that we experience ourselves in sleep and mind is absent. If that were true, everyone is realized during sleep. And once realized, he does not come back to the world. That is why it is said that the mind is in the dormant state. The I thought exists in its primitive form’.

As this anonymous friend wrote, this seemingly common sense reasoning is why it is generally said that our mind or ego exists in sleep in a dormant condition (known as the kāraṇa śarīra or ānandamaya kōśa), but such reasoning oversimplifies the issue, failing to recognise not only some important nuances but also some fairly obvious flaws in its own arguments. Let us therefore consider this issue in greater depth in order to see whether we can understand Bhagavan’s teachings in this regard more clearly.

Tuesday, 3 November 2015

What happens to our mind in sleep?

A couple of months ago a friend called Vilcomayo wrote a comment on one of my earlier articles, Our memory of ‘I’ in sleep, in which he or she asked, ‘what exactly means “absence of the mind” in sleep? In a state in which our mind is/was absent or subsided, does/did the mind “go” to any other place or does/did it rather subside in its source?’, and today he or she wrote another comment reminding me about this question.

Before replying to this question I would first like to apologise to Vilcomayo for not replying earlier. I receive so many questions by email and in comments on this blog that I am unfortunately not able to reply to all of them immediately, and if I cannot reply to any of them soon enough they tend to join the large backlog of hundreds of questions that I have not yet had time to reply to and may never have time to do so. Therefore, Vilcomayo, you are perfectly justified in reminding me about your question, and I apologise not only to you but also to all the other friends whose questions I have not been able to reply to yet.

What happens to our mind in sleep is not actually an easy question to answer, because it is a question asked from the perspective of waking or dream, the two states in which this mind seems to exist, about sleep, which is the state in which it does not seem to exist. According to Bhagavan the mind does not actually exist even when it seems to exist, so the correct answer is that nothing happens to the mind in sleep, because there is no mind to which anything could ever happen.

Saturday, 31 October 2015

The logic underlying the practice of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra)

In a comment on my previous article, Self-investigation (ātma-vicāra) is just the simple practice of trying to be attentively self-aware, an anonymous friend asked, ‘Does this practice work?’ and went on to explain why he or she asked this question, saying, ‘There are so many Gurus each offering a unique method — a method that might have worked for them. The real question is does it work for others? Michael, from your writings I gather you have been practicing this for more than two decades (?). What is your realization so far? Have you been able to achieve what Bhagavan describes? Honestly, if the answer is no, then I will be very skeptical of this method’.

Wednesday, 23 September 2015

We ourself are what we are looking for

A friend wrote to me recently:
I am still struggling with understanding the concept of ‘Who am I’. Am I looking for that which existed before my body and mind came into this existence, i.e. emptiness/fullness etc.? Do I explore the personal ‘I’ and from where it arose? I understand that I am that source from which the body came into the dream but when I explore it there is nothing there and I cannot feel the love that is supposed to be the real me. Also why is the dream of life so unpleasant when it has come from a source of love? What is the point of the dream? I find it frightening and I worry so much about the animals/the environment and I feel such pain. Why would the self create such a dream?
In reply I wrote:

Yes, we are looking for that which existed before our body and mind came into existence, but that exists not only then but also now and always, because it is what we actually are, so since we cannot go back in time we must find it here and now.

Tuesday, 22 September 2015

Self-knowledge is not a void (śūnya)

In a comment on one of my recent articles, The term nirviśēṣa or ‘featureless’ denotes an absolute experience but can be comprehended conceptually only in a relative sense, a friend called Bob asked several questions concerning the idea of a void, blank or nothingness and expressed his fear of such an idea. He started by asking why all we can now remember about what we experienced in deep sleep is a blank, or rather why we cannot remember anything at all except that we existed, and he suggested, ‘Is this because the illusory dualistic knowing consciousness [our mind or ego] cannot conceive the real non-dual being consciousness[?]’. He then went on to say, ‘I would be lying to you if I said that surrendering myself […] isn’t scary. It is very scary as I am scared of dissolving into the unknown. It is like letting go of the cliff and falling into nothingness, the complete unknown … the cold empty void’, but then asked, ‘is it more accurate to say that myself as I really am, the infinite non dual being consciousness that experiences everything as itself, is not a mere blank void or cold nothingness but is just a reality completely beyond the conceptualisation of my limited dualistic egoic mind[?]’, and added, ‘This seems to make letting go less scary as I am not falling into a cold empty void at all’.

To clarify what he was trying to express he also asked several other questions such as ‘is it right to say the non-dual infinite being consciousness is not a blank void of nothingness, it is just a reality beyond what the limited mind can understand so it appears a blank when tried to be recollected from the illusory dualistic waking state[?]’ and ‘is it right to say when I experience myself as I really am with perfect clarity of self-awareness this previous seeming blank empty nothingness / void I once linked to deep sleep will now be the one true reality as waking & dream would have dissolved into it and the deep sleep state will now be all there ever was / has been[?] The veil of lack of clarity would have been lifted for ever’, before finally expressing his hope that ‘this once seeming cold empty blank void perception of the deep sleep state will not be so but in contrast it will be a reality of pure bliss ... pure happiness of being where I experience everything as myself .. it won’t be cold empty void at all’.

This article is therefore an attempt to reassure Bob that the experience of true self-knowledge is not as scary as it may seem, and that it is something way beyond any idea that our finite mind may have of it.

Tuesday, 11 August 2015

What is cidābhāsa, the reflection of self-awareness?

In a comment on one of my recent articles, Can we experience what we actually are by following the path of devotion (bhakti mārga)?, an anonymous friend quoted a translation of verses 8 and 9 from Ātma-Vicāra Patikam (a song of eleven verses composed by Sri Sadhu Om about self-investigation, which is the first appendix in Sādhanai Sāram). What he wrote in verse 9 is:
நானெதென் றாய வஃது நலிவதற் கேதே தென்றால்
நானெனு மக விருத்தி ஞானத்தின் கிரண மாகும்
நானெனுங் கிரணத் தோடே நாட்டமுட் செல்லச் செல்ல
நானெனுங் கிரண நீள நசித்துநான் ஞான மாமே.

nāṉedeṉ ḏṟāya vaḵdu nalivadaṟ kēdē deṉḏṟāl
nāṉeṉu maha virutti ñāṉattiṉ kiraṇa māhum
nāṉeṉuṅ kiraṇat tōḍē nāṭṭamuṭ cellac cella
nāṉeṉuṅ kiraṇa nīḷa naśittunāṉ ñāṉa māmē
.

பதச்சேதம்: நான் எது என்று ஆய அஃது நலிவதற்கு ஏது ஏது என்றால், நான் எனும் அக விருத்தி ஞானத்தின் கிரணம் ஆகும். நான் எனும் கிரணத்தோடே நாட்டம் உள் செல்ல செல்ல, நான் எனும் கிரண நீளம் நசித்து நான் ஞானம் ஆமே.

Padacchēdam (word-separation): nāṉ edu eṉḏṟu āya aḵdu nalivadaṟku ēdu ēdu eṉḏṟāl, nāṉ eṉum aha-virutti ñāṉattiṉ kiraṇam āhum. nāṉ eṉum kiraṇattōḍē nāṭṭam uḷ sella sella, nāṉ eṉum kiraṇa nīḷam naśittu nāṉ ñāṉam āmē.

English translation: If anyone asks what the reason is for it [the ego] being destroyed when one investigates what am I, [it is because] the aham-vṛtti [ego-awareness] called ‘I’ is a [reflected] ray of jñāṉa [pure self-awareness]. When together with the ray called ‘I’ the investigation [attention or scrutinising gaze] goes more and more within, the extent [or length] of the ray called ‘I’ being reduced [and eventually destroyed], [what will then remain as] ‘I’ will indeed be jñāṉa [pure self-awareness].

Thursday, 25 June 2015

The term nirviśēṣa or ‘featureless’ denotes an absolute experience but can be comprehended conceptually only in a relative sense

In a comment on one of my recent articles, The ego is essentially a formless and hence featureless phantom, a friend called ‘Sleepwalker’ quoted a sentence from its thirteenth section, Can self-awareness be considered to be a feature of the ego? (which I had quoted from We are aware of ourself even though we are featureless, the second section in one of my earlier articles, Being attentively self-aware does not entail any subject-object relationship), namely “When we say, ‘I slept peacefully last night’, we are expressing our experience of having been in a state in which we experienced no features”, and asked whether the peacefulness of sleep is not just a feature.

Since the concept of nirviśēṣatva (featurelessness or absence of any distinguishing features) is a significant and useful idea in advaita philosophy, and since it is very relevant to the practice of self-investigation, I decided to write the following detailed answer to this question:

Sunday, 31 May 2015

How is karma destroyed only by self-investigation?

A new friend recently wrote to me asking, ‘When we do meditation on I or atma-vichara will all the previous karma be destroyed? How is that?’ The following is what I replied to him:

Thursday, 28 May 2015

The ego is essentially a formless and hence featureless phantom

In the fourth section of one of my recent articles, ‘Observation without the observer’ and ‘choiceless awareness’: Why the teachings of J. Krishnamurti are diametrically opposed to those of Sri Ramana, I wrote:
The important principle that he [Sri Ramana] teaches us in verse 25 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu is that this ego is only a formless and insubstantial phantom that seemingly comes into existence, endures and is nourished and strengthened only by grasping form (that is, by attending to and experiencing anything other than itself), so we can never free ourself from this ego so long as we persist in attending to anything other than ourself (that is, anything that has any features that distinguish it from this essentially featureless ego). Therefore the only way to free ourself from this ego is to investigate it — that is, to try to grasp it alone in our awareness. Since this ego itself is featureless and therefore formless, and since it can stand and masquerade as ourself only by grasping forms in its awareness, if we try to grasp this ego alone, it ‘will take flight’ and disappear, just as an illusory snake would disappear if we were to look at it carefully and thereby recognise that it is not actually a snake but only a rope.

Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Dṛg-dṛśya-vivēka: distinguishing the seer from the seen

In a comment that he wrote on my previous article, ‘Observation without the observer’ and ‘choiceless awareness’: Why the teachings of J. Krishnamurti are diametrically opposed to those of Sri Ramana, a friend called Venkat quoted two passages that record what Bhagavan replied on two occasions, first in response to a question that he was asked about the teachings of J. Krishnamurti and second in response to a comment about them.

Monday, 11 May 2015

‘Observation without the observer’ and ‘choiceless awareness’: Why the teachings of J. Krishnamurti are diametrically opposed to those of Sri Ramana

In a comment on one of my recent articles, What is meant by the term sākṣi or ‘witness’?, a friend called Sankarraman wrote:
I wouldn’t say that JK advocated witnessing of thoughts, since he has said that the witness being the ego is tied to thoughts. So that position extenuates him from that charge. But he speaks of the observation without the observer, which is similar to Patanjali’s extinction of thoughts as paving the way for liberation, which is called transcendental aloneness. There are a lot of parallels one can find in the two teachings except that they don’t constitute the flight of the Ajada.
In reply to this I wrote the following comment:

Tuesday, 21 April 2015

What is meant by the term sākṣi or ‘witness’?

When I attended a meeting of the Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK in London earlier this month, one of the questions I was asked was about the concept or practice of sākṣi-bhāva or ‘being a witness’. I do not remember exactly what I replied at the time, but after seeing the video that was made of that meeting, a friend wrote to me saying that he agreed that the term sākṣi or ‘witness’ as it is often used is a misnomer, and he recalled that Bhagavan said in certain contexts that we should take this term to mean just ‘presence’ (as in the presence of our real self) rather than ‘witness’. He also added his own reflections on this subject, saying:

Monday, 6 April 2015

How we can confidently dismiss the conclusions of materialist metaphysics

In one of my recent articles, All phenomena are just a dream, and the only way to wake up is to investigate who is dreaming, I wrote:
Moreover, since we experience ourself existing in sleep, when we do not experience anything else, the fact that we exist independent of whatever else we may experience in waking or dream is self-evident. Therefore we need not doubt this fact, or suppose that our existence could depend upon the existence of our body or any other thing, as is wrongly supposed by most present-day philosophers and scientists.
Quoting this passage, a friend called Sivanarul wrote a comment in which he said:

Friday, 3 April 2015

Any experience we can describe is something other than the experience of pure self-attentiveness

Last month a friend wrote to me describing what he experiences when he tries to practise self-investigation (ātma-vicāra) and asking whether his description indicates that his practice is on the right track. This article is adapted from the reply I wrote to him.

The experience of self-attentiveness or self-awareness cannot be expressed in words, because it is featureless, so any words we use to describe what we experience when we are trying to be self-attentive are only a description of something other than pure self-attentiveness.

Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Is there any real difference between waking and dream?

A couple of months ago a friend wrote to me asking:
You often say that there is, in essence, very little difference between the dream and waking states. Upon reflection it indeed does seem to be so.

However, there does seem to be one substantial difference. There is continuity in the waking state both of location and body. When we enter the waking state we always find ourselves in the same place we left it at. We also find ourselves with the same body that went to sleep.

The dream state, on the other hand, is not like that at all. When we enter the dream state we often find ourselves in completely different places. One time we may find ourselves in the UK, another time in America or some place of our youth, etc. We may even find ourselves travelling somewhere in the outer space.

Saturday, 14 March 2015

Self-attentiveness and self-awareness

A friend recently wrote to me three emails in which he asked a series of questions about the practice of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra), and the following is adapted and expanded from the replies I wrote to each of his questions:

Monday, 2 March 2015

Investigating ourself is the only way to solve all the problems we see in this world

More than a year ago a friend wrote to me asking some questions about Sri Ramana’s teaching that what we now believe to be our waking state is actually just another dream, and last month he followed this up with a series of three more emails asking various questions, most of which were concerning the same subject. This article is adapted from the replies that I wrote to these four emails.

First reply:

In his first email my friend asked how we got ourself into this state of dream or forgetfulness if our real state is consciousness or spirit, and how it is possible for us to remain all the time in the state of self-abidance or self-awareness if we are at work, and finally: ‘Can you be in the state [of self-awareness] and yet optimally perform in the dream state (in the world) or do you forgo one when doing the other?’ In reply to this I wrote:

Sunday, 15 February 2015

Why is it necessary to consider the world unreal?

In several comments on some of my recent articles various friends have tried to argue that we need not be concerned about whether or not the world is real or exists independent of our experience of it. For example, in his first comment on Science and self-investigation Periya Eri wrote:
What is wrong in our deep-rooted “but unfounded” belief that the world exists independent of our experience of it? The statement saying that the world is unreal does not in the least change the fact that we have to master all difficulties in our life. The same evaluation goes for the conclusion that the world does not exist at all independent of our mind that experiences it. And the same is true of the statement that even the mind that experiences this world is itself unreal. Also the account that the mind does not actually exist at all and that after its investigation it will disappear, and that along with it the entire appearance of this world will also cease to exist. […]
In reply to this I wrote a comment in which I said:

Monday, 9 February 2015

Self-attentiveness is not an action, because we ourself are not two but only one

In the final paragraph of one of my recent articles, The connection between consciousness and body, I wrote:
So long as we allow ourself to attend to anything other than ourself, our body and all the other extraneous things that we thus experience seem to be real, so Sri Ramana advises us to try to attend only to ourself, the ‘I’ who is conscious of both ourself and all those other things. Therefore if we wish to follow his path and thereby to experience what this ‘I’ really is, we should not be concerned with our body or any connection we may seem to have with it, but should focus all our interest and attention only on ourself, the one absolute consciousness or pure self-awareness ‘I am’.
Referring to this, a friend wrote to me asking:

Wednesday, 4 February 2015

The terms ‘I’ or ‘we’ refer only to ourself, whether we experience ourself as we actually are or as the ego that we now seem to be

In a comment on one of my recent articles, The fundamental law of experience or consciousness discovered by Sri Ramana, Palaniappan Chidambaram asked, ‘If the whole sadhana [spiritual practice] is in just being one self […] then why do we use the term vichara or investigation? When thoughts come we don’t investigate but just ignore and turn attention to ourselves. So ideally there is no investigation or enquiry?’, to which I replied in a comment:
Since pure self-awareness is our essential nature, being ourself entails being clearly aware of ourself alone. Therefore trying to be aware of ourself alone is the only means by which we can succeed in being what we really are.

Sunday, 11 January 2015

Why are compassion and ahiṁsā necessary in a dream?

Last June, a few weeks after I posted on my YouTube channel the May 2014 video of me answering questions at a meeting of the Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK, a friend called Jim wrote to me asking:
In your latest YouTube upload you talk about being vegetarian, and sweatshops, and signing petitions. I’m confused in this point. So much is said about this waking state being exactly like our dream state, what does it matter what we eat, or wear, or where our clothes are made? If in a dream I’m eating a chicken, a carrot or a car bumper none of it matters. Upon waking I realize it’s just a dream all created by my mind. There is no boy toiling in a sweatshop upon my waking right? So why is the waking state different?
The following is adapted from the long reply I wrote to him, and also from shorter replies that I wrote to two of his subsequent emails:

Sunday, 4 January 2015

The fundamental law of experience or consciousness discovered by Sri Ramana

My previous article, Our aim should be to experience ourself alone, in complete isolation from everything else, was adapted from an email I wrote to a friend in reply to some questions he asked me about the practice of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra), which led to an exchange of further emails on the same subject. Therefore this article is adapted from the subsequent replies that I wrote to him.

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

Science and self-investigation

A friend recently asked me to comment on an article entitled The Universe as a Hologram by Michael Talbot, saying that ‘it brings the scientific viewpoint very close to the mystic vision of reality’, and after I replied to him he sent a second email in which he tried to explain why he believed that science is relevant to Sri Ramana’s teachings, saying:
Before physics delved deeply into the nature of matter, conviction about the unreality of the perceived world could only be based on complete faith in the teaching. In the modern world however, beliefs are founded upon rational and scientific grounds. Particle physics has provided us with scientific grounds for such faith i.e. belief in the unreality and illusoriness of the perceived world, since it has shown that what we regard as solid matter is actually non-substance.
The following is adapted from the replies I wrote to these two emails:

Friday, 19 December 2014

Does the world exist independent of our experience of it?

A friend wrote to me a few months ago quoting a passage from section 616 of Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi (2006 edition, p. 598) in which Sri Ramana says: ‘ahankara (ego) shoots up like a rocket and instantaneously spreads out as the Universe’ (which paraphrases the teaching that he gave still more clearly and emphatically in verse 26 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu: ‘அகந்தை உண்டாயின், அனைத்தும் உண்டாகும்; அகந்தை இன்றேல், இன்று அனைத்தும். அகந்தையே யாவும் ஆம். […]’ (ahandai uṇḍāyiṉ, aṉaittum uṇḍāhum; ahandai iṉḏṟēl, iṉḏṟu aṉaittum. ahandai-y-ē yāvum ām), which means ‘If the ego comes into existence, everything comes into existence. If the ego does not exist, everything does not exist. The ego itself is everything. […]’). It seems my friend has difficulty accepting this teaching, because after quoting this passage from Talks he wrote:
What is he talking about??? ... Is all the hard won knowledge of physics and the evolution of the universe so much nonsense?

This is consistent, certainly, if you believe everything is a dream and you’ve just woken up from a good sleep and created the universe.

I am afraid such mysticism is beyond me...and I mean no disrespect to Bhagavan Ramana.
The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to him:

Thursday, 20 November 2014

Is there any such thing as a ‘self-realised’ person?

In the comments on my previous two articles, Our memory of ‘I’ in sleep and Why should we believe that ‘the Self’ is as we believe it to be?, there has been some discussion about the subject of being a ‘self-realised’ person, with one friend claiming ‘I have realised who I am’ and others expressing doubts about that, so in this article I will examine this concept of being a ‘self-realised’ person and consider whether it accurately represents anything that truly exists.

Firstly I will consider the common use of the term ‘self-realisation’ as a translation of the Sanskrit terms ātma-jñāna or ātmānubhava, which respectively mean self-knowledge and self-experience in the sense of experiencing or being clearly aware of ourself as we really are. Though ‘realise’ can mean to recognise, understand, ascertain or become clearly aware of something, it is a rather vague and ambiguous term to use in this context, because it has various other meanings such as to accomplish, achieve, fulfil, actualise, effect, bring about, acquire or cause to happen, so ‘self-realisation’ is not the most appropriate term to use as a translation of ātma-jñāna or ātmānubhava, particularly since in psychology the term ‘self-realisation’ means self-actualisation or self-fulfilment in the sense of achieving one’s full personal potential.

Though he did not speak much English, Sri Ramana understood it enough to recognise that ‘self-realisation’ is not a particularly appropriate term to use in the context of his teachings. He therefore used to joke about it saying that ourself is always real, so there is no need for it to be realised, and that the problem is that we have realised what is unreal (that is, we have made the unreal seem to be real), so what we now need to do is not to realise our ever-real self but only to unrealise everything that is unreal, particularly our seemingly real ego, which is the root cause of the seeming reality of everything else.

Sunday, 9 November 2014

Why should we believe that ‘the Self’ is as we believe it to be?

In a comment on my previous article, Our memory of ‘I’ in sleep, a friend called Joel wrote:
Why do you talk of the Self remembering itself? It IS itself, so what is there to remember? The notion of the Self ‘remembering’ the Self during deep sleep when now awake is merely a creation of the mind to justify a continuity through the three states that actually is not in need of justification, because apart from the mind there are no three states.
The following is my reply to this comment:

One of the mistakes you are making here, Joel, is that you are taking an argument, assuming its conclusion to be true, and claiming that the argument is therefore unnecessary. But without the argument, what reason do you have for believing its conclusion to be true? If we believe a certain proposition to be true, but have no reason for believing it, our belief in it is unjustified. An argument is simply a reason or a set of reasons for believing a certain proposition or idea to be true, so when we consider whether or not a certain belief is true or justified, we need to consider whether the arguments or reasons for believing it are sound.

Sunday, 2 November 2014

Our memory of ‘I’ in sleep

In one of my recent articles, The essential teachings of Sri Ramana, I wrote:
Though we generally believe that we are not aware of anything in sleep, it would be more accurate to say that we are aware of nothing. The difference between what I mean here by ‘not being aware of anything’ and ‘being aware of nothing’ can be illustrated by the following analogy: if a totally blind person and a normally sighted person were both in a completely dark room, the blind person would not see anything, and hence he or she would not be able to recognise that there is no light there. The normally sighted person, on the other hand, would see nothing, and hence he or she would be able to recognise the absence of light. The fact that we are able to recognise the absence of any experience of anything other than ‘I’ in sleep clearly indicates that we exist in sleep to experience that absence or void.

The fact that we do actually experience sleep can also be demonstrated in other ways. For example, if we did not experience sleep, we would be aware of experiencing only two states, waking and dream, and we would not be aware of any gap between each successive state of waking or dream. But we are aware that sometimes there is a gap that we call sleep, in which we experience neither waking nor dream. We do not merely infer the existence of this third state, sleep, but actually experience it, and that is why we are able to say after waking from a period of deep sleep: ‘I slept peacefully and had no dreams’.

Sunday, 19 October 2014

We cannot experience ourself as we actually are so long as we experience anything other than ‘I’

In one of my earlier articles, Ātma-vicāra: stress and other related issues, I wrote:
You also ask: ‘when you are doing self-inquiry should your concentration be so good that you are not even aware of what’s going on around you, like the ceiling fan running, a baby crying etc. or is it OK if you are aware of the background noises like that?’ Yes, ideally you should not be aware of anything other than ‘I’. For example, if you were absorbed in reading a book that really interests you, you would not notice the sound of a fan or any other background noises, and if you did notice some sound such as a baby crying, that would mean that your attention had been distracted away from the book. Likewise, if you are absorbed in experiencing only ‘I’, you will not notice anything else, and if you do notice anything else, that means that your attention has been distracted away from ‘I’, so you should try to bring it back to ‘I’ alone.

Sunday, 12 October 2014

The essential teachings of Sri Ramana

A friend wrote to me recently saying, ‘My humble opinion with total respect: far far too many words. Can you indicate where in your web page is your essential succinct truth’, to which I replied trying to give a simple summary of the essential teachings of Sri Ramana as follows:

You are probably right: far too many words.

Sri Ramana’s teachings are actually very simple, and can therefore be expressed in just a few words, but our minds are complicated, so sometimes many words are necessary in order to unravel all our complex beliefs and ideas and to arrive at the simple core: ‘I am’.

‘I’ is the core of our experience (since whatever we experience is experienced only by ‘I’), and is also the core of his teachings. Everything that we experience could be an illusion, and everything that we believe could be mistaken, so it is necessary for us to doubt everything, but the only thing we cannot reasonably doubt is ‘I am’, because in order to experience anything, to believe anything or to doubt anything I must exist.

Sunday, 5 October 2014

We can believe vivarta vāda directly but not ajāta vāda

In a comment on my previous article, The perceiver and the perceived are both unreal a friend called Sanjay asked whether advaita vāda is a synonym of vivarta vāda, to which I replied in another comment:
Sanjay, advaita means ‘non-two-ness’ (a-dvi-tā), so advaita-vāda is the argument or theory that there is absolutely no twoness or duality. The most complete and radical expression of advaita-vāda is therefore ajāta-vāda, because according to ajāta-vāda not only does twoness not actually exist but it does not even seem to exist.

However, vivarta vāda is also compatible with advaita-vāda, because according to vivarta vāda twoness does not actually exist even though it seems to exist. That is, vivarta vāda accepts that distinctions (dualities or twonesses) such as the perceiver and the perceived (the ego and the world) seem to exist, but it argues that their seeming existence is just a false appearance (vivarta) and hence unreal.

Sunday, 28 September 2014

The perceiver and the perceived are both unreal

In a comment that he wrote on one of my earlier articles, What should we believe?, a friend called Venkat asked:
Bhagavan said that ajata vada was the ultimate truth, in his experience. He also said that eka jiva vada (drsti srsti vada) was the 'closest' to ajata vada.

How did Bhagavan see these two being different, given that eka jiva vada says there is no existent creation, it is just the perceiving of it (i.e. it is a dream)?
I replied to this in another comment:
Venkat, you should be able to understand the answer to your question by reading my latest article, Metaphysical solipsism, idealism and creation theories in the teachings of Sri Ramana, so I will give just a brief reply to it here.

According to ēka-jīva-vāda and dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda, there is one ego or jīva who perceives this world, which does not exist except in the view (the perception or experience) of that one ego. Therefore what causes the appearance of creation (sṛṣṭi) is only the perception (dṛṣṭi) of the ego.

Friday, 26 September 2014

Metaphysical solipsism, idealism and creation theories in the teachings of Sri Ramana

In a comment that he wrote on one of my recent articles, What should we believe?, Sankarraman referred to an article on David Godman’s blog, Swami Siddheswarananda’s views on Bhagavan’s Teachings on Creation, in which David discussed some opinions that Swami Siddheswarananda (former president of the Mysore branch of the Ramakrishna Math and founder of the Centre Védantique Ramakrichna in France) expressed about Sri Ramana’s views on solipsism and the idealistic theory of creation known as dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda in the third section of an article that he wrote in 1946 for the Golden Jubilee Souvenir, in which he claimed:
The philosophical outlook of Maharshi tends very often to be confused with that of solipsism or its Indian equivalent, drishti-srishti-vada, which is a sort of degenerated idealism. That Maharshi never subscribes to that view can be known if we study his works in the light of orthodox Vedanta or observe his behaviour in life. [...] (Golden Jubilee Souvenir, third edition, 1995, p. 69)
In his article David explains in his own way why Swami Siddheswarananda was wrong to believe that Sri Ramana did not teach dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda, and in his comment Sankarraman expressed his own views on this subject and asked me to explain my understanding in this regard, so the following is my reply to him:

Swami Siddheswarananda had genuine love and respect for Sri Ramana, but from what he wrote in the Golden Jubilee Souvenir it is clear that his understanding of some crucial aspects of Sri Ramana’s teachings (and also of what he called ‘orthodox Vedanta’) was seriously confused. Dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda (or drishti-srishti-vada, as he spelt it) is the argument (vāda) that creation (sṛṣṭi) is a result of perception or ‘seeing’ (dṛṣṭi), as opposed to sṛṣṭi-dṛṣṭi-vāda, which is any theory (whether philosophical, scientific or religious) that proposes that creation precedes perception (in other words, that the world exists prior to and hence independent of our experience of it). The classic example of dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi is our experience in dream: the dream world seems to exist only when we experience it, so its seeming existence is entirely dependent on our experience of it. Since Sri Ramana taught us that our present so-called waking state is actually just a dream, and that there is no significant difference between waking and dream, it is obvious that he did teach dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda.

Friday, 25 July 2014

What should we believe?

In my previous article, What is enlightenment, liberation or nirvāṇa?, I wrote:
Since experiencing ourself as we really are is what is called enlightenment, liberation or nirvāṇa, if it dissolves this dream that we call our waking state, then it would also dissolve the appearance of the rest of humanity whom we experience in this dream. If the dreamer wakes up, not only is he or she liberated from the dream, but also all the people who seemed to exist in that dream world will also be liberated from it.

All this reasoning is based upon our supposition that this world is all just our dream, but we cannot know for certain whether or not this is actually the case until and unless we investigate ourself and thereby experience ourself as we really are. So at present all we can say for certain is that if we attain enlightenment, liberation or nirvāṇa, it will not do any harm to the rest of humanity, and that if this world and all the people in it are just like the world and the people we see in a dream, then our own liberation will in effect liberate the whole of humanity.
Commenting on these two paragraphs, a friend wrote to me:

Saturday, 19 July 2014

What is enlightenment, liberation or nirvāṇa?

In an anonymous comment on one of my recent articles, Self-investigation, effort and sleep, someone asked several questions, including the following:
[...] What exactly is enlightenment, liberation, or nirvana, and what use is it really? [...] what effect does it have on the rest of humanity? [...] if there are very, very few (1 in a billion?) who manage to achieve liberation what is the point of it all? It seems a complete lottery to me because the Self chooses whom it will and we cannot know the basis on which it chooses. [...]
He also wrote an email to me referring to this comment, so I replied answering each of the four questions he had asked, and the following is adapted from what I wrote to him:

Thursday, 19 June 2014

Is consciousness a product of the mind?

In a comment on one of my recent articles, Self-investigation, effort and sleep, Venkat wrote:
May I ask for your comments on the following.

Science tells us that our fundamental building blocks (chemicals . . . electrons, protons, neutrons . . . ultimately energy waves) are inter-dependent and non-differentiated. For whatever reasons, the universe has evolved, and from which has evolved body-minds. These body-minds are fundamentally non-separate. Bhagavan's self-enquiry is for the seemingly separate ‘I’ to see this non-differentiated non-separateness and thereby to dissolve.

If you agree that this model is feasible, is consciousness a product of the mind? Nisargadatta talks about consciousness as a product of the food-body-mind, and the Absolute that is aware of this consciousness.
Since the reply I drafted is too long to post as another comment on that article, I am giving it here:

Venkat, what science tells us is a combination of observations and theories that have been developed to explain those observations in terms of other observations and currently accepted theories, and also to predict future observations, but what science cannot tell us is whether what it has observed is real or illusory. Science is based on our generally unquestioned belief that the world is real and exists independent of our experience of it, but our experience does not and cannot support this belief.

Sunday, 15 June 2014

Why do we not experience the existence of any body or world in sleep?

In a comment on my previous article, What do we actually experience in sleep?, Wittgenstein wrote with reference to my ‘gap’ argument that the featureless gap called ‘sleep’ that we experience between some consecutive states of waking and/or dream ‘also characterizes the discontinuity of world-body (they always pair up), space-time, causation and ego (all belonging to non-self, jada). So, in a single attempt we do come to know the continuity of the background self (sat-chit) and the discontinuity of the non-self. Further, such discontinuous entities should be unreal even when they appear’, and then went on to discuss why we do not experience the existence of the world or any other non-self items in sleep. In general I agree with his inferences, but the following are my own reflections on this same subject:

Because our natural predisposition (or rather the natural predisposition of our mind) is to believe (at least while we are experiencing them in the waking state) that this body and world are real and exist independent of our experience of them, we wrongly assume that the reason we do not experience them in sleep is that we were unconscious then. However, if we analyse our actual experience in our three states of waking, dream and sleep, we can understand that (for reasons such as those that I explained in my previous article, What do we actually experience in sleep?) we are in fact conscious in sleep, even though we are not conscious of any body or world then. We therefore have to question our assumption that this body and world exist when we are asleep, and also our underlying assumption that they exist independent of our experience of them.

Thursday, 12 June 2014

What do we actually experience in sleep?

A friend wrote to me recently asking me to further clarify what I had written in Chapter 2 of Happiness and the Art of Being about sleep being a state in which we are still conscious or aware that we exist, and after I replied to him he wrote again saying that though he would like to be convinced that he is aware in sleep, he is still not entirely sure that this is the case. The following is adapted from the replies that I wrote to his two emails.

First reply:

When you say, ‘I fall asleep and I’m not aware of anything’, what exactly do you mean by saying ‘I’m not aware of anything’? Do you mean that you are not aware at all, or that you are aware of nothing? Please do not rush to answer this question to yourself, but think about it carefully.

Consider the difference between the experience of a totally blind person (B) and a normally sighted person (S) when they are both in a completely dark room. B does not see anything because he does not see at all, so he does not know that the room is dark, whereas S sees nothing, so he knows that the room is dark. Is our experience in deep sleep like that of B or S?

Saturday, 25 January 2014

By discovering what ‘I’ actually is, we will swallow time

To a friend who wrote some remarks about experiencing the here-and-now by being aware of the ‘mind and its attachments and reactions to the world outside’, and also about the ego being a subtle form, I replied:

Since the mind is constantly changing, it never stands still in the here and now, but is instead caught up in the constant flow of change, which is always moving from past to future. The only thing that always stands still in the here and now is ‘I am’, because it never changes.

Therefore if we wish to stand in the here and now we must attend only to ‘I am’, because if we attend instead to the constant activity and reactivity of the mind, we will get caught in the every-changing flow of time from past to future.

Friday, 24 January 2014

Only ‘I am’ is certain and self-evident

In a comment on my recent article, Investigating ‘I’ is the most radical scientific research, R Viswanathan quoted Nochur Venkataraman as saying: ‘a great philosopher stated I think and so I am, but it should be I am and so I think’, and he also referred to this in an email, to which I replied:

A comment that Bhagavan Sri Ramana made about this famous conclusion of Descartes, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am), was recorded by Lakshmana Sarma in verse 166 of Sri Ramana Paravidyopanishad:
The existence of their own self is inferred by some from mental functioning, by the reasoning, ‘I think, therefore I am’. These men are like those dull-witted ones who ignore the elephant when it goes past, and become convinced afterwards by looking at the footprints!
‘I am’ is self-evident — in fact, it is the only thing that is entirely self-evident, because it is evident to itself rather than to anything else, whereas all other supposedly self-evident things are evident only to the mind that experiences them, and the mind experiences them as something other than itself — so only those who fail to recognise this obvious fact would believe that we need to think in order to know ‘I am’ or to logically assert that ‘I am’.

Monday, 20 January 2014

Investigating ‘I’ is the most radical scientific research

In continuation of an ongoing correspondence between us, a research psychologist wrote to me, ‘Ramana was a great man, now it’s time to go further, we are in 2013, so, why not abandon the old ways and embrace the new, taking further their paradigm, not getting stuck in theirs?’, to which I replied:

Doubt and uncertainty are the basis of any research we may undertake, but most research is narrow in scope because it focuses on a small area of doubt set against a background of beliefs that are assumed to be true.

For example, in quantum mechanics a researcher will focus on a particular area of doubt, but such doubt will be set against the background of quantum theory and the entire set of generally accepted sub-theories that are related to it and entail it. Such theories, which form the paradigm upon which all research in that field is conducted, are all beliefs that most researchers in that field will take for granted. This is the nature of scientific research, and it is not wrong in that context, because science can move forward only on the assumption that most of its currently accepted theories are true.

Friday, 17 January 2014

‘I’ is the centre and source of time and space

A new friend wrote to me recently saying that he thinks he has understood the concept of time but that he has not yet grasped the concept of space. In my reply I wrote:

The concept of space is just that: a concept or idea, and as such it is a mental construction.

Time and space are the two interlocked conceptual frameworks within which we organise all our other ideas about a physical world. Without space, there would be no place for more than one thing to seem to exist (because each thing requires a separate place in which to exist, since two things cannot simultaneously occupy the same place), so space is the conceptual framework that allows for the appearance of multiplicity. Likewise, without time, there would be no scope for any change to seem to take place, so time is the conceptual framework that allows for the appearance of change, which seems to be constantly occurring within this appearance of multiplicity.

Therefore, to know ‘I’, which is one and unchanging, neither space nor time is required. In fact, all ideas of space and time need to be set aside in order for us to experience ‘I’ as it really is, because space is the basis for the illusion of multiplicity (which is experienced as ‘I’ and other things), and time is the basis for the illusion of change (in which ‘I’ seems to be just one among many changing things).

Thursday, 26 December 2013

The unique clarity and simplicity of Sri Ramana’s teachings

Yesterday a friend wrote to me quoting verse 579 of Guru Vācaka Kōvai:
Because of the non-dual nature of [our] enduring self, [and] because of the fact that excluding self there is no other gati [refuge, means or goal], the upēya [the aim or goal] which [we are to] reach is only self and the upāya [the means or path] is only self. Know them to be non-different.
and saying ‘I think only Bhagavan has provided such clarity on the path, as well as the goal that we should aim for’. To this I replied:

Yes, I too believe that ‘only Bhagavan has provided such clarity on the path, as well as the goal that we should aim for’. He has provided unsurpassed clarity on the goal we should seek and achieve, on the path by which we should seek and achieve it, and on the reason why seeking and achieving it is more important than anything else that we can do in this life.

I believe that the reason why his teachings are so clear and convincing is that they are so simple and so coherent, by which I mean that they all tie together so logically. They are also based on premises that are self-evident once he has pointed them out to us: that is, they are based on the following simple and clear analysis of our experience of ourself in our three states of experience, waking, dream and sleep.

Friday, 21 January 2011

How to avoid creating fresh karma (āgāmya)?

In a reply that I wrote to one of the comments on my previous article, Second and third person objects, I wrote:

Whatever we experience in either waking or dream is determined by our destiny (prārabdha), so we have no power to alter any of it. However, though we cannot change what we are destined to experience, we can desire and make effort to change it, and by doing so we create fresh karma (āgāmya).

Since all such desire and effort to change what we are destined to experience is futile and counterproductive, we should refrain from all such extroverted desire and effort, and should make effort only to subside within by focusing our entire attention upon ourself (the first person, the experiencing subject, ‘I’) and thereby withdrawing it from everything else (every second or third person object).

By making such selfward-directed effort, we will not alter what the mind is destined to experience, but will remove the illusion that we are this experiencing mind. This is what Sri Ramana teaches us in verse 38 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu:
If we are the ‘doer’ of actions, which are like seeds, we will experience the resulting ‘fruit’. [However] when we know ourself by investigating ‘who is the doer of action?’, ‘doership’ will depart and all the three karmas will slip off. This indeed is the state of liberation, which is eternal.

Saturday, 9 January 2010

Sri Ramana’s mangalam verse to Vivekacudamani

When Sri Ramana translated Vivēkacūḍāmaṇi into Tamil prose, he composed a maṅgalam or ‘auspicious introductory verse’ for it.

Recently a friend asked me to translate this verse, because he was not satisfied with the translation of it on page 212 of The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi, which is as follows:

Rejoice eternally! The Heart rejoices at the feet of the Lord, who is the Self, shining within as ‘I-I’ eternally, so that there is no alternation of night and day. This will result in removal of ignorance of the Self.
The original Tamil verse is:
அகமெனு மூல வவித்தை யகன்றிட
வகமக மாக வல்லும் பகலற
வகமொளி ராத்ம தேவன் பதத்தினி
லகமகிழ் வாக வனிசம் ரமிக்கவே.

ahameṉu mūla vaviddai yahaṉḏṟiḍa
vahamaha māha vallum pahalaṟa
vahamoḷi rātma dēvan padattiṉi
lahamahiṙ vāha vaṉiśam ramikkavē
.

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

Svarupa-dhyana and svarupa-darsana

A friend recently wrote to me asking:

Does svarupa-dhyana, atma-chintana and atma-smarana mean focusing attention on the first thought ‘I am’, consciousness of being? I mean, is it concentration on being, staying without thoughts but still aware of external world? If so, svarupa-darshana is different experience and is the same as kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. Isn’t it?
Here the mention of ‘svarupa-darshana’ and ‘external world’ appears to be a reference to the third paragraph of Nan Yar? (Who am I?), in which Sri Ramana says:
If [our] mind, which is the cause of all [objective] knowledge and of all activity, subsides [completely], [our] perception of the world (jaga-dṛṣṭi) will cease. Just as knowledge of the rope, which is the base [that underlies and supports the appearance of the snake], will not arise unless knowledge of the imaginary snake ceases, svarūpa-darśana [true knowledge of our essential self], which is the base [that underlies and supports the appearance of the world], will not arise unless [our] perception of the world, which is an imagination, ceases.
In reply to this friend I wrote as follows:

Yes, terms such as ātma-vichāra, svarūpa-dhyāna, svarūpa-smaraṇa and ātma-chintana (which are various terms that Sri Ramana uses in Nan Yar?) all mean self-attentiveness — the focusing of our entire attention upon ourself, our essential consciousness of being, ‘I am’.

Tuesday, 23 June 2009

Appala Pattu – an explanatory paraphrase

In continuation of my previous four articles, which were explanatory paraphrases of Upadesa Undiyar, Ulladu Narpadu, Ulladu Narpadu Anubandham and Ekatma Panchakam, the following is the fifth of seven extracts from the introductory page that I have drafted for Sri Ramanopadesa Noonmalai:

அப்பளப் பாட்டு (Appala-p-pattu), the ‘Appalam Song’, is a Tamil song that Sri Ramana composed for his mother one day in about 1914 or 1915, when she asked him to help her make some appalams (a thin crisp wafer made of gram flour and other ingredients, also known as parpata, pappadam, poppadum or pappad, which can either be fried or toasted over a naked flame or in hot embers). He responded by composing this song, in which he compares each of the ingredients, implements and actions required to make an appalam to the qualities and practices required for us to experience true self-knowledge.

In the pallavi or refrain (which completes the meaning of the anupallavi and each of the four verses) he simply says, ‘Making appalam, see; eating it, fulfil [or destroy] your desire’. The appalam that he asks us to prepare is the appalam of true self-knowledge, and what he asks us to see is who we really are. By eating this appalam — that is, by experiencing true self-knowledge — we will satisfy our hunger for infinite happiness, and thus we will destroy all our other desires, which are all just distorted forms of our fundamental desire for real happiness.

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

Guru Vachaka Kovai verse 579 and Anubhuti Venba verse 610

When I wrote my previous article, Guru Vāchaka Kōvai – a new translation by TV Venkatasubramanian, Robert Butler and David Godman, I unfortunately overlooked an important fact, namely that Sri Muruganar himself had written a brief urai (explanation) for verse 579 of Guru Vāchaka Kōvai in Anubhūti Veṇbā.

I overlooked this partly because I do not have a copy of Anubhūti Veṇbā, and partly because I forgot to check the appendix on page 536 of David’s version of Guru Vachaka Kovai, in which he has given the corresponding verse numbers in Guru Vāchaka Kōvai and Anubhūti Veṇbā for the 95 verses that are included in both these works.

Fortunately David has sent me an e-mail attaching a scanned copy of a letter written to me by a mutual friend, in which he pointed out that verse 579 of Guru Vāchaka Kōvai is included in Anubhūti Veṇbā as verse 610, and in which he also copied by hand the urai that Sri Muruganar wrote for it in Anubhūti Veṇbā, which is as follows:

Thursday, 17 July 2008

God as paramarthika satya – the absolute reality

In continuation of three of my earlier articles, God as both nirguna brahman and saguna brahman, Experiencing God as he really is and God as purna – the one infinite whole, the following is the fourth extract from the second chapter, ‘God’, of The Truth of Otherness:

Thus, these three verses of Guru Vachaka Kovai are an emphatic refutation of our separation from God, the one infinite purna, the unlimited and absolute reality, who alone truly exists, and who is perfectly non-dual and therefore completely devoid of parts. In verse 888, Sri Ramana emphasises that the infinite purna alone exists by quoting this Vedic mantra, which says that even “when purna is taken out of purna, purna whole alone remains”, and by adding that purna alone remains not only then but also when purna has united purna. That is, whether anything appears to separate from it or unite with it, the infinite purna in truth always exists alone, because whatever appears to separate from it or unite with it is in truth nothing but that purna itself.

Then in verse 889 he explains that, since nothing other than that real purna exists, there is nothing that could ever either separate from it or unite with it, and that therefore everything that appears to exist as other than it is in truth one with it. However, he does not conclude his explanation of this Vedic mantra by saying merely that everything is one with the infinite reality, but goes one step further by stating clearly in verse 890 that everything except the infinite reality is a mere imagination and is therefore completely unreal.

Monday, 7 July 2008

God as purna – the one infinite whole

In continuation of my earlier two articles, God as both nirguna brahman and saguna brahman and Experiencing God as he really is, the following is the third extract from the second chapter, ‘God’, of The Truth of Otherness:

The reason why we said in the previous chapter [an extract from which is given in the article The world is a creation of our imagination] that this world is not created by God is that in his true nirguna form he is mere being, and therefore never does anything, and that in his imaginary saguna form he and this world are both created simultaneously. That is to say, God as a seemingly separate supreme being comes into existence only when we come into existence as a seemingly separate individual being.

When we rise as this mind, our limited individual consciousness, we perceive the world and all the other objective thoughts in our mind as being separate from and other than ourself, and thus we seemingly create duality and division in our non-dual and undivided real self. When we thus see ourself and this world as separate and finite entities, we transform our infinite real self into a seemingly infinite God, whom we consider to be separate from ourself and this world.

Tuesday, 17 June 2008

Self-enquiry: the underlying philosophy can be clearly understood only by putting it into practice

In his written and spoken teachings, Sri Ramana has given us a clear, subtle, profound and complete philosophy, which prompts us to think about our experience of ourself and everything else more deeply than we would ever do without such prompting, and which provides us with a truly satisfactory answer to all the most essential philosophical questions that we could ever ask. However, he did not give us his philosophical teachings merely to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, but only for a single purpose, namely to urge and guide us to practise self-enquiry and self-surrender and thereby to know ourself as we really are.

All the philosophy or theory that he has taught us has only this one aim or purpose, so until and unless we actually practise this one path of self-enquiry and self-surrender, we will not gain the real benefit that we should gain from studying his teachings. What he has taught us is not merely a theoretical philosophy but also a practical science, so if we try to restrict ourself to the philosophical aspect of his teachings and ignore their practical aspect, our understanding of them will be incomplete, one-sided and distorted.

We can truly understand his entire teachings and be benefited by them only if we put them into practice by earnestly attempting to scrutinise our essential self-conscious being, ‘I am’, and thereby subside into the innermost depth of ourself. If we do not thus attempt to practise self-enquiry and self-surrender, we will never be able to understand his teachings clearly or deeply.

Thursday, 29 May 2008

God as both nirguna brahman and saguna brahman

In continuation of my previous two articles containing extracts from the currently incomplete draft of The Truth of Otherness, the following is the first of several extracts from the second chapter, which is entitled ‘God’:

The ultimate truth about God is that he is our own real self, our fundamental and essential self-conscious being, which we always experience as ‘I am’. That is, he is both our being and our consciousness of our being — our perfectly non-dual being-consciousness or sat-chit.

He is our own essential being, and the essential being of everything that is or appears to be. He is the infinite fullness of being, which is the ultimate reality and essence of all things. He is the source, substratum and support of everything.

He is the absolute reality, which shines in the heart or innermost core of every sentient being as the knowledge ‘I am’. He is the ancient and eternal ‘I am’, the timeless ‘I am’, the omnipresent and all-pervading ‘I am’, the infinite ‘I am’, the absolute ‘I am’, the immutable and indivisible ‘I am’, the non-dual ‘I am’, the one and only truly existing ‘I am’, the all-transcending ‘I am’, the essential ‘I am’ other than which nothing is.

Friday, 23 May 2008

The world is a creation of our imagination

In continuation of my previous post, Introduction to The Truth of Otherness, the following brief extract from The Truth of Otherness is all that I have so far drafted for the first chapter, ‘The World’. Needless to say, if I ever happen to complete writing this book, I would include in this chapter a detailed discussion of many other important truths that Sri Ramana has revealed to us about the nature of this world, particularly about how we experience it only due our pramada or slackness in self-attentiveness — that is, our failure to abide firmly in our natural state of absolutely non-dual self-conscious being.

God is not some being outside ourself who one day decided to create this universe. He is our own real self, which in truth just is, and never does anything. Therefore, this universe is truly created not by God, but only by our own kalpana-sakti or power of imagination. However, if we wish for any reason to attribute the creation of this vast and wonderful universe to God rather than to our own imagination, we should at least understand that he has created it only through the channel of our own mind or power of imagination.

If we wish to maintain that God created this world, we are in effect maintaining that he is not real in the absolute sense of the term, because the absolute reality is mere being, which never does anything. All doing or action involves change, and is therefore transient and unreal. Since action is unreal, whoever performs action is equally unreal. Something that is real cannot do something that is unreal.

Thursday, 22 May 2008

Introduction to The Truth of Otherness

As I explained in the introduction to Happiness and the Art of Being, pages 55 to 58, I began to form it as a book by compiling some reflections on the teachings of Sri Ramana that I had originally written for my own benefit, because I find writing to be a valuable aid to the practice of self-investigation and self-surrender, since it helps me to deepen and clarify my understanding and is therefore an effective way of doing manana or deep reflective meditation upon his teachings.

When I thus began to compile my personal musings into the form of a book, I arranged them under various chapter headings, which I divided into two parts. Thus an early draft of Happiness and the Art of Being consisted of two parts, ‘The Essentials’ and ‘The Peripherals’, with ten chapters in the first part and eighteen in the second part.

However, when I began to compile ‘The Four Yogas’, which was one of the chapters that I planned to include in the second part, I soon found that it would be too long to form a single chapter, because I was trying to include in it some detailed musings that I had begun to write about certain fresh meanings that emerge from the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali when we carefully consider it in the clear light of Sri Ramana’s teachings, so I decided to separate such musings from the rest of the chapter and form them into an appendix.

Thursday, 1 November 2007

Happiness and the Art of Being - Canadian publication now released

Yesterday evening the Canadian publication of Happiness and the Art of Being - A Layman's Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of the Spiritual Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana was released, and it is now available for purchase on the publisher's website at:


At present this webpage gives only minimum information about the book, but within the next few days more detailed information will be added to it.

Monday, 20 August 2007

The crest-jewel of Sri Ramana's teachings

On page 529 of the second e-book edition (page 555 of the forthcoming printed edition) of Happiness and the Art of Being I give the following translation of the first maṅgalam verse of Ulladu Narpadu:

Other than ulladu [‘that which is’ or being], is there consciousness of being? Since [this] being-essence [this existing substance or reality which is] is in [our] heart devoid of [all] thought, how to [or who can] think of [or meditate upon this] being-essence, which is called ‘heart’? Being in [our] heart as [we truly] are [that is, as our thought-free non-dual consciousness of being, ‘I am’] alone is meditating [upon our being]. Know [this truth by experiencing it].
On pages 529 to 538 of the second e-book edition (pages 555 to 565 of the printed edition) I have given a detailed explanation of the meaning of this important verse, after which on pages 565 to 569 of the printed edition I have added the following conclusion to my explanation:

In the first of the two verses of his payiram or preface to Ulladu Narpadu, Sri Muruganar writes that Sri Ramana joyfully composed this clear and authoritative text in response to his request, "So that we may be saved, [graciously] reveal to us the nature of reality and the means to attain [join, reach, experience or be united with] it". Accordingly, in this first mangalam verse Sri Ramana reveals to us both the essential nature of reality and the means by which we can experience it, which is possible only by our being one with it.

Friday, 17 August 2007

Sri Ramana’s figurative use of simple words

In continuation of my previous two posts, Atma-vichara is only the practice of keeping our mind fixed firmly in self and Atma-vichara and the question ‘who am I?’, the following is what I have newly incorporated on pages 445 to 450 of the forthcoming printed edition of Happiness and the Art of Being:

In his teachings Sri Ramana frequently employed ordinary words in a figurative sense, because the absolute reality about which he was speaking or writing is non-objective and non-dual, and hence it is beyond the range of thoughts and words. Since the one undivided and infinite reality can never be known objectively by our mind, but can only be experienced subjectively by and as our own essential non-dual self-consciousness, no words can describe it adequately, and hence its true nature can often be expressed more clearly by a metaphorical or figurative use of simple words rather than by a literal use of the more abstract technical terms of scholastic philosophy.

Since the true nature of the one absolute reality cannot be known by our mind or described by any words (which are merely tools created by our mind to express its knowledge or experience of objective phenomena), the only means by which we can merge in and as that non-dual and otherless absolute reality is likewise beyond the range of thoughts and words. Hence Sri Ramana often used simple words figuratively not only when he was expressing the nature of the one absolute reality, but also when he was expressing the means by which we can attain our true and natural state of indivisible oneness with that infinite reality.

Monday, 30 July 2007

Happiness and the Art of Being – additions to chapter 7

In the forthcoming printed edition of Happiness and the Art of Being, chapter 7, ‘The Illusion of Time and Space’, I have incorporated three new portions that are not in the second e-book edition.

After the first paragraph on page 389 of the second e-book edition, regarding verse 15 of Ulladu Narpadu I have added the following new paragraph, which will be on page 395 of the printed book:

In the kalivenba version of Ulladu Narpadu Sri Ramana added two extra words before the initial word of this verse, nihazhvinai or ‘the present’, namely nitamum mannum, which mean ‘which always endures’. Thus he further emphasised the fact that the present moment is ever present, that all times are the present while they occur, and that the present is therefore the only time that actually exists — the only time that we ever experience directly and actually. All other times, both past and future, are just thoughts that occur in this present moment.
On page 395 of the second e-book edition, immediately after verse 14 of Ulladu Narpadu, I have added two new paragraphs, and modified and expanded the next paragraph. These three paragraphs, which will be on page 402 of the printed book, are as follows:

Sunday, 29 July 2007

Our real self can reveal itself only through silence

As I wrote at the end of my previous post, Happiness and the Art of Being – additions to chapter 5, on page 339 of the second e-book edition of Happiness and the Art of Being (pages 344 to 345 of the printed book) I have added a translation of verse 5 of Ekatma Panchakam and a brief explanation about it. This newly added portion, which I wrote in continuation of my explanation about the term mauna-para-vak, which Sri Ramana uses in verse 715 of Guru Vachaka Kovai, and which means 'the supreme word, which is silence', is as follows:

The power of the silent clarity of unadulterated self-consciousness to reveal itself as the absolute reality is expressed by Sri Ramana poetically in verse 5 of Ekatma Panchakam:

That which always exists is only that ekatma vastu [the one reality or substance, which is our own true self]. Since the adi-guru at that time made that vastu to be known [only by] speaking without speaking, say, who can make it known [by] speaking?
The word eka means ‘one’, atma means ‘self’, and vastu is the Sanskrit equivalent of the Tamil word porul, which means the absolute reality, substance or essence. Therefore the ekatma vastu, which Sri Ramana declares to be eppodum ulladu, ‘that which always is’, is the one absolute reality or essential substance, which is our own true self.

Friday, 27 July 2007

Happiness and the Art of Being – additions to chapter 2

As I wrote in my last post, Happiness and the Art of Being will soon be available in print, I have written various new explanations, which will be incorporated in the printed version of Happiness and the Art of Being. Most of these new additions are quite brief, often just one or two paragraphs, but four of them run to more than three pages, one in chapter 4, one in chapter 9 and two in chapter 10.

In chapter 2, ‘Who am I?’, I have incorporated just two single-paragraph additions. On page 128, immediately after verse 3 of Ekatma Panchakam, I have added the following paragraph:

In the kalivenba version of Ekatma Panchakam Sri Ramana added the compound word sat-chit-ananda, which means ‘being-consciousness-bliss’, before the initial word of this verse, tannul or ‘within [our] self’, thereby reminding us that what we are in essence is only the perfectly peaceful consciousness of being, ‘I am’. Other than our basic consciousness of our own being, everything that we know appears within the distorted object-knowing form of our consciousness that we call our mind, which arises within us during waking and dream, and subsides back into ourself during sleep. Our true consciousness of being — our essential self-consciousness ‘I am’ — is therefore like the screen on which a cinema picture is projected, because it is the one fundamental adhara or underlying base that supports the appearance and disappearance of our mind and everything that is known by it.

Monday, 19 March 2007

The 'unconsciousness' that we seem to experience in sleep

On pages 329-330 of the present e-book version of Happiness and the Art of Being there are two paragraphs in which I write:

Though in our present waking state we mistake the seeming 'unconsciousness' of sleep to be merely an unconsciousness of our body and the world, in sleep we do not think 'I am unconscious of my body and the world'. Only in the waking state do we think 'In sleep I was unconscious of my body and the world'. That which thinks thus is our mind, but since our mind was not present in sleep, it cannot accurately tell us what our experience in sleep actually was.

All we can now say about sleep is that, though we knew 'I am' in that state, it was nevertheless a state of seeming darkness, ignorance or lack of clarity. That seeming lack of clarity is the 'unconsciousness' that we experience in sleep. But what actually is that seeming lack of clarity? About what is it that we lack clarity in sleep? Only about our real self, the real nature of our essential consciousness 'I am'. In sleep we know that we are, yet we lack clarity about what we are. Therefore the seeming 'unconsciousness' of sleep is actually only our lack of clarity of true self-knowledge, our so-called 'forgetfulness' of our real self. If our real self, our essential consciousness 'I am', were not obscured by the veil of our self-forgetfulness, sleep would be a state of perfectly clear self-knowledge.

Sunday, 18 March 2007

The consciousness that we experience in sleep

On page 119 of the present e-book version of Happiness and the Art of Being there is a paragraph in which I write:

Generally we think of deep sleep as a state of 'unconsciousness'. But what we were unconscious of in sleep was only things other than 'I', such as any body or world. We were not, however, unconscious of our own existence. We need other people to tell us that our body and the world existed while we were asleep, but we need no one to tell us that we existed at that time. Without the help or testimony of any other person or thing, we know 'I slept'. In sleep we may not have known exactly what we were, but we did know very clearly that we were. The knowledge that we clearly possess about our experience in sleep, and that we express when we say 'I slept peacefully, and knew nothing at that time', would not be possible if in sleep we had not been conscious that we were having that experience. If we did not know 'I am' while asleep, we could not know so clearly 'I slept' after we wake up. Since in the waking state we know clearly not only that we slept, but also that in sleep we did not know anything, is it not clear that sleep was a state that we actually experienced? The 'unconsciousness' of sleep – the absence at that time of any knowledge about anything other than 'I am' – was our own experience, something that we ourself experienced or knew at that time.
Today I have been checking all the changes that I have made while revising Happiness and the Art of Being in preparation for its forthcoming publication in print, and while doing so I decided to expand the explanation given in this paragraph as follows:

The fear of death is inherent in our love for our own being

In the seventh last paragraph of my recent post Overcoming our spiritual complacency I wrote:

So long as we experience ourself as a physical body, the fear of death will always exist in us, but usually in a dormant form. Because we imagine ourself to be this body, we are attached to it and hence we fear to lose it...
While doing a final check on the changes that I have made while revising Happiness and the Art of Being in preparation for its forthcoming publication in print, I decided to expand this explanation about our fear of death as follows:

However, though it usually remains in a dormant form, our fear of death is in fact the greatest, most fundamental and most deep-rooted of all our fears. We fear death because it appears to us to be a state of non-existence — a state in which we ourself will cease to exist, or at least cease to exist as we now know ourself. Since we love our own being or existence more than we love any other thing, we fear to lose our own being or existence more than we fear any other thing. In other words, our fear of death is rooted in our self-love — our basic love for our own essential self or being.

Friday, 16 March 2007

Knowing our source by a 'sharp intellect' or kurnda mati

While revising Happiness and the Art of Being in preparation for its forthcoming publication in print, in chapter 10, 'The Practice of the Art of Being', I have modified my translation of verse 28 of Ulladu Narpadu (on page 457 of the present e-book version) and I have expanded the explanation of it that I give in the subsequent paragraphs as follows:

Sri Ramana often used this analogy of diving or sinking into water to illustrate how deeply and intensely our attention should penetrate into the innermost core or essence of our being. For example, in verse 28 of Ulladu Narpadu he says:

Like sinking [immersing or diving] in order to find an object that has fallen into water, diving [sinking, immersing, piercing or penetrating] within [ourself] restraining [our] speech and breath by [means of a] sharp intellect [a keen, intense, acute and penetrating power of discernment or attention] we should know the place [or source] where [our] rising ego rises. Know [this].

Thursday, 15 March 2007

Taking refuge at the 'feet' of God

In my previous post, Overcoming our spiritual complacency, I gave the first instalment of the additional material that I have written for inclusion in chapter 9 of Happiness and the Art of Being (after the first paragraph on page 422 of the present e-book version). The following is the second of these three instalments:

In the first sentence of this second mangalam verse of Ulladu Narpadu Sri Ramana says:

Those mature people who have intense fear of death will take refuge at the feet of mahesan [the 'great lord'], who is devoid of death and birth, [depending upon him] as [their protective] fortress. …
This is a poetic way of describing his own experience of self-investigation and self-surrender. Though the word mahesan, which literally means the 'great lord', is a name that usually denotes Lord Siva, the form in which many Hindus worship God, Sri Ramana did not use it in this context to denote any particular form of God, but only as an allegorical description of the birthless and deathless spirit, which always exists in each one of us as our own essential self-conscious being, 'I am'.

Monday, 12 March 2007

The true science of consciousness and drik drisya viveka

In Happiness and the Art of Being, chapter 8, 'The Science of Consciousness', on pages 386 to 390 of the present e-book version I discuss the modern field of study that is known as 'consciousness studies' or the 'science of consciousness', and I explain that any true science of consciousness must clearly distinguish consciousness from any object or phenomenon known by consciousness, a process that in the philosophy of advaita vedanta is known as drik drisya viveka or 'discrimination between the seer and the seen'. In this context I write on pages 388 to 389 of the present e-book version:

... Until we understand this basic distinction between consciousness and even the subtlest object known by it, we will not be able to focus our attention solely and exclusively upon our essential consciousness, and thus we will not be able to experience it as it really is — that is, as our pure and unadulterated consciousness of our own being, which is devoid of even the slightest trace of duality or otherness.

Unless modern scientists are willing to accept this fundamental but very simple principle, all their efforts to understand consciousness will be misdirected. Any scientist who imagines that they can understand consciousness by studying our physical brain, its electrochemical activity or its cognitive function, has failed to understand that all these things are merely objects that are known by consciousness as other than itself.
While revising Happiness and the Art of Being in preparation for its forthcoming publication in print I have modified and expanded the next paragraph and added a new paragraph, so the next four paragraphs will read as follows:

Saturday, 10 March 2007

The transcendent state of true self-knowledge is the only real state

In chapter 6 of Happiness and the Art of Being I explain on page 342 of the present e-book version that our fundamental state of true self-knowledge is sometimes described in advaita vedanta as the state of 'wakeful sleep' or 'waking sleep' (jagrat-sushupti in Sanskrit, or nanavu-tuyil in Tamil) because, since it is a state in which we experience no duality, it is a thought-free state like sleep, but since it is at the same time a state in which we experience absolute clarity of self-knowledge, it is also a state of perfect wakefulness. I then write:

Since this state of 'wakeful sleep' is beyond our three ordinary states of waking, dream and deep sleep, in advaita vedanta it is also sometimes referred to as the 'fourth state' or turiya avastha. Somewhat confusingly, however, in some texts another term is used to describe it, namely the 'fourth-transcending' or turiyatita, which has given rise to the wrong notion that beyond this 'fourth state' there is some further 'fifth state'. In truth, however, the non-dual state of true self-knowledge is the ultimate and absolute state, beyond which no other state can exist.
On pages 343 to 344 of the present e-book version I then quote and explain verse 32 of Ulladu Narpadu Anubandham and verses 937 to 939 of Guru Vachaka Kovai, but while revising Happiness and the Art of Being in preparation for print I decided that I could improve my translations and explanation of these verses. I have therefore revised my translations and expanded my explanation as follows:

Thursday, 8 March 2007

I think because I am, but I am even when I do not think

In Happiness and the Art of Being, chapter 6, 'True Knowledge and False Knowledge', on pages 322 to 323 of the present e-book version I have written:

... though our basic knowledge or consciousness 'I am' alone is real, and though all the other things that appear to be real borrow their seeming reality only from this consciousness, which is their underlying base and support, we are so accustomed to overlooking this consciousness and attending only to the objects or thoughts that we form in our mind by our power of imagination, that those objects and our act of knowing them appear in the distorted perspective of our mind to be more real than the fundamental consciousness that underlies them.

The only reason why we suffer from this distorted perspective is that we are so enthralled by our experience of duality or otherness, believing that we can obtain real happiness only from things other than ourself, that throughout our states of mental activity, which we call waking and dream, we spend all our time attending only to such other things, and we consequently ignore or overlook our underlying consciousness 'I am'.

Wednesday, 7 March 2007

What is True Knowledge? - additions to chapter 5 of Happiness and the Art of Being

I have posted the five largest additions that I will be incorporating in chapter 5 of Happiness and the Art of Being in my five most recent posts, namely:

I will also incorporate the following three smaller additions in this chapter, 'What is True Knowledge?'

In my discussion about the meaning of verse 22 of Ulladu Narpadu I have split the paragraph that begins on the bottom of page 291 and ends on the top of page 292 of the present e-book version, and have added a new sentence, so the two resulting paragraphs will read as follows:

The true import of the word 'I'

In Happiness and the Art of Being, chapter 5, 'What is True Knowledge?', on pages 309 and 311-312 of the present e-book version I quote verses 20 and 21 of Upadesa Undiyar, in which Sri Ramana says:

In the place [the core of our being] where 'I' [our mind or individual self] merges [or becomes one], the one [true knowledge] appears [or shines forth] spontaneously [or as ourself] as 'I [am] I'. That itself [or that, which is ourself] is the whole [the infinite totality or fullness of being, consciousness and happiness].

That [one infinite whole that shines thus as 'I am I'] is at all times [in the past, present and future, and in all eternity] the [true] import of the word 'I', because of the absence of our non-existence even in sleep, which is devoid of [any separate or finite sense of] 'I'.
On pages 312 to 314 of the present e-book version I discuss the meaning of verse 21, and I conclude my explanation with the following paragraph:

Monday, 5 March 2007

Everything is just an expansion of our own mind or ego

In Happiness and the Art of Being, chapter 5, 'What is True Knowledge?', there is a paragraph on page 279 of the present e-book version in which I have written as follows:

Though our true, absolute and non-dual knowledge 'I am' is the ultimate support or substratum that underlies all forms of duality or relativity, it is not their immediate support or base. The immediate base upon which all duality depends, and without which it ceases to exist, is only our wrong knowledge 'I am this body', which is our individualised sense of selfhood, our ego or mind. ...
In the present e-book version I then quote what Sri Ramana says in verse 26 of Ulladu Narpadu, but for the forthcoming publication of Happiness and the Art of Being as a printed book I have written an explantion of verse 23, which I will incorporate at this point before verse 26, and immediately after verse 26 I will also incorporate another new paragraph of explanation. This entire portion will then read as follows:

[...] Therefore in verse 23 of Ulladu Narpadu Sri Ramana says:
This body does not say 'I' [that is, it does not know 'I am', because it is just inconscient matter]. No one says 'in sleep I do not exist' [even though in sleep this body does not exist]. After an 'I' has risen [imagining 'I am this body'], everything rises. [Therefore] by a subtle intellect scrutinise where this 'I' rises.

Sunday, 4 March 2007

Non-duality is the truth even when duality appears to exist

While revising Happiness and the Art of Being in preparation for its forthcoming publication as a printed book, I have written some fresh material to incorporate in chapter 5, 'What is True Knowledge?', after the paragraph (on page 278 of the present e-book version) that ends, "... in that state we will clearly know that we have always been only the pure consciousness of being, 'I am', and that ignorance — the wrong knowledge 'I am this body' — never really existed, just as when we finally see the rope as it really is, we will understand that we were always seeing only that rope, and that the snake we imagined we saw never really existed", and I have amended and expanded the next paragraph. This new material, the amended portion and the final paragraph of this passage will read as follows:

Even when we imagine that we do not know our real self and therefore try to attend to ourself in order to know what we really are, we are in fact nothing other than our real self, which always knows itself as it really is. Our seeming ignorance of the true non-dual nature of our real self is only an imagination, and the sole purpose of our effort to know ourself is only to remove this imagination. This truth is stated emphatically by Sri Ramana in verse 37 of Ulladu Narpadu:

Even the argument that says, 'Duality [is real] in [the state of] spiritual practice, [whereas] non-duality [is real] in [the state of] attainment [of self-knowledge]', is not true. Both when we are lovingly [earnestly or desperately] searching [for ourself], and when [we] have attained ourself, who indeed are we other than the tenth man?

Objective knowledge will disappear along with our mind when we know ourself as we really are

In Happiness and the Art of Being, chapter 5, 'What is True Knowledge?', after the paragraph (on page 277 of the present e-book version) that ends, "Is it not clear, therefore, that the only true knowledge that we can attain is the clear knowledge of ourself as we really are, devoid of any superimposed adjuncts — that is, knowledge of ourself as our unadulterated and essential self-consciousness, 'I am', which is the absolute non-dual consciousness that knows only itself?" I will incorporate the following addition:

All objective knowledge involves a basic distinction between the subject, who is knowing, and the object, which is known. It also involves a third factor, the subject's act of knowing the object.

Because our knowledge of ourself involves only the inherently self-conscious subject, and no object, we know ourself just by being ourself, and we do so without the aid of any other thing. Because we are naturally self-conscious, we do not need to do anything in order to know ourself. Therefore unlike all our objective knowledge, our knowledge of ourself involves neither an object nor any act of knowing, and hence it is a perfectly non-dual knowledge.

Saturday, 3 March 2007

The Nature of Reality - additions to chapter 4 of Happiness and the Art of Being

Yesterday I posted the last two of the four major additions that I will be incorporating in chapter 3, 'The Nature of Our Mind', of Happiness and the Art of Being, namely:

In chapter 4, 'The Nature of Reality', I do not expect to incorporate any large additions, but I will incorporate the following four small additions.

On page 219 of the present e-book version, I have added two sentences in the middle of the first paragraph, and after these sentences I have split the paragraph into two as follows:

Thursday, 1 March 2007

Everything is only our own consciousness

While revising Happiness and the Art of Being in preparation for its forthcoming publication as a printed book, in chapter 3 (on page 182 of the present e-book version) after the paragraph that ends, "... Whenever we perceive a world, we always do so from within the confines of a particular body, which we feel to be ourself", and before the next paragraph, which now begins, "Our primal imagination that we are a physical body is the foundation upon which our mind is built. Whenever it rises, whether in a dream or in a so-called waking state, our mind always imagines itself to be a body...", I have added the following:

Hence our perception of any world is dependent upon our imagining ourself to be a body in that world, which in turn is dependent upon our mind, the finite consciousness that imagines itself to be that body. Therefore in verses 5, 6 and 7 of Ulladu Narpadu Sri Ramana says:

[Our] body [is] a form [composed] of five sheaths [the pancha kosas or five adjuncts that seemingly cover and obscure our consciousness of our real self when we imagine any of them to be ourself]. Therefore all five [of these 'sheaths' or adjuncts] are included in the term 'body'. Without [some kind of] body, is there [any such thing as a] world? Say, having left [all kinds of] body, is there [any] person who has seen [this or any other] world?

Wednesday, 28 February 2007

Our real 'I' is formless and therefore unlimited

In preparation for the forthcoming publication of Happiness and the Art of Being as a printed book, I have today made one further addition to chapter 2, 'Who am I?' That is, on page 137 of the present e-book version, after the paragraph that ends, "... what each and every one of us experiences as 'I am' is the one eternal, undivided, non-dual and infinite being", I have added the following:

The fundamental difference between the experience of sages such as Sri Ramana, who know themself to be the one infinite and undivided self-conscious being, and the experience of those of us who imagine ourself to be anything other than this one infinite and undivided self-conscious being, which is our true and essential self, lies only in the limitations that we imaginarily superimpose upon our truly infinite being. This fundamental difference is expressed by Sri Ramana in verses 17 and 18 of Ulladu Narpadu:

[Both] to those who do not know themself [and] to those who have known themself, this body [is] only 'I'. [However] to those who do not know themself 'I' [is limited to] only the extent of the body, [whereas] to those who have known themself within the body 'I' itself shines devoid of limit [boundary or extent]. Understand that this indeed is the difference between them.

Tuesday, 27 February 2007

The foundation of all our thoughts is our primal imagination that we are a body

In chapter 3 of Happiness and the Art of Being (on pages 153-154 of the present e-book version) I have translated verse 2 of Anma-Viddai as follows:

Since the thought 'this body composed of flesh is I' is the one string on which [all our] various thoughts are attached, if [we] go within [ourself scrutinising] 'Who am I? What is the place [the source from which this fundamental thought 'I am this body' rises]?' [all] thoughts will disappear, and within the cave [the core of our being] self-knowledge will shine spontaneously as ‘I [am] I’. This alone is silence [the silent or motionless state of mere being], the one [non-dual] space [of infinite consciousness], the sole abode of [true unlimited] happiness.
In preparation for the forthcoming publication of Happiness and the Art of Being as a printed book, I have expanded the two paragraphs that follow this verse (on page 154 of the present e-book version) as follows:

Monday, 26 February 2007

Our body, mind and other adjuncts are not 'I'

In preparation for the forthcoming publication of Happiness and the Art of Being as a printed book, I have expanded the final three paragraphs of chapter 2, 'Who am I?', (which are on pages 145-146 of the present e-book version) as follows:

Since none of these other tattvas [that is, none of the so-called tattvas or ontological principles other than our own essential self-conscious being] are real, neither they nor anything composed of them can be our true self, and therefore we should not waste our time and energy thinking about them, enumerating them, classifying them or examining their properties, but should ignore them entirely and instead attend only to our real 'I' — our fundamental and essential consciousness of our own true being. The only need we have to consider our body, our mind and all our other adjuncts is to understand the fact that they are unreal, and are therefore not 'I'.

Hence in verse 22 of Upadesa Undiyar Sri Ramana briefly states the essential conclusion that we should arrive at by means of the rational process of self-analysis, which in the ancients texts of advaita vedanta is called neti neti or 'not thus, not thus':

Since [our] body, mind, intellect, life and darkness [the seeming absence of knowledge that we experience in sleep] are all jada [inconscient] and asat [unreal or non-existent], [they are] not 'I', which is [chit or consciousness and] sat [being or reality].

Sunday, 18 February 2007

Our self-consciousness is the absolute reality

In continuation of my earlier posts Our imaginary sleep of self-forgetfulness or self-ignorance, Are we in this world, or is this world in us?, Our waking life is just another dream and Only the absolute clarity of true self-knowledge will put an end to all our dreams, the following is the fifth and final instalment of the additional matter that I plan to incorporate after the paragraph that ends on the first line of page 127 of my book, Happiness and the Art of Being:

In our present experience, the only thing that is real is our own self-consciousness, 'I am'. If we did not exist, we could not know our own existence, nor could we imagine the existence of anything else.

The one real basis of all our knowledge and all our experience is our own consciousness. When we say 'I know' or 'I experience', we imply 'I am conscious'. However, though we sometimes appear to be conscious of things other than ourself, our consciousness of those other things appears and disappears. Being impermanent, it is only relatively real.

Saturday, 17 February 2007

Only the absolute clarity of true self-knowledge will put an end to all our dreams

In continuation of my earlier posts Our imaginary sleep of self-forgetfulness or self-ignorance, Are we in this world, or is this world in us? and Our waking life is just another dream, the following is the fourth instalment of the additional matter that I plan to incorporate after the paragraph that ends on the first line of page 127 of my book, Happiness and the Art of Being:

In verse 1 of Ekatma Panchakam, after the first two clauses, "Having forgotten ourself" and "having thought '[this] body indeed is myself'", Sri Ramana adds a third clause, "having [thereby] taken innumerable births". What exactly does he mean by this? How actually do we "take innumerable births"?

As we have discussed earlier, our present waking life is actually just a dream that is occurring in our imaginary sleep of self-forgetfulness or self-ignorance. When we imaginarily ignore or forget our real self, which is infinite being, consciousness and happiness, we seemingly separate ourself from the perfect happiness that is our own self. Therefore until we reunite with our own reality, which is absolute happiness, we cannot rest, except during the brief but necessary interludes that we experience in sleep, death and other such states, in which our mind subsides in a state of temporary abeyance or inactivity.

Wednesday, 14 February 2007

Our waking life is just another dream

In continuation of my earlier posts Our imaginary sleep of self-forgetfulness or self-ignorance and Are we in this world, or is this world in us?, the following is the third instalment of the additional matter that I plan to incorporate after the paragraph that ends on the first line of page 127 of my book, Happiness and the Art of Being:

In the eighteenth paragraph of Nan Yar? Sri Ramana says:

Except that waking is dirgha [long lasting] and dream is kshanika [momentary or lasting for only a short while], there is no other difference [between these two imaginary states of mental activity]. To the extent to which all the vyavahara [activities or occurrences] that happen in waking appear [at this present moment] to be real, to that [same] extent even the vyavahara [activities or occurrences] that happen in dream appear at that time to be real. In dream [our] mind takes another body [to be itself]. In both waking and dream thoughts and names-and-forms [the objects of the seemingly external world] occur in one time [that is, simultaneously].

Are we in this world, or is this world in us?

In continuation of my earlier post Our imaginary sleep of self-forgetfulness or self-ignorance, the following is more of the additional matter that I plan to incorporate after the paragraph that ends on the first line of page 127 of my book, Happiness and the Art of Being:

After saying [in verse 1 of Ekatma Panchakam], "Having forgotten ourself", Sri Ramana says, "having thought '[this] body indeed is myself'", because our present imagination that we are this body arises as a result of our self-forgetfulness. If we clearly knew what we really are, we could not imagine ourself to be anything that we are not. Therefore we could not imagine ourself to be this body if we did not first imagine our seeming self-forgetfulness or lack of clarity of self-consciousness.

Whenever our mind becomes active, whether in waking or in dream, it first imagines itself to be a body, and then through the five senses of that imaginary body it perceives an imaginary world. Our mind cannot function without first limiting itself within the confines of an imaginary body, which it mistakes to be 'I'. Hence our mind is an intrinsically limited and therefore distorted form of consciousness.

Tuesday, 6 February 2007

Our imaginary sleep of self-forgetfulness or self-ignorance

Since many people have expressed a desire to have a printed copy of my book, Happiness and the Art of Being, I have recently been revising it carefully in preparation for its publication as a printed book. While doing so, I expect to add several new portions, discussing certain aspects of Sri Ramana's teachings in greater depth and detail.

As and when I write any such new additions, I plan to post them on this discussion forum.

The first significant addition that I am in the process of writing will be incorporated after the paragraph that ends on the first line of page 127 in the present e-book version, which is currently available for free download on the page Happiness and the Art of Being in my main website, www.happinessofbeing.com. Though I have so far completed only the first part of this first addition, I have decided to post it now, and to post the rest of the first addition later.

The following is this first part of the first addition:

Monday, 15 January 2007

The truth that underlies cognition

With reference to my recent post The cognition of duality, the friend whose e-mail prompted me to write it replied as follows:

Thank you for your clarification. It is very nice. What I wanted to share is if one tries to understand how cognition takes place, it almost reveals the Truth. We generally take it for granted.
In my reply I wrote as follows:

You are right. If we understand correctly how cognition takes place, our understanding will lead us back to the only reality in this whole process of cognition, which is our own consciousness. And when we carefully consider our own consciousness, we will understand that the cognising (object-knowing) aspect of it is transient and therefore not absolutely real. The only aspect of it that is permanent and therefore absolutely real is our fundamental consciousness of our own being, 'I am'.

Saturday, 13 January 2007

Exposing the unreality of our ego

With reference to my earlier post 'Awareness watching awareness', a friend wrote to me an e-mail which he concluded with the statement:

If the tricks of the ego are not dealt with and exposed in detail, all spiritual teachings end up serving the ego.
The following is adapted from my reply to that e-mail:

I believe that this statement is very true. Our mind or ego is our only real enemy, and it plays so many tricks to continue its illusory existence. The sole purpose of all spiritual teachings is to expose the unreality of this impostor and all its progeny, our thoughts and this entire world of duality, all of which depend upon its dubious reality for their seeming existence.

Sri Ramana has taught us that the only way to expose the unreality of our mind or ego is to know our true self by scrutinising ourself. As he says in verse 17 of Upadesa Undiyar:
When [we] scrutinise the form of [our] mind without forgetfulness [interruption caused either by sleep or by thinking], [we will discover that] there is no such thing as 'mind' [separate from or other than our real self]. For everyone, this is the direct path [to true self-knowledge].

Wednesday, 10 January 2007

Self-consciousness alone is true knowledge

With reference to my recent post, The true import of 'I am', a friend asked:

Is the self aware of itself without manifestation?
I replied as follows:

The simple answer is yes, it is, as is clearly illustrated by our experience in sleep.

Who knows any manifestation? To whom does it manifest? It is known only by us, because it manifests only in our own mind. Nothing that is known by us is known outside our mind, except our fundamental consciousness of our own essential being, which we always experience as 'I am', whether our mind and its contents are manifest, as in waking and dream, or remain unmanifest, as in sleep.

Tuesday, 9 January 2007

The true import of 'I am'

In reply to a friend who wrote, "The 'I am' is the beginning of the dream", I wrote as follows:

The 'I am' just is. It is the permanent abiding reality, our true and essential self-conscious being. The beginning of this dream of our three states, waking, dream and sleep, is our primal imagination, 'I am this body, I am a person, I am so-and-so', which arises when we seemingly ignore our natural clarity of perfect self-consciousness.

Because we wrongly imagine ourself to be this body and mind, we mistake the words 'I am' to denote this body-mind complex. But Sri Ramana taught us that that which is truly denoted by the term 'I am' is only our true being, which is non-dual self-consciousness. This is clearly stated by him in verse 21 of Upadesa Undiyar:

That [one infinite whole that shines thus as 'I am I'] is at all times [in the past, present and future, and in all eternity] the import of the word 'I', because of the absence of our non-existence even in sleep, which is devoid of [any separate or finite sense of] 'I'.

Sunday, 7 January 2007

Which spiritual teachings are truly credible?

In a comment on the post Who has attained 'self-realisation'?, Innerself quoted the last two paragraphs of that post, and then commented:

Although I can understand your point of view and the arguments in the above quote, the reason why this knowledge would be helpful is in the credibility one can put into the teachings.

Nisargadatta and Ramana were Self-Realized, Jnani. I don't think that anyone [would] contest this. Thus one can trustfully read their books and/or written answers published.

There are so many out there saying they are Enlightened...
It is true that, as Innerself observes, there are many people who claim to be 'enlightened', but sadly many of them are probably either self-deluded or are deliberately trying to deceive people. One of the easiest ways to gain the respect and adulation of other people is to make them believe that one has attained jnana, the experience of true knowledge, since this is widely recognised to be the ultimate spiritual attainment. It is therefore very tempting for the human ego to pose as if it had attained such jnana, 'enlightenment' or 'self-realisation', so it is not surprising that there are people who fall a prey to this temptation. And since it is impossible for those of us who have not attained jnana to know whether or not another person has attained it, it is very easy for a person who wishes to be considered as 'enlightened' or 'self-realised' to deceive other people, making them believe this to be so.

Saturday, 30 December 2006

'Putting it all together'

Yesterday I received the following message that someone sent through the form on the Contact Me page of my website:

I'm very new to this teaching of advaita vedanta. I have some books of Nisargatta and Ramana and waiting for Sadhu Om's books to arrive. Haven't started to read them yet. I have almost completely read Robert Adams' The Silence of The Heart and I am deeply touched by it. I'm still leaning on how to put everything together, so as to awaken to my Self. Self-Realization is what I want! I am very pleased that your interest aren't in the direction of money, as I read on your site (your E-book). I have found the web site '...' [name of this other website omitted] and was surprised to see that everything has a price. I don't know how to understand this! I would apreciate your help in 'putting it all together' and help my understanding.
In reply I wrote as follows:

Regarding your request for help in "putting it altogether", I believe that the first and most important need for anyone coming newly to Sri Ramana is to acquire a clear understanding of both the philosophy and the practice that he taught.

Wednesday, 27 December 2006

Is there really any difference between the advaita taught by Sri Ramana and that taught by Sri Adi Sankara?

In a comment on the post Your comments and questions are welcome (1), Ganesan wrote:

I see certain differences between the traditional advaita of Sankara and that taught by Bhagavan, especially the self-enquiry, which does not subscribe to the idea of meditation on the mahavaykas. Further, Bhagavan's teachings are extremely subjective, directing one's attention to the self.
Is there really any essential difference between the advaita taught by Sri Ramana and that taught by Sri Adi Sankara? I do not believe that there can be, because differences can appear only in duality, and are impossible in the fundamental non-dual reality, which underlies the appearance of all duality. Non-duality or advaita is the true state of absolute oneness, in which no division, distinction or difference can even appear to exist.

Any differences that we might imagine to exist between the advaita taught by Sri Ramana and that taught by Sri Adi Sankara exist only in our understanding of their teachings, and not in the non-dual truth that they actually taught. One of the principal causes of our failure to recognise the essential oneness of the non-dual truth taught by all true sages or jnanis lies not in their teachings but only in the so-called "traditional" interpretation of their teachings.



Last updated: 7th November 2024