Commentary
on the Teachings of Ramana Maharshi
An interview with Ram (James Swartz)
conducted by
John Howells in January 2003,
at Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu,
JOHN:
I would like to ask you to comment on Ramana’s original teachings.
Ram:
Commenting on these texts is difficult.
Who knows what Ramana really said?
And who he said it to and why? In
a way it is better to check the scriptures and get it directly from the horse’s
mouth. They are much more comprehensive
and great minds have commented on them making the ideas more accessible. This kind of text is called smriti,
words based on personal experience. The
words may very well be true but they may not be true, or only partially true,
not necessarily because the person who uttered them was not enlightened
(although that is a distinct possibility these days when so many are claiming
enlightenment and pontificating mightily on its nature) but because he or she
was unable to properly express the subtle truths. So to see if there is anything worth
considering in the words of an enlightened soul one needs to check sruti,
the scriptures, (the Upanishads, Brahma Sutras, Bhagavad Gita) since it has
been purified of erroneous concepts and put in clear refined language. If statements based on personal experience, smriti,
does not jibe with sruti, scripture, then one needs to take a second
look at them.
To find out the true meaning we need to
look into the way words are used in this document. Translations of these teachings are valuable
but they are almost always beset with one major problem; the translator often
is not a Self realized person or if he is, his ability to express the
realization is unsophisticated…so you often get approximations of the true
meaning but not the true meaning. It is
always a problem.
JOHN:
Are there any other issues that make commenting on the words of a
jnani like Ramana difficult?
Ram: There is
one, a rather subtle but important point, nonetheless. And that is that the truth of any statement
depends on the point of view from which it was spoken and the point of view
from which it is viewed. So both a
statement and its opposite can be true.
Very often enlightened people speak of enlightenment from the relative
plane, even though they know that there is a perhaps higher or better or more
accurate way to express their vision.
But the person to whom they are speaking needs to be ready to hear it
that way and unless they are it is useless to speak from the ultimate standpoint. So if you didn’t know what the context was
you might conclude that the enlightened person wasn’t so enlightened. From one point of view the sun seems to rise
in the east and set in the west. From
another, the North Pole at the winter solstice, it seems to go around in a
circle. From the vastness of space it
seems to be a stationary point around which the earth is spinning.
JOHN: Looking at Ramana's text "Who am I" he is asked what
"Who am I ?" means.
Ram:
He answers with a typical Vedantic teaching, called the pancha kosas
or the five sheaths. It is found in the
Upanishads. He negates the five sheaths
(erroneous notions about one’s self) and when asked who he is (if he is none of
these) says, "that awareness which alone remains".
It is interesting to note that although
Ramana was a realized soul he did not ‘teach’ in the traditional Vedantic
way…which is to take a text on Self realization, the Bhagavad Gita or the
Upanishads or one of the many excellent Vedantic texts that have stood the test
of time, and unfold it verse by verse, word by word. It is quite a rigorous and formal
sadhana. The teacher not only needs to
be versed in the scriptures, which Ramana was, but the student need to be
qualified. The teachings are wielded
systematically on the student over a long period of time because the mind is
very resistant to this knowledge, even though it needs it badly and they strip
off the student’s self ignorance on the spot.
I suspect, although we have no way of knowing, that in this case Ramana
is probably answering a question by a curious person who is unfamiliar with
Vedic culture so he is just giving information, explaining the basic idea found
in the Upanishads... which has been
corroborated by his own experience.
JOHN:
What do you mean ‘strips away the student’s ignorance on the spot?
Ram: Most people,
particularly Westerners unfamiliar with the teaching tradition of Advaita
Vedanta, think Vedanta is just about studying scripture and therefore only
produces intellectuals, pundits they call them here, who know a bunch of
profound concepts…but are not Self realized.
And it is true that there are schools that produce pundits…which is not
all that bad …because the ideas need to be kept alive anyway. But Vedanta is not a belief system nor is it a
passive body of information that is meant to be interpreted according your own
tastes. It is a means of Self knowledge
that works in a very dynamic and practical way to remove the student’s
ignorance about who he or she is. And
very often enlightenment happens right in the classroom as the teacher is
unfolding the teachings. This is
possible because Vedanta says that you are already enlightened because you are
the Self and there is only one Self. All
that prevents you from knowing it are the erroneous notions you have about
yourself and the world. So assuming you
want to be free of your limiting views you expose yourself to the teaching and
it let it remove your ignorance.
JOHN: So what you’re suggesting here is that
Ramana is not trying to directly enlighten this person?
Ram: As I said, one
never knows because we weren’t there and we do not have access to Ramana’s
intentions. Of course he would always be
happy to enlighten someone but…and this is just a guess…what it feels like is
that you have a beginner who knows very little and Ramana is playing the role
of informant; he is just trying to make the idea known. There are many people
on the spiritual path who are not really serious about enlightenment or
qualified for it but who deserve answers to their questions. They are good people who have an interest,
sometimes a deep love of spirituality, and they hang out with the sages like
Ramana because they like hanging out with sages. It’s a nice life. Of course they would like enlightenment…who
wouldn’t?...but the downside for them is that it would ruin their seeking
lifestyle which has become an identity in itself. Nonetheless they feel the need to justify
themselves so they always have a number of profound questions. My guru used to say that such people were ‘in
love with their doubts.’ It means they
want to know but they really don’t want to know. I have no idea if this is the case with this
questioner, but it doesn’t seem to be a very natural question. If the questioner were an advanced seeker who
was really ready to know, he or she would probably not ask such a question or
ask it in this way. He or she would
already know the answer and know that asking such a question would not solve
the problem. Ramana was a very decent
kind person. He would probably take any
question at face value and answer it to the best of his ability.
JOHN: What about this idea that Ramana taught in
silence, that all you had to do was to sit in his presence and the silence
would enlighten you?
Ram: I suppose that
if you were completely qualified, absolutely ready to pop, you could just sit
in the presence of someone like Ramana and maybe figure out that you are whole
and complete limitless awareness. But
this is highly unlikely. People spend
years around such people ‘sitting in silence, enjoying the ‘energy’ but don’t
become enlightened. Usually people who
are highly qualified only have one or two very subtle doubts separating
themselves from jnanam, Self knowledge.
And usually they already know the answer… they just don’t have one
hundred percent confidence in it.
Experientially they have everything they need and all that is missing is
the knowledge of who they actually are.
So when they offer their ignorance to a sage like Ramana, who is an
authority and for whom they have respect and devotion, he can, with a few very
well chosen words, remove their ignorance.
Sometimes the person puts the question and gives the answer and the
teacher just nods…and that is it. Or
sometimes the teacher just asks a question in response to the student’s
statement and the student understands…without giving a verbal answer.
JOHN: So you’re
saying that words are better than silence?
Ram: Not better than
but at least as good. A thing and its
opposite may both be true and useful.
There is a kind of romantic myth about silence that does not serve
people spiritually. People are tired of
words and they want relief and this is understandable but if you are already
enlightened and don’t know it, then silence is not going to help. Silence will not remove your ignorance.
JOHN:
What do you mean by that?
Ram: Silence is
not opposed to Self ignorance or any kind of ignorance. They can coexist very nicely. But knowledge is opposed to ignorance and it
will destroy it. You start out thinking you’re limited but the fact is that you
are not limited. It may be that in
silence you will realize it but it wasn’t the silence that made you realize it,
it was the fact that you were doing some kind of enquiry…looking into the
nature of the silence and it lead you to the Self which you understood to be
you. This seeing is called jnanam,
knowledge. As I just said, you find
people who spend years sitting in silence alone and/or in the presence of a
mahatma and nothing happens. Sure, you
can argue that they are not ready to get it but if they were able to formulate
their doubt and express it to a jnani they might have it removed in a
second. So the right words spoken by the
right person at the right time can be just as effective as silence.
JOHN: This
is very interesting.
Ram: What I find
interesting is that Ramana does not actually use his own words to answer this
fellow. He is using the Upanishadic
words. Or he is so steeped in the tradition that the Upanishadic words have
become his words. He might be doing this
because he knows the difference between smriti and sruti and he
wants the words he uses to have the weight of the Upanishad. It shows the great respect he had for the
tradition. That he was a great
personality is undeniable, but he was not a ‘personality’ in the conventional
sense, like Aurobindo, who may have realized the Self but who felt the need to
convince the world of his greatness by redefining and attempting to more or
less rewrite the Vedas according to his own personal vision…which included the
whole notion of human evolution. This
notion is definitely outside the Upanishadic tradition which is concerned only
with removing ignorance of one’s limitless nature. Ramana wasn’t a do-gooder, trying to change
the world with some sort of messianic vision.
He saw the truth clearly and he expressed it in a straightforward manner…just
as it is expressed in the Upanishad.
If you look at this statement the question that will
naturally arise when Awareness is said to be the self is “What is this natural
awareness?” And Ramana, true to the
Upanishad, replies, "Existence ‑ Consciousness ‑ Bliss
(Sat ‑ Chit ‑ Ananda). If
Ramana were a traditional teacher and the question was actually heartfelt, then
he might have unfolded the exact meaning of these words so that the student
would realize the Self. It is not
enough to just give the words. We have all read hundreds of time and heard
every guru from Calfornia to
JOHN: You keep making this distinction between the
teaching style of Ramana and traditional Vedanta. What do you mean exactly?
Ram: Ramana wasn’t a traditional teacher but had a
great respect for the teaching tradition.
Let me see if I can explain what I mean.
There are two great traditions under the umbrella of Sanatana Dharma,
Vedic culture: Yoga and Vedanta. Yoga
deals with the experiential side (karma) of spiritual life and is actually
meant for the purpose of purifying the mind.
It is not a valid means of Self knowledge although yogi types sometimes
attain enlightenment, not because of their yoga but because they develop
inquiring minds as a result of all the subtle experiences that their practices
generate and intuitively draw the correct conclusion about the Self and their
identity with it….during or immediately after a profound epiphany…like Ramana
did during his ‘death’ experience…or by reflecting on their epiphanies over a
period of time. Millions of people have
the kind of experience Ramana did. I’ve
heard hundreds of such stories. But
almost no one becomes enlightened during a particular experience (although it
may feel like that) because they fail to grasp the meaning of the experience or
the importance of the one to whom the experience is occurring. It is the understanding that “I am the Self”
that needs to come out of Self experience.
JOHN: So it seems you need to come away from the
experience with the clear understanding of the fact that you are whole and
complete limitless awareness.
Ram: Vedanta acknowledges the importance of
experience but actually deals with the ‘meaning’ of experience. Any experience is only useful spiritually if
it shows you that you are whole and complete limitless awareness. If the experience leaves you incomplete and
separate, craving another Self experience, what use is it? This, of course, assumes that you are
striving to be free. Many have no idea
what liberation is or that it is actually possible so they just chase
experience. There are several meditators
here right now who have had all kinds of exceptional experiences for years, what
you could call Self experiences, but who remain as egos still striving to gain
something. Pure beautiful egos, to be
sure, but still unaware that they are limitless. The knowledge that the ‘I’ is actionless
awareness, as Ramana says, is called Vedanta, the knowledge that erases one’s
ignorance. What is that ignorance? The belief that the ‘I’ is limited,
inadequate, and incomplete, the belief in one’s self as a doer.
JOHN: So chasing experience isn’t the way to
go? You’re saying that you should be
looking for knowledge?
Ram: Yes, absolutely. It is quite rare to have a single experience
like Ramana and come away with the firm knowledge that ‘I am the Self’ and have
that knowledge stick for more than a few hours or days….a one a million chance.
He was either exceptional or lucky
although there really isn’t any particular advantage to waking up at young
age. He may have been graced but this
does not mean that his enlightenment was exceptional. He certainly didn’t behave as if it
were. Enlightenment is just
enlightenment and over time countless people have attained enlightenment in
many unusual circumstances. When you
realize that you are the Self it destroys your sense of being special or
unique.
But somehow he
understood that he needed understanding.
He was trying to figure out something and he just happened to be trying
to figure out the most important question, ‘Who am I?’ You can see this enquiry in the report of his
‘death’ experience. You have a very
bright young man making a scientific experiment, dispassionately observing what
was happening. This is the essence of
Vedanta.
JOHN: So you’re talking about Yoga and Vedanta
to give some sort of context to his enlightement?
Ram: Yes. Now that Ramana is getting fame it is rather
sad to see all these Western people coming to Tiruvannamalai with absolutely no
notion of the context of his enlightenment and his life, with no understanding
of the depth of the Vedic tradition and burdened with amazing and
ill-considered views of enlightenment based on their Ramana fantasies.
Anyway, Ramana’s type of realization,
because it did not occur at the feet of a guru in a traditional Vedantic
classroom, is more in line with the tradition of Yoga, although most yogis do
not become jnanis as Ramana did.
His lifestyle too, sitting in meditation in a cave, is more typical of
the yogic tradition than the Vedantic.
The reason yogis do not usually become jnanis is because
they have often been confused by the language of Yoga into thinking of enlightenment
as a permanent experience of samadhi.
So when the experience is ‘on’ they are not looking to understand
anything, they are simply trying to make the state permanent, sahaja. The joke is that enlightenment is not an
experience, nor is there any permanent experience. Furthermore, they do not realize that to
make an experience permanent one would have to be a doer, an agent acting on
the experience, maintaining it or controlling it or staying in it…which is a
dualistic state, not enlightenment.
JOHN:
This idea that enlightenment is not a particular experience is quite
revolutionary, isn’t it?
Ram:
It is and it isn’t. Let’s face
it, people are experience oriented…because they feel they need to get something
here. And after years of picking up
various experiences along the way they get totally conditioned to seeing
everything in terms of experience…how they feel about things. But experience is limited. And very dumb. It does not teach you anything. It can’t teach you anything…unless you are
out to learn something. So when a person
becomes disillusioned with experience and turns within to seek the Self he or
she will formulate the search in terms of experience. But a few rare people understand that seeking
experience, particularly the experience of enlightenment, is not the way to
go. In the old days many more people
sought understanding…perhaps because the more or less peaceful nature of
agrarian life produced more pure minds…who knows? The reason Ramana practiced self inquiry and
advises self enquiry is because the problem is ignorance. Experience does not remove ignorance. It is motivated by ignorance. Only knowledge removes ignorance. And you get knowledge by making an enquiry…or
being taught. Everybody starts out
chasing experience but the clever ones switch off it at some point and head for
knowledge.
JOHN:
So how would you express that knowledge?
Ram: The
negative way to express Self realization is “I am not the doer. I am not the enjoyer.” In Ramana’s case he realized “I am not the
body” because he found himself to be quite aware even as the body lay there
‘dead.’ “I am not the body” is the
equivalent of “I am not the doer” because the body is the doer. Ramana was called a jnani because he
gained knowledge of who he was during the experience. The experience finished after some time but
the knowledge of who he was remained permanently. It was there operating in the background
regardless of what experience he was having.
At the end of his life he must have been experiencing serious pain…and
wished he was dead…but his Self knowledge was unaffected. And he was unnaffected…because he was the Self. But the body/mind complex suffered.
JOHN: Most of
the people around here that I meet are looking for a particular experience and
think that Ramana was in some special state.
Ram: When a person becomes a deity or a myth a lot
is gained but a lot is lost too. You
gain an ideal and inspiration but you lose a practical connection with the
truth. Had Ramana realized in the
traditional Vedantic way, at the feet of a jnani who was teaching the
Upanishad he might have picked up the skill of wielding the means of knowledge
and may have gone on to enlighten hundreds…assuming the Lord sent that many
qualified people to him. This is not to
in any way diminish Ramana, but while he was sitting at the foot of Arunachala
teaching ‘in silence’ there were great Vedantic masters like Swami Chinmayananda
and his guru Swami Tapovan churning out many enlightened persons using the
traditional verbal methods passed down from the Lord through Shankara and other
great links in the tradition.
If you know the
real spiritual India, not just the export guru scene and the satsang
culture, you will understand that while enlightenment is rare with reference to
the total number of people on the planet there are tens of thousands of ‘fully’
enlightened people worldwide and particularly in India. I’ve lived here many years and was introduced
to the highest levels of Indian spirituality when I was quite young and I’ve
lived with a number of enlightened people of the same caliber as Ramana and
have personally met more than one hundred enlightened people. And this is just
JOHN: That sounds like heresy and contradicts
the conventional wisdom.
Ram: Yes, I suppose
it does. But conventional wisdom is
often wrong. It is rare but not as rare
as it is made out to be.
JOHN:
So what accounts for this belief?
Ram: When you
consider that human beings have been on the planet for a couple of million
years and that the Self pervades and informs every living being every second of
their existence and that the Self has been an object of worship and knowledge
forever and that it responds to any sincere desire to know it, and that the
soul transmigrates bringing with it the spiritual work it has done before, you
can not seriously believe that in any age there are only a handful of
enlightened people.
JOHN:
That make a lot of sense. Are there any other reasons why people
think it is so rare?
Ram: One source of ignorance accounting for this belief
is the ego’s lack of spiritual self confidence.
It always resists the truth and in fact often does everything it can to
sabotage one’s efforts to attain it. So
to keep it from doing the work, it imagines that only supermen are capable of
it. A more insidious source is the gurus
themselves…clever and powerful people who have had some kind of enlightenment
experience but who are not enlightened…who are suffering enlightenment sickness
i.e. the ego has carefully confused itself with the Self and built a new
identity as ‘an enlightened being’, which is used to gain typically egoic ends:
power, respect, pleasure etc. These
people have a vested interest in creating the impression that there are only a
handful of enlightened people because it makes their enlightenment seem more
rare and important. Today you will find
gurus who have mapped out their idea of the different ‘levels’ of enlightenment
and have conveniently put the famous gurus of the past and present on levels
lower than themselves. Or, at least,
where it was obvious that their fame was not as great as the ‘greats’, put
themselves on the same ‘level.’ People
are so abysmally ignorant spiritually nowadays that they unthinkingly swallow
this stuff.
JOHN: That’s not a very kind statement.
Ram:
Perhaps it isn’t, but it’s true.
In fact I’m happy to rant a bit more on the subject if you’ll permit me.
JOHN:
OK.
Ram:
One particular manifestation of this ignorance is the arrogance that one
sees in so called spiritual people. They
feel like they are superior to the religious crowd which they see as a bunch of
primitive dualists…separating themselves from God, wrapped up in forms,
etc. But the spiritual group is just as
guilty of holding irrational beliefs, ill-considered opinions, and
mind-boggling superstitions. A simple
belief in an external God looks downright sensible compared to some of the
views you hear expressed around here.
JOHN:
Like what?
Ram:
Like the idea that there is actually a column of light inside the mountain. Like the notion that there are eight hundred
invisible rishis circumambulating the mountain on the inner path in a
clockwise direction. Like the idea that
the guru can do your sadhana for you.
Let’s go back to my
original contention about Ramana seeming to be more of a yogi than a jnani. Ramana’s teachings can be confusing if one
does not understand the difference between Yoga and Vedanta because he used
both languages when he was speaking. The
language of Yoga is well-known and most people who came to him were not
qualified for enlightenment so he used that language. If you are not qualified it does no good to
try to enlighten someone with either words…or silence…because they are simply
incapable of getting it. So what Ramana
did was to encourage them to purify themselves by following a (yogic)
path…which typically involved some sort of yogic discipline and surrender to
God.
JOHN: What do you mean by ‘qualified for
enlightenment?’
Ram: Many Western people have no idea what sadhana
is. They actually think that they can
just get a ticket to
It’s true that you
are not a doer, but the you that is not a doer is the Self. The ego doesn’t become a non-doer by trying
not to ‘do’ anything. This sort of
teaching is very misleading because it is tailor made for the ego. It gives it the impression that it can have
its cake and eat it too. But it has
value too…for someone addicted to doing, someone whose self worth is tied up in
accomplishing things.
People are continually bewildered by the
fact that Ramana was supposedly a non-dual jnani and that he preached
religion and sadhana which is dvaita, duality. But he is completely in line with traditional
Vedanta on this issue. Purification is
at least as important as knowledge, perhaps more so, because without a clear
mind, you will not get knowledge, jnanam. This idea does not sit well with people
nowadays. They want it handed to them on
a platter. This accounts for the
popularity of the shaktipat gurus and the miracle makers. Around them you have a whole class of people
who actually believe that the guru is doing the work for them!
JOHN:
But Ramana didn’t do sadhana to get enlightenment.
Ram:
That’s true…but he certainly did sadhana after it. Knowing who he was, he need not have sat in
meditation in caves for many years, he could have gone home and eaten his mom’s
iddlys and played cricket. It was all the
same to him. But he didn’t. He decided to purify his mind. The glory of Ramana is not his
enlightenment. It was just the same as
every other enlightenment that’s ever been.
His glory was his pure mind.
He polished his mind to such a degree that it was particularly radiant…
a great blessing to himself and everyone whom he contacted. That kind of mind you only get through
serious sadhana, or yoga, if you will.
These modern gurus, particularly the so-called ‘crazy wisdom’ gurus who
seem to revel in gross mind, refuse to encourage people to develop themselves
because they do not understand the tremendous pleasure that comes from a pure
mind.
JOHN: Let’s
look in detail at the text. After telling the person that the self is
existence, consciousness, and bliss, he is asked “When will the realization of
the self be gained?” and he replies, "When the world which is what
is seen has been removed, there will be realization of the Self which is the
Seer.”
Ram: The way the question is phrased supports what I’ve
been saying about the language of Yoga and the language of Vedanta. The questioner says, ‘When will the Self be
gained?” Ramana does not disturb the
fellow’s mind by attacking the question and bringing him directly to the Self
(because the fellow is not capable of it).
In the Bhagavad Gita, which has the status of an Upanishad,
The question is typical of the yoga mindset…something
to be gained. Vedanta, the tradition of
knowledge which uses the (more accurate) language of identity would say, “The
self is already accomplished. It cannot
be gained because you are it already. If
there is any ‘gaining’ it will be through a loss of ignorance.”
Ramana’s response is another teaching from
scripture…the Upanishad, Gita, and Sankara (Drk-Drksha Viveka)…for which Ramana
had the greatest respect… the discrimination between the Seer and the
seen. The teaching establishes the
understanding that what one sees (read experiences…including all so-called Self
experiences: satories, samadhis, epiphanies, etc.) are “not Self” and the one
who sees them is you, the Self. One
thing I admire about Ramana was his refusal, unlike the modern teachers, to
reinvent the wheel. It shows his lack of
egoism. Based on his experience, he knew
the difference between the Self and the objects appearing in it (the seen) but
he did not feel compelled to cook up some fancy personal teaching on the
subject. Why? Because no fancy, modern teaching is
required. Enlightenment is a very simple
understanding of the Self and its relationship to experience, the forms. In a nutshell it is the understanding that
while the forms depend on the Self, the Self does not depend on the forms. This freedom from experience is called moksha,
liberation. This wisdom has been clearly
stated long before Ramana came on the scene and needs no interpretation or new
terminology.
Ramana knows that the question is actually imprecise
and that the person will not understand if he attacks the question, so he takes
it at face value and puts it in a traditional way. You have a copy. Can you refresh my memory about what he says?
JOHN: Ramana
says, "When the world which
is what is seen has been removed, there will be realization of the Self…which
is the Seer.”
Ram: This
statement is pure Vedanta. The operative
words are, "....has been removed". How is one supposed to understand the words
"....has been removed?".
What kind of removal is it? Is it
the yogic view that complete destruction of the unconscious tendencies, vasanas,
allows you to ‘gain’ the ‘self? Or is it
the Vedantic view…removal of the notion that the world is separate from the
Self?
In Ramana’s teachings you will find both ideas. The first is called the vasana kshaya theory
of enlightenment by the Vedantis and manonasa by the Yogis. Most Buddhist traditions espouse this
view. The word ‘world’ is actually a
psychological term in Yoga. It does not
mean the physical world. The physical
world is the Self. It has no personal
meaning. But the ‘world’ that Ramana
says has to be removed is the psychological projections that make up one’s own
‘world,’ i.e. ignorance. These
projections are based on an incorrect understanding of the Self, on a belief
that the Self is separate, inadequate, or incomplete. Ramana’s teaching, which is Upanishadic
teaching, is called vichara, enquiry.
The purpose of enquiry is knowledge, not the ‘physical’ removal of the
mind. If he had been teaching Yoga as a
means of liberation he would not have encouraged enquiry because Yoga is
committed to experience of samadhi, not understanding that one is the
Self.
JOHN: This is
interesting. I never heard it stated
this way before.
Ram: Well, it isn’t
really revolutionary. People read into
Ramana whatever fits with their beliefs.
So from that point of view it may seem controversial. But if you know the tradition from which
Ramana comes it is just very pure Vedanta.
Yoga is very popular and it always has been. I started out as a meatball businessman
practicing hatha yoga for muscles. And I worked my way up to some very high samadhis
through meditation. Then I realized that
the Self wasn’t a state and with a bit of luck a guru came into my life and
sorted me. Mind you, I’m not attacking
Yoga. Yoga, purification through sadhana,
is essential for enlightenment.
JOHN: But I
thought the goal was sahaja samadhi.
Ram: It’s only a
means. Contrary to conventional wisdom,
the samadhis are not the final goal.
Sahaja just means ‘continuous’
and ‘natural.’ So in terms of the
mind it means a continuously still mind, one that values everything
equally. That is the meaning of Samadhi. Sama means equal. You actually have this samadhi
naturally all the time without doing a lick of work.
JOHN:
Oh, how is that?
Ram: As the
Self. Though the Self is out of time and
the word ‘continuous’ is an experiential term referring to time, from the
mind’s point of view the Self, which is every form of experience, is
continuous…and natural. It is your
nature.
Anyway, no samadhi is equivalent to
enlightenment because samadhis are only states of mind or no mind, no
mind being a state of mind. Nirvikapa
samadhi is non-dual but unfortunately it is a state that can easily be
destroyed. And there is no one there in
that state, so when it ends one’s ignorance about the nature of one’s self is
not removed and one experiences limitation once more.
Samadhi helps to purify the mind and is a
great aid to enquiry but if you remove the mind, how will you make an
enquiry? Who will make an enquiry? You make an enquiry with the mind for the
mind…so it can shed its ignorance…and no longer trouble you. The mind is a very useful God given
instrument. Would God have given a mind
if He had intended for you to destroy it?
And, in fact, Yoga isn’t about killing the mind either because how will
you experience a samadhi if you don’t have a mind? The mind is the instrument of experience.
If you argue that you are aiming at nirvikalpa
samadhi where there is no mind, fine, but the problem with nirvikalpa
samadhi is that a fly landing on your nose can bring you out of it, not
that there is anyone there to come ‘out’.
And when the ‘you’ who wasn’t there does ‘come back,’ as I just
mentioned, you are just as stupid as you were before… because you were not
there in the samadhi to understand that you are the samadhi. If you are the samadhi you will have
it all the time because you have you all the time…so there will be no anxiety
about making it permanent.
Samadhi is actually just a word that
describes the nature of the Self. It
means equal vision in the sense that whatever object you see has equal value to
every other object. Why try to get your
mind in this state when you have it already…as the Self? So this description is just as pertinent
when the mind is active as when it is dead.
If that is so, what is the value of a dead mind?
JOHN: OK. You’re saying that samadhi is not the goal,
that it is just the means?
Ram: Yes. Not the means. A means. There are other ways to purify the mind. Misunderstanding this teaching is perhaps
responsible for more despair, confusion, and downright frustration than any
other. It is commonly believed that
this ‘removal’ means that all the vasanas need to be physically
eradicated for enlightenment to happen.
And many people believe that Ramana had ‘achieved’ that state. If you study Ramana’s life you will see that
by and large he was a very regular guy…a large part of his appeal… head in the
clouds, feet firmly planted on the earth.
He walked, talked, cooked, read, and listened to the radio. If he did not have a mind, who or what was
doing all these things? No vasanas
means no mind because the vasanas are the cause of the mind. How did he go about the business of
life? So I think we need to look at the
word ‘removal’ in a different way.
Ramana was called a jnani because he had removed the
idea of himself as a doer…it is called sarva karma sannyasa…
which happens when you realize you are the total. Or you realize you are the total when you
realize you are not the doer. ‘Not the
doer’ means the Self. It doesn’t mean
that the ego becomes a non-doer. The ego
is always a doer. As the Self he
understood that while the few vasanas he had left (which were non-binding and are not a problem
even for a worldly person) were dependent on him he was not dependent on
them. So for him, as the Self, they were
non-binding. How can a thought or a
feeling affect the Self? It can only
affect an ego, a limited being...and then only if that ego lets it. For a person who thinks he or she is the
doer, allowing the vasanas to express or not is not an option. Actions happen uncontrollably because the ego
is pressurized to act in a certain way by the vasanas. For a jnani vasanas are
elective, for an agnani they are compulsory.
So the ‘removal’ that Ramana talks about is only in
terms of knowledge. He often uses
another metaphor which he borrowed from Vedanta, the snake and the rope. In the twilight a weary thirsty traveler
mistook the well rope attached to a bucket for a snake and recoiled in
fear. When he got his bearings and his
fear subsided he realized that the snake was actually only the rope. There was no reason to take a stick and beat
the snake to death (which is equivalent to trying to destroy the mind) because
the snake was only a misperception.
When he calmed down and regained his wits (did some sadhana) he
inquired into the snake and realized that it was just a rope. And in that realization the snake was
‘removed.’
JOHN : My understanding is that he meant the
removal of all the attachments to our conditioned mind.
Ram:
How would that come about?
JOHN:
In his Ashram his disciples would sit doing nothing for years. His own attendant, Annamalai Swami spent 10‑15
years in daily conduct with Ramana and every minute when they were not working,
they would be sitting quietly. Then, one day Ramana said to Annamalai
"Now, you stop working and you go away and sit quietly". He then sat
for 50 years in his room never again setting foot in Ramona's ashram. Ramana himself sat for almost 15 years in
Virupashka cave, with very few people around. So, it involved a lot of sitting
presumably witnessing whatever thoughts were coming up.
Ram:
Well, sitting doing nothing is doing something…and you can get very
attached to a meditation lifestyle…you can get attached to anything, even
sannyasis get attached to their sticks and begging bowls… but yes, this
idea is completely in line with
traditional Vedantic sadhana. The
texts support it. First you get the mind
quiet and then you are capable of realizing that you are the Self. There is no better way to get the mind quiet
than staying in close proximity to a person like Ramana whose mind was
exceptionally quiet. It sets the tone
and the disciple’s mind becomes like it.
And the longer you do apparently nothing, the more you realize that you
don’t have to do anything to be what you are.
So this practice gradually kills off the doer. One of the misconceptions people have about
the talking schools of Vedanta is that the talk somehow obscures the silence
and therefore the words are just ‘intellectual’ and therefore of no use
spiritually. But this is not true. My guru, Swami Chinmaya, was a famous
Vedanta master who had many enlightened disciples and he spoke
incessantly. But the words were all
coming out of the silence, the Self. I
personally witnessed thousands of people one night in
JOHN:
Yes.
Ram:
So, he wasn’t removing vasanas.
JOHN:
Perhaps the attachment to them?
He must have had a pull to go back
to his family. He didn't do that and
when his mother first came sent her away.
He wasn't caught up in that anymore.
Ram: That was because he understood he was
the Self. The way you loose attachment
in one go is to understand you are the Self.
JOHN:
It is often called "a constant experience".
Ram:
Sure, but the Self is ‘constant experience’ anyway. Or put it this way, if this is a non-dual
reality and this reality is the Self then each and every experience is the
Self. So nobody is short of Self experience,
the ignorant and the enlightened alike.
The problem is that very few people understand that everything is the
Self. So they seek for all these
incredible ‘Self’ experiences.
JOHN:
The Self is a constant experience?
Ram: No, the Self is ‘constant experience’ if
there is such a thing. In fact ‘constant
experience’ is a contradiction. The Self
becomes experience but it does not sacrifice its nature as a non-doing,
non-experiencing witness to do it. That
means you are free of your experiences.
JOHN:
When one says "constant experience" would that mean "remembering
the self constantly?"
Ram:
Yes, remembrance is helpful…up to a point.
But you can never make remembrance, like experience, constant. Knowledge is constant. When knowledge takes place, that’s it. Remembering is a kind of mental activity that
implies forgetting. Once you know you
are the Self there is nothing to remember any more. How can you remember what you are? You are the one who is doing the
remembering. You are prior to the act of
remembrance.
JOHN: The next
question Ramana is asked is "Will there not be realization of the Self
even while the world is there (taken as real)? He replies, "There
will not be.”
Ram: What does he mean, the
world is ‘there.’ Where is
‘there?’ And what is the ‘world?’
JOHN:
Doesn't he mean that if you believe that ‘out there’ is real then you
cannot realize the Self, at the same time ?
Ram: I think that is what he meant. The words make it sound as if the world needs
to be removed. But this is not likely so
what does 'world' mean? It means the
belief that something in the world will make you happy or can take away your
happiness. It is the belief that needs
to be removed. That belief counts as
self ignorance because the self is unaffected by anything in your mind.
JOHN:
You can say it’s an understanding of the true nature of the world.
Ram:
Correct. Vedanta says you only
need to know what the world is and what the Self is. Neither is the source of suffering if you
know what they are. When I know that
contact with the world will not produce lasting happiness, then I’ve had it
with the world. There is no way it can
burn me. It’s a problem when I seem not
to know that it is endlessly changing.
Or put it this way. I want it to
last, at least when things are going good, and I want it not to last when
things are going badly. What is wrong
with this picture?
Enlightenment does not mean that there are
two kinds of happiness, one worldly and one spiritual. The small bits of happiness that I’m able to
pick up in the world are actually only my own Self too. If I understand that happiness gained
through the world will not last, I can certainly enjoy it for as long as it
lasts. When it ends, it ends. I just say, "OK, party is
over…great!"
Ramana was a jnani because he
removed his ignorance. I don’t think he
sat there all day, trying to break his attachments, although he may have done
some of that in the years immediately following his enlightenment…when he was a
cave dweller. I would think that because
he was so young when he woke up his vasanas had not had a chance to get
entrenched. And Indian culture was
pretty pure in those days and he came from a decent family so he would not have
had many deep negative attachments like sex and money and so on.
JOHN:
When you would go back to the situation of an 19 ‑ 20 year old
boy, who was firstly sitting for long hours, in samadhi in the
Ram: That is
pretty common in
JOHN:
Yes, so they could feel something and so supported him. But how about him? Would he really know what is happening to
him? He has never read any spiritual
books, never had a teacher and is sitting there for hours
Ram: That's a
good question. He probably did know
because there were all these Mahatmas running about, role models if you
will. So, he knew how they lived and he
probably got lots of teaching from the sadhus who he came in contact
with. You need to know that the Indian
spiritual scene is a vast network and word of someone’s enlightenment gets
around very fast. Many great men must have
come to see him and speak with him, share with him certain things that would be
helpful to him. After all, he was
sitting at the hub of one of
I stayed with a great
mahatma in Kerala, Swami Abhedananda, who was a guru’s guru. Many enlightened people came to see him and
he would invite them up to his room and I’m sure that they got something very
valuable. Many of the Westerners who
come to India, even the one’s who have been here a long time and who have been
only associated with the ‘export’ gurus often have peculiar notions about
saints like Ramana. They believe that he
was a kind of lonely figure, the only one of his kind, head and shoulders above
the crowd, lived in a cave like a hermit and sat in silence most of the time
and didn’t have a social life. He
probably was quite distant and emotionally reserved like most Tamil men, but he
had love…in spades… and if you have love people come and give you what you
need.
And then too you have to understand that
his sense of himself being the Self never left him, so he wouldn’t be that
concerned about his emotional needs.
JOHN:
What I am getting at is how would he really know that his experience
was the Self and not something else?
How would he know that?
Ram:
How do you know that you are JOHN rather than someone else?
JOHN:
I don’t, that is my problem.
I don't know that anymore. That's exactly my problem.
Ram:
Do you know that you don't know that?
JOHN:
Yes, I know that whatever JOHN was doesn't work anymore for me. So I
know that much.
Ram:
Yes, that's what knowledge is; “JOHN doesn’t work for me anymore.” When you see the Self, you know what the Self
is. Self realization is the recognition
of a fact. There is no doubt involved in
it. If you are stranded on a desert
island deprived of human contact for fifty years and somebody rescues you and
they ask you your name, you answer ‘John’ immediately…even though you had never
been asked for it for fifty years.
That’s knowledge.
JOHN:
Did he know the Self?
Ram: Yes, it
looks like he did. He may have thought it as an object at first which is
natural. It’s hard to tell. Perhaps the reason he sat in the caves alone
was to erase whatever sense of duality there was left in his understanding..
which would show remarkable maturity.
But then this kind of enlightenment will only come to a very mature
person regardless of his age. Usually,
the Self appears first as an object and then, keeping the mind on the Self and
repeatedly inquiring into it, the bedrock understanding eventually comes that
one is the Self that one is enquiring into.
This is certainly what he taught.
And he taught it with authority…based on personal experience.
The problem of language comes in
here at this level. He uses the
language of experience more than he does the language of identity…at least in
the work that we have. If you read that statement describing his enlightenment
experience in the temple you can get the sense that he knew he was it, perhaps
a little vaguely in the beginning, but more clearly as time passed. Again it is very difficult to tell from the
words.
It’s probably not correct to say that he
knew the Self. He knew he was the
Self. That is the meaning of the word
Ramana.
JOHN:
That seems like a very subtle distinction.
Ram:
It is, but there is a world of
difference. To say you ‘know the Self’
means that you see the Self as an object, as something separate. To say that you are the Self means that there
is no duality in your experience or understanding of yourself.
Let’s talk about his famous ‘enlightenment
experience’ now. I think it can shed a
lot of light on this subject of what knowing the Self actually is
JOHN:
Yes. It’s right here. I copied it from the board in the Mother’s
Shrine.
“I felt I was going to die and that I had to
solve the problem myself, there and then.
The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to
myself mentally without forming the words.
Now death has come, what does it mean?
What is it that is dying? This body dies. And I at once dramatized the occurrence of
death. I lay with my limbs stretched out
still as though rigor mortis had set in and imitated a corpse so as to give
greater reality to the enquiry. I held
my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no sound could escape so that
neither the word ‘I’ nor any other word could be uttered. “Well then,” I said to myself, “The body is
dead. It will be carried stiff to the
burning ground and there reduced to ashes.
But with the death of the body am I dead? Is the body ‘I?’ It is silent and inert but I could feel the
full force of my personality and even the voice of the ‘I’ within me, apart
from it. So I am spirit transcending the
body. The body dies but the spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by
death. That means that I am the
deathless spirit.” All this was not a
dull thought. It flashed through me
vividly as living truth which I perceived directly, almost without thought
process.
‘I’ was something
very real, the only real thing about my present state, and all the conscious
activity connected with my body was centered on that “I”. From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or ‘Self’
focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for
all. Absorption in the Self continued
unbroken from that time on. Other
thoughts might come and go like the various notes of music but the ‘I’
continued like the fundamental sruti
note that underlies and blends will all other states. Whether the body was engaged in talking,
reading, or anything else I was still centered on the ‘I’. Previous to that crisis I had felt no
perceptible or direct interest in it, much less any inclination to dwell
permanently in it.”
Ram: First, this
is a typical Self experience. Let’s not
pretend that it is very rare. It happens
somewhere to someone every day.
Remember that lovely piece of writing by Wren Lewis that you gave me…the
guy who got poisoned in
JOHN:
Yes, that would be another interesting one to talk about.
Ram: It certainly
would. My point is that there is a now
a vast literature of these kinds of experiences.
The first thing one notices is the
statement, “the shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards.” The mind previously was facing the
world. Now it is looking inwards. Spiritual literature is forever reminding us
that “The Truth dwells within.”
And then we have Ramana’s reaction to the
experience. This to me is an important
aspect…and it reveals the nature of Ramana’s mind very clearly. Ordinarily when we have intense experiences
involving great pleasure or great pain our emotions take over and cloud our
appreciation of the experience. We
either get so frightened we can’t report what happened accurately or we get so
ecstatic we can’t report what happen accurately. But Ramana stayed cool as a cucumber. He says, “Now death has come, what does
it mean? What is it that is
dying? This body dies.”
I mentioned earlier that Vedanta is
concerned with meaning. Here you have
it. Here you have an inquiring mind, one
not fascinated by the experience, one seeking to understand the
experience. Although perhaps the
majority of the people coming through here are experience happy there are quite
a few who have this kind of mind to some degree. They want to know. But very few have it to the degree that
Ramana did. This shows that he was a jnani,
a lover of knowledge. And using logic he
draws the right conclusion, “This body dies.” Already we can see by implication that he
knows he is other than the body. He has
completely objectified it. Then he does
quite an interesting thing, he dramatizes it ‘to give greater reality to the
enquiry.’ The rest of his musings up
to ‘it is silent and inert’ are just further confirmation of his
understanding that he is not the body.
Then we come to the realization of the
Self. This is the positive side, what
happens when the world is negated. He
says, “but I could feel the full force of my personality and even the voice
of the ‘I’ within me, apart from it.”
The word ‘personality’ is quite interesting. I don’t know if this was an accurate
translation of Ramana’s words. But what
he meant was the jivatman, the Self embodied as an individual. I’m sorry to use these fancy Sanskrit terms
but there is simply no English equivalent.
The Self is unembodied, but it is capable of ‘assuming’ bodies. And one of the subtle ‘bodies’ it assumes is
the jivatman. The other is the causal body called the karana shirira. OK, we can call it the soul or the
person…but it’s not quite right…throws up too many imprecise associations.
So now he is aware of the dead body and the
subtle body… what is called the personality…and ‘even the voice of the ‘I’
within me, apart from it.’ You see the
whole structure of the inner world.
Then, he concludes correctly, ‘So I am spirit transcending the body.” He has answered the ‘Who am I?”
question…which up to this point he had never even considered.
When
you have any experience the knowledge of that experience arises in the
mind. This knowledge needs to be
grasped, owned, if you will. In this
case (as the Self) he witnessed the knowledge ‘flashing vividly through me
as living truth.’
JOHN:
So how does this relate to liberation?
Ram:
Many people have these kinds of experiences but do not realize that they
are ‘spirit transcending body.’ It
is this knowledge that is called liberation.
Why is it liberation? Because
thinking you are the body is a huge problem.
It makes the world and everything in it real. But as the Self the world appears as a kind
of dream that one knows to be a dream…so all the experiences you have in it
can’t bind you. In the next statement
he addresses this issue of what is real.
He says, “ ‘I’ was something very real, the only real thing about my
present state, and all the conscious activity connected with my body was
centered on that ‘I’.”
This is knowledge. The ‘I’ is real. The body/mind isn’t.
JOHN:
Surely, if it is the Self it has to be real, doesn’t it?
Ram: That’s a good
point. The answer is ‘yes’ and
‘no.’ Yes, because if the Self is
everything and the Self alone is real and if there is such a thing as the
body/mind it has to be real. There is a
statement in the Vedanta that says, ‘Brahma
satyam, jagan mithya.’ It means the
limitless Self is real, the world (read body/mind) is apparently real. Real is defined in spiritual science as what
never changes…what lasts forever. So
experience and the body don’t fit that definition. But experience isn’t actually unreal either. It has a peculiar status, neither completely
real, nor completely unreal. There is a
famous Vedantic text, the Vacarambana Sruti that explains how it is. I won’t digress into it because we are just
getting to the meat of Ramana’s experience.
There is one more thing to understand in
this passage which is that Ramana is not quite through with the process he’s
experiencing. He is at the intermediate
stage. Before this experience came and
he realized he was the Self he thought that the body was real. But this experience has shown him that with
reference to the Self the body is not real.
It is important that he completely negate his belief in the reality of
the body. So he has to say that it isn’t
real. Then later, when the knowledge
that he is the Self is completely firm, he can take the body back as real
because it is non-separate from him. The
only actual problem with the body is the belief that it is an independent
entity and that the ‘I’ depends on it.
But Ramana realized that the ‘I’ was free of the body. He says…and this is very important… ‘all
the conscious activity connected with my body was centered on that “I”.
People who are ignorant that they are the
immortal Self… what you would call materialists… believe that the ‘I’ is
centered on the body, that it is the body that gives life to the ‘I.’ But scripture and direct experience shows
that the body is centered on the ‘I.’ In
other words the ‘I’ is the living principle and the body is just matter. Ramana realized that fact.
Now the next statement is very difficult to
understand. In a way we would have been
a lot happier if Ramana just packed up his meditation carpet and stole silently
away into the night. He’s the Self and
he knows it…shouldn’t that be the end?
But as usual life always has another surprise in store. He says, “From that moment onwards the
‘I’ or ‘Self’ focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination.”
Which ‘I’ did what? If I’m the ‘I,’ the one without a second, how
do we get two ‘I’s here? Has Ramana lost
his realization? How can the Self be
fascinated with anything? It would only
be fascinated if it felt there was something to experience or know. But you and I that it is whole and complete,
lacking nothing, so why is it acting as if it weren’t? Furthermore if it is self aware it is already
‘focused’ on itself.
This experience was not the end. In fact it was just the beginning of Ramana’s
spiritual journey. He has just become
Self realized but he has not become enlightened.
JOHN: What do you
mean by that?
Ram: The last
paragraph shows clearly that he thinks of the Self as an object and that he
sees himself a separate from it. He is
seeing it, experiencing it, no doubt…it would remain as a ‘permanent
experience’ but he has yet to see himself solely as the non-dual self. He does.
He gets there. We don’t know
when…probably sometime during his meditation phase when he was living in the
caves…but he gains the last little bit of knowledge.
JOHN:
How do you know?
Ram: The
language. Let’s take the language at
face value. Ramana was a very straightforward
person. He says, “Absorption in the Self continued unbroken
from that time on.” So the natural
question is “who is absorbed in what?”
It seems that the Self was absorbed in itself (by that I think he meant
that he, Ramana (who had just realized that he was the Self) was absorbed in
the Self that he had realized. This
would be a statement that would indicate the end of it all. But a couple of sentences later he says, “I
was centered on the ‘I’.” And one
gets the impression that the first ‘I’ was different from the second. This is a statement of the Self realization
phase of the spiritual journey.
And it fits in with the Self enquiry that Ramana
taught…which was based on his own experience and backed by scripture. One of the definitions of Self enquiry that
Ramana gives is “Holding the mind on the Self is enquiry.” So here he is, a young boy of seventeen who
didn’t have a clue about the Self, with his mind fixed permanently on the Self.
JOHN: So what is
the next phase? How does it happen?
Ram: You keep
watching the Self. You stay alert, which
is not hard because the Self is very beautiful.
And the more you watch it the more it sets you to thinking. You become fascinated. The words Ramana uses are ‘a powerful
fascination.’ When you’re in this
phase you need a cave or something like it.
You do not want to be in the world.
If you stay in the world your connection might be broken.
You fall in love.
When you are in love you do not stop thinking. One thing that we need to point out here is
very important. You know how I have been
saying that this belief that the mind has to stop completely is not true, that
it does happen but it need not happen, that having a dead mind can be a big
problem?
JOHN: Yes.
Ram: Well, it’s clear
by Ramana’s own admission that his mind had not stopped completely. He says,
“Other thoughts might come and go like the various notes of music…”
This ‘state’ he is ‘in’ is savikalpa samadhi to use the Yogic
term. It is a state of clear seeing in
which vikalpas, thoughts, arise and fall. But the thoughts do not obscure the vision
of the Self. This is very
important. Ramana says so.
Anyway, where was I?
Yes…love. You fall in love. When you are in love you do not stop
thinking. On the contrary, you think
more, you want to know what your beloved is, what he or she is doing. This thinking is enquiry. Ramana already had the knowledge from his
experience to guide him in his enquiry.
He knew about himself and the “I beyond the body.”
You are getting it all straight about who you are and what
your relationship is to this beautiful being.
And then one day something happens…we cannot say when…it just happens…if
you stay focused on the beloved…there is an Aha! and at that moment the you
that was looking at the Self ‘becomes’ the Self. There is actually no becoming. You were it all along. The becoming is a recognition, a knowing. But the ‘becoming’ changes your
perspective. You are no longer the jivatman
looking in at the Self, the paramatman, you are the Self looking out at
the jivatman. And what do you
know? That the jivatman and the paramatman
are one. Or in the words of the
scripture, “Tat Tvam Asi,” That (Self)
you are. Formulated from the Self’s
perspective the words are “Aham Brahmasmi”
I am limitless. Ramana the form
is limited. Ramana the Self is
unlimited.
This is what Vedanta calls enlightenment. From that point on you do not abide ‘in’ the
Self you abide ‘as’ the Self. You have
only one non-dual identity.
JOHN: That’s a
very important analysis that will help many people who are nearing the end of
their spiritual journeys.
Ram: Yes. Now the rest of the statement is Ramana
looking back. He does not go into what
happened next, the stage I just described, because it was not called for.
JOHN: Ramana was
very clear about the meaning of this experience. He must have had a very pure mind.
Ram:
Vedanta says the mind needs to be purified. About the educated bit, I think he was well
educated. I think he was self
taught. He obviously was well read…he
was conversant with many scriptures. He
had a pure bhakti for Sankara. He
knew the value of the mind. He was a jnani,
he loved knowledge. He must have
studied all this life. He was well informed
too. He liked to listen to the
radio. It’s sad that the spiritual
world nowadays is so pro-experience and anti-knowledge. Ramana wasn’t an intellectual but he loved
knowledge.
JOHN:
At the end of his book “Self Enquiry” he says, "He
who is thus endowed with a mind that has become subtle, and who has the
experience of the Self is called a Jivanmukta.”
Ram: Here’s a
vindication from Ramana’s mouth of what I’ve been saying about the mind. The mind does not have to be killed…just the
gross part of it. When enough of the
gross vasanas are exhausted the mind becomes subtle. It still has thoughts in it but the thoughts
do not unbalance it. This kind of mind
comes about through intelligent living, sadhana, and is capable of Self
realization.
Experience of the Self is not enlightenment. It may be Self realization but it it not
enlightenment for the simple reason that there is an experiencer other than the Self. It is enlightenment when the experiencer realizes that he or she
is what is being experienced i.e. the Self.
Enlightenment is knowledge, jnanam, not experience of
anything. People erroneously believe
that they will be left as they are and they will gain some incredible
experience ‘of the Self’…rather like winning the spiritual lottery. But a jivanmukta is free of everything,
especially experience. If it was
a constant ‘experience of the Self’ how bored the jivan mukta would soon
become! Any experience, including very
beautiful experiences become tiring after a short time. Jivanmukta simply means someone who has
realized he or she is the Self and has no sense of duality. This statement only applies to the Self.
JOHN:
(reading) “It is the
state of jivanmukta that is referred to as the attributeless Brahman and
as Turiya. When even the subtle mind gets resolved.”
Ram:
Well, this is not a correct understanding of jivanmukta. In the first place it is not a ‘state.’ States are experience-based and come and
go. Attributeless Brahman would not have
any states in it, nor would it be a state.
A state is an attribute.
Attributeless Brahman are two words that describe the Self. The Self, awareness, has no attributes and is
limitless which is the meaning of the word Brahman. A jivanmukta is someone who has
realized that he or she is the Self.
That is all. The resolution of
the mind is simply a resolution in understanding. The mind understands that it is the Self and
that makes it peaceful and finishes it as an independent entity. It does not mean that the mind dies never to
think a thought again.
Turiya is another word that is mightily misunderstood. It does not refer to a ‘forth state.’ The Mandukya Upanishad does not refer to the
Self as a forth state. If you know
Sanskrit you can see this clearly. This
is another case of the language of Yoga sneaking in and co-opting language of
identity. The word ‘forth’ in the
Mandukya points to the invariable awareness in all the three states. That is
all.
JOHN:
(reading) “ and when one is immersed in the ocean of bliss and
has become one with it without any differentiated existence, one is called a Videhamukta. It is the state of Videhamukta that is
referred to as the transcendent Turiya. This is the final goal.”
So is he saying this is enlightenment?
Ram: That’s the way
it seems. He is describing enlightenment
in both the language of experience and language of yoga. If you analyze that language you can find
the problem. He is experiencing
limitless bliss, yet he is talking about it being a goal. Something to be gained. But in the language of identity it is
something that you are.
Let’s pick apart this statement a little more. In the first place what do the words
‘immersed in’ mean? These are
experiential words. They indicate a
person having a particular kind of experience…in this case bliss. The next words of interest are ‘has
become one with it.” What do they
mean? What kind of ‘becoming’ is
it? If the ‘becoming’ is experiential
the experience of bliss stops because the one who was experiencing it is no
more. In the state of oneness,
non-duality, the subject and object necessary for experience are not
present. So if somebody is going to
lose the experience of ‘the ocean of bliss’ why will they merge into the
Self? It doesn’t make a lot of
sense. This is why the Bhakti tradition
scoffs at the liberation tradition. The
bhaktas say, ‘Why would I want to be God when I can experience God all the
time?” It’s a valid point. However, it doesn’t take into account the
fact that you can be God and experience God.
There is only a contradiction when you have a flawed understanding of
the nature of God and the ego.
But what if this ‘becoming’ is the coming of
understanding? By understanding I mean
the recognition that the subject, the mind/ego, the one experiencing the bliss, and the object, the bliss, are
one. Bliss is a common word describing
the Self. One way to describe this
understanding experientially is that it is a shift during which the foreground,
the ego, which has been experiencing the Self in the form of bliss becomes the
background and the Self, which has been the object of experience, becomes the
foreground, I. So now the ‘I’ is the
Self looking out at the ego looking ‘in’ at it.
And when this shift takes place there is an instant recognition that ‘I’
is the Self. One’s identification of ‘I’
with the ego/mind ends… once and for all.
From that point on there is no foreground or background, no in or
out. The mind is purified of these
‘spiritual’ concepts.
Videhamukti exoterically is actually thought to mean
‘liberation when the body dies.’ But
this is just a belief. The actual
meaning is ‘freedom from the body.’ ‘Vi’
means without and ‘dehi’ means the body and ‘mukti’ means
liberation. So it is not an
experiential term; it is a statement of knowledge. It means that when you realize that you are
not the body you are free. The
realization that one is not the body, if it is a hard and fast knowledge , is
enlightenment. We can include the
mind/ego in the word ‘body’ too because it is a body, albeit a subtle one. Body means embodied. This experience and the understanding that
arises with it means that from this point on one is no longer embodied. The bodies are in the Self but the Self is
not in the bodies. This is why it is
called liberation.
JOHN:
You have always been the Self, its like a recognition.
Ram:
That's right.
JOHN:
Its an embracing.
Ram:
Yes, one owns it.
JOHN:
It's the moment the wave sinks into the ocean. Its when the wave stops
being this wave...
Ram:
Yes, but…here’s that famous ‘but’… the wave can be there. If there is a wave in the ocean you know
that it is not just an independent wave but it is the ocean too. It won’t be a wave unless it is the
ocean. The wave depends on the ocean but
the ocean does not depend on the wave.
So even if there is a wave it has no effect on the ocean. Enlightenment does not destroy dualistic
experience. One just realizes that
experience depends on me, the Self, but that I am always free of
experience. Acting in the world with
this knowledge is quite different from acting in this world without it.
JOHN: Right.
What you are saying now is very important. It’s completely contrary to what I have been
led to believe. It’s a vital point. I can remember talking about this in
Ram: All that ‘teaching’ does is deflate
people; it doesn't give them encouragement and is patently untrue. Mind you, you need to get some mind out of
the way…your neuroses, your binding likes and dislikes…and for that you need to
do some work. That's why Bhagavan talks
about doing meditation, sadhana. That's what Vedanta says too. The mind needs to be quiet but that does not
mean that the world has to go and the mind has to disappear completely. It may disappear completely. But it always
reconstitutes itself.
If Self realization only happens when the mind is non
existent, then the Self and the mind enjoy exactly the same order of
reality…like sickness and health. When
you are healthy you are not sick. The
scriptures say that this is not so. Experience
shows that it is not so.
The Self is knowable directly when the mind is
functioning. The Self doesn’t need any
knowledge. The mind needs it so it has
to be functioning clearly. But when the
mind is overcome with heavy duty rajas (activity) and tamas (dullness) it is impossible to know the Self.
JOHN: So the mind
does experience the Self, then? This
seems contrary to what you were saying before.
Ram: That’s
good. Yes and no. What is experienced is the reflection of the
Self in a sattvic mind. The sattvic
mind is like a highly polished mirror and the Self illumines it…so it is
experienceable there. There can be no
‘direct experience’ because the mind and the Self enjoy different orders of
reality…the Self is subtler than the mind.
Ramana defines enquiry as ‘holding the mind on the Self’ which
means keeping your attention on the reflection of the Self in the sattvic
mind. The reason you hold your attention
on it is to get knowledge. When you get
knowledge you can relax. You are trying
to figure out what it is and what it has to do with you. And if you are faithful, meaning if you do
not involve yourself with the occasional vasanas arising in the mind,
there will eventually come a point…it is inevitable…when there is the
‘Aha!’ And that ‘Aha!’ is simply the
recognition that what I am experiencing is me.
When you grasp this
knowledge that "I am the self" you are no longer excluding yourself
from the experience of the Self. As long
as you are experiencing the Self then you are excluding yourself from the
Self. You are saying, I am here and the
Self is there and I am experiencing it.
In the Gita Arjuna has fear when he sees
JOHN: In "Who am I" in the seventh answer
Ramana says, ‘When the mind, which is the cause of all cognition and of
all actions, becomes quiescent, the world
will disappear."
We dealt with this earlier but it is important to go over
it, I think. Now this is pure Yoga. Vedanta says that when the world disappears,
you do not disappear. For you to know
that it has disappeared you have to be there.
Seeing that you exist independently of the world is the purpose of this
kind of experience. If the world
disappears and you do not understand that you are the Self, then what is the
point of having this experience?
When the world ‘disappears’ the Self is revealed as it is
and with it should come the knowledge that "I am the self". From this point onward you do not need to
experience the self. You do not have to
do anything be the Self. The Self is a given.
Its already here, already accomplished.
JOHN:
Does that mean, that everything you do everyday, moment by moment
that what ever you do is right because it is the Self?
Ram:
Sure.
JOHN:
Therefore there is no question of right and wrong.
Ram: Yes. You have to follow dharma because you are dharma. Dharma is based on the notion everything is
one. Whatever you do is right because
you are right.
JOHN:
Can we say that when you realize the self you can do no wrong? You
are living in the Self, in fact you simply are the Self. You cannot be doing wrong.
Ram: For a jnani
there is not right or wrong, but this does not mean that a jnani is
going to go out and kill because he understands that everyone is himself. You don't kill yourself…unless you think you
are someone else. You don't do good…
because you are good.
JOHN:
Quoting Laxmana Swami on the subject of Self realization and
enlightenment. He says, "Devotees
by their own effort can reach the effortless, thought
...destroy it completely you see.”
Ram:
This again is the language of Yoga and needs to be looked into. Mind you, I’m not against or for any
language. One just needs to know what
the words are actually referring to…and see whether or not the words are the
best ones for revealing what is. The
Yogis are probably talking about the same thing as the Vedantis. But the way a siddha like Lakshamana
Swami uses words is going to be different from an ordinary person…because he
understands what the words actually refer to.
And for someone who is not enlightened who is using the words to guide his
or her sadhana the words need to be very carefully considered. Because at these subtle levels of experience
the way you think about things can make
or break your endeavor.
I’m going to be a
bit hard on this statement of Laxmana Swami without meaning any
disrespect. He says speaking of a pure sattvic
state, “In that state there are no more thoughts, desires or memories rising
up.” Fair enough. Then he says,
“Then go and sit in the presence of a realized being…” Now, what is wrong with this statement? If there are no desires rising up why would
you want to go and sit ‘in the presence of a realized being?” You would have to have a desire to do
that. If there were no desires you
wouldn’t do anything at all because action is motivated by desire. You wouldn’t even scratch the mosquito bite
on your nose. And we have seen in the
statement of Ramana above that it is quite possible to do Self enquiry when
there are thoughts in the mind. In fact
you only do Self enquiry when there are thoughts in the mind because enquiry is
about getting discrimination, the knowledge of the Self and it’s relationship
to the mind. If you have no thoughts you
have no mind; if you have no mind, there is nothing to do enquiry with.
Desires are only a
problem spiritually if they are binding.
Non-binding desires are just fine.
Even the Yoga Sutra, which is the authority on this subject,
distinguishes between binding and non-binding vasanas. But the point is well-taken. It is basically saying what the scriptures
say: that you need to have a certain kind of prepared mind. We will not quibble about whether there are
no thoughts or whether there are only a smattering of light non-distracting
thoughts.
OK, let’s go on
with this. Once you are there he says “the
power of the Self will make the residual ‘I' go back to its source from where
it will die, never to rise again.”
When the mind is
full of passion and dullness it is in the presence of the Self but it doesn’t
know it. But when you have purified the
mind to the point that Laxmana Swami is speaking about the mind is already in
the presence of the Self. That would be
the only thing there aside from the mind.
And if one had the desire to be enlightened why wouldn’t simply having
that desire invoke the power of the Self and cause it to make the mind “to
go back to its source…where it will die, never to rise again.” In fact, presumably one would only have gone
through such an arduous sadhana if one were going for liberation…so the
Self would have been well aware of the desire of the aspirant. So why would one have to drag one’s body off
to find a realized soul? Ramana didn’t
have a guru and his mind was active…yet he realized the Self. If his mind weren’t active he would not have
been able to simulate death and report the thoughts and feelings he had about
it. And, in fact, as we have just read
he said there were thoughts rising and falling.
Another problem
with this thought-free mind idea is that the mind is already the Self. If this is a non-dual reality and there is
such a thing as a pure mind, then that pure mind is going to have to be the
Self. So what is meant here is not that
the mind is destroyed never to rise again, but that the mind’s ignorance…that
it is something other than the Self… never rises again… in the presence of the guru.
What I’m going to
say next is very important. It shows
that the problem is ignorance, not lack of Self experience. There is a reason why they called Ramana a guru. And the reason is because the guru
removes ignorance. You only need to look
at the word itself to divine the meaning.
“Gu” means darkness and “Ru” means ‘to remove.’ Darkness is a symbol of ignorance. What removes darkness? Light.
Light is a symbol of knowledge.
So you go to a guru to get knowledge, not to get some sort of permanent
experience of the Self.
If this statement
of Laxmana’s were to be taken at face value we could dismiss it as untrue
because here he is using his mind to tell us about enlightenment. If it were dead, ‘never to rise again’ then
who is making this statement?
Presumably he is making the statement because he has a desire to
enlighten us about enlightenment. If his
desire-free mind was destroyed by the power of the Self he would not be able to
make this statement on two accounts.
First, a desire-free mind would have no desire to enlighten anybody and
secondly, if the desire free mind has been destroyed how will it say anything? People speak because they want to speak.
I’m not arguing with
Laxmana’s statement. I agree that you
need a guru if you are going to realize who you are. So the question becomes ‘What does the guru
have to do with it?” And what is the
nature of the experience he calls enlightenment?
However, I don’t think
we can dismiss Laxmana’s statement completely. When I look at any statement,
even one that on the face of it seems strange, rather than dismiss it out of
hand I try to see how it could be true.
Very few people study language and this probably applies to most
enlightened beings. So a person like
Laxmana, who is respected as a realized soul, probably knows what he is talking
about. At least this is probably the way
it happened for him. Or this is the best
he can do in expressing it. Let’s take a
look at one sentence, “the power of
the self will make the residual ‘I' go back to its source from where it will
die, never to rise again. This is the complete and full realization.”
What power is he
talking about here? In Vedantic
literature there is a technical term that applies to this situation. It is jnana shakti and it means
‘the power of knowledge.’ Is this what
he means? Or is he talking about some
other power? If he’s talking about some
other power of the self then there would be no need to go and sit with a guru
because a person with a dead mind would be sitting in the presence of the self
already. But if he means the ‘power of
knowledge’ then he is right. You need to
visit a guru. Because, blissful as it
is, a dead mind is still an ignorant mind.
There are a few
more questions that need to be answered before this statement makes sense. What does ‘residual I’ mean? What does ‘go back’ mean? How will the power of knowledge make the
residual ‘I’ go back to its source? And
what kind of death is it?
I think the only
reasonable interpretation of ‘residual I’ is an ego that does not know that it
is limitless awareness. So the ‘going
back’ is not a physical journey, an experiential journey but the erasing of
ignorance. And to be fair, the removal
of ignorance and the gaining of understanding has experiential
ramifications. It’s very subtle but it
is a happening, no doubt. ‘The source’
means the Self. So the going back is the
realization of the identity of the residual ‘I’ and the Self. This ‘destroys’ the residual ‘
There is one more
point that I’d like to make that concerns the last sentence. He says that the guru will “pull the
desire free mind in to the heart and destroy it completely.” Again we need to look at the meaning of the
words. But before we do we need to
address one glaring contradiction: why
would the desire free mind need to be destroyed? One can understand why one would want to rid
oneself of a desire filled mind…but a desire free mind? A desire free mind is thought by many to be
the goal. Buddhism, for example, defines
enlightenment as a desire free mind. The
word nirvana means a desire free mind.
Furthermore why would you want to get rid of a desire free mind only to
gain a desire free Self? The Self is
nirvana, free of flame, desire. ‘Nir’
means not and ‘Vana’ means flame.
This statement is a
fine example of the problems that come with the language of experience. Let’s give Laxmana the benefit of the doubt
and assume that he was misquoted or mistranslated
and that he means the guru will remove your ignorance about who you are. If that is so then there is only one other
possible source for a potential misunderstanding: that the guru is going to do
this. It does look like the guru is
doing it but there is one lesson that needs to be learned from Ramana’s own
enlightenment that applies across the board to all enlightened beings. And that is that the guru may show you the
Self…but you have to grasp it yourself.
If the guru could do it, every qualified person who had an enlightened guru
would be immediately enlightened. But it
would effectively finish off the tradition of enlightenment because you would
not have the confidence to enlighten others because you would not have
enlightened yourself…like Ramana…and every other enlightened being did.
JOHN:
So the destruction of the mind that he is talking about is actually
the destruction of ignorance?
Ram:
Vedanta says that it is a destruction of ignorance, not desire. True, ignorance of the fact that one is whole
and complete generates a lot of foolish and unnecessary desires. And these need to be gotten rid of if you are
going to get a clear mind. And you need
a clear mind if you are going to realize who you are. But certain desires are quite fine. In the Bhagavad Gita, which is a liberation
scripture with the status of an Upanishad,
JOHN:
Laxmana Swami is saying that if you have desire there is no way you
can realize the self.
Ram:
Well, he does and then he contradicts himself. If you have a dead mind like he is saying you
won’t have any desire in it…so why will you go off to an enlightened person to
get something? Shankar and the whole of
the Vedantic tradition says that you need a discriminating, dispassionate,
quiet mind with a burning desire for liberation. If you have that you can realize the Self and
realize that you are it. You need the
quiet mind so that you can grasp the knowledge.
You need discrimination so you can sort out the subtle parts of the
inner self and you need dispassion so your emotions and prejudices won’t derail
your enquiry. So it seems to me that
that you need quite a bit of mind…just not a disturbed mind. Ramana realized the Self with a very active
mind. He made a little ritual and used logic while it was going on.
JOHN:
Are you saying that a person following the no-mind idea can’t get
enlightened?
Ram:
No. I’m saying that it is not
the only option. This whole argument is
rather like the religious argument advanced by the Christians; you can only
come to God through Christ. No other way
works. I’m saying that the whole idea of
a path, following a certain idea, has to be transcended at a certain point,
particularly this idea that the mind has to be completely dead. People often try to kill it, eventually they
give up…and sometimes turn to the path of understanding.
JOHN:
It suggests that things are in the way must be gotten out of the way.
Ram: That's what Buddhism also says. They have
this same yoga idea. You have to remove all your unconscious tendencies. When they are gone, that is enlightenment.
JOHN:
But that can take years and years even life times.
Ram: Sure can.
You have no idea how much stuff is in there. You are going to set out to get rid of it
all when you don’t even know how big a task you’re setting for yourself?
JOHN: But people do it. Or think they are doing it.
Ram: They are actually doing something else but
aren’t aware of it. People can’t just go
sit in a room and do nothing. It’s too
‘weird.’ They need a justification. It’s like fishing. A lot of fishermen don’t give a damn about
fish, they just like to go out and stand in a cool stream looking at the lovely
mountains and observing life in the wild.
But it doesn’t look that good. If
somebody comes by and says why are you standing there in waist deep water
staring out into space they will be hard pressed to come up with a sensible
answer. So they take a fishing rod with
them.
Vedanta says all you need to do is to destroy the
ignorance that makes you believe that you are the ego, the small 'I'. Then the vasanas become non binding. So it is ignorance that causes the thoughts
to bind, not the thoughts themselves.
You see that water tower?
JOHN: Yes.
Ram: That means
that you have a water tower thought in your mind.
JOHN: OK. I’ m with you so far.
Ram: What are
your feelings about it?
JOHN: Feelings?
Ram: Right. You don’t
have any. You don’t give a damn about
it. You have no relationship to it at
all. It is just a thought in your
mind. It doesn’t help you or hurt
you. It just is what it is. It doesn't bind you in any way. What insulates you from it is the knowledge
that you are not it…just like Ramana realizing he wasn’t the body. He did not have to destroy his body to
realize it. He just destroyed it in his
mind.
JOHN: So, it is
incredibly rare to find someone with a dead mind?
Ram: It’s rare
to find a duck-billed platypus. But what
conclusion should we draw from that? The
fact is that if you have a dead mind you are either in nirvikalpa samadhi,
asleep, in a coma, or actually dead. We
have already seen that nirvikalpa samadhi is not liberation. And the others certainly aren’t. There is a great statement by the Buddha
that applies. “Believe nothing you have
read or anything you have heard, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with
common sense and reason.” This belief
totally defies common sense and reason.
JOHN: Here is
an important part of Ramana’s teaching.
He says, ‘The Self can
only destroy the mind when the mind no longer has any tendency to move outwards.”
Ram: It means destroy the belief that there is
something ‘out there’ that will make the mind permanently happy. When you no longer believe there is anything
‘out there’ the mind automatically turns inward. It’s called vairagya, dispassion You become indifferent toward the world. This is not the end of it. True, the mind is ‘Self realized’… that is
it is experiencing the Self… but it still needs to determine if it is what it
is experiencing…or if it is something other than what it is experiencing.
JOHN: That makes sense.
Ram: I’m not arguing against Self experience. You have Self experience twenty four hours a
day. And enjoy all the incredible mind
blowing Self experiences you want. But
why sit there and just endlessly have Self experience? If it’s a discrete experience, unlike any
other, it will naturally exclude every other experience and you will not be
able to enjoy the world because you can’t have two experiences
simultaneously. In reality you have
constant self experience whether or not the mind is ‘experiencing the Self’…you
just don’t know that whatever you are experiencing is the Self. So what the teachings of Vedanta try to do
is to deal with a small but crucial bit of ignorance…the tendency to exclude
yourself from what you are experiencing by pointing out that all experiences
share something in common…an ‘I”.
JOHN: Hmm.
Ram: I don’t take myself into account. So I don’t understand that I’m the content of
the experience. Without me experience is
not possible. So I’m what’s valuable,
not the experience. Without me there is
no possibility of having any experience, including the experience of an empty
mind…the situation that Laxmana talks about here where all vasanas are
exhausted leaving only the ego. Then,
according to him what is required is that this person should go and sit in the
presence of a master to get his ego destroyed.
But let’s not get too frightened until we understand what is actually
being destroyed. Does that mean there is
no ego ever again? If that’s the case
then Ramana wasn’t enlightened, was he?
He had an ego, a body, a mind. He
walked and talked and acted like a normal person.
JOHN: Yes.
He worked in the kitchen and had very distinct ideas about how the food
should be prepared and how things should be done in a particular way.
Ram: Yes.
He had his preferences, his likes and dislikes.
JOHN. He also had a mind that could design
buildings and get them constructed.
Ram: He read scripture. He’s getting a lot of his teachings from
scripture. Here’s one: “The seer and the object seen are like a
rope and a snake.” “When the
mind comes out of the Self the world appears.” And then there are the words ‘to be real’
appended after ‘appears.’ Now
what does ‘the world appears to be real’ mean? It means one’s private ‘world’ is only a
mental state, a projection. He’s talking
about the removal of ignorance, it’s ‘destruction’ if you will. Because the world is real. The world is the Self in time. It’s not an illusion. The belief that the ‘I’ needs the world to
complete itself is the ignorance that needs to be destroyed.
JOHN. The ignorance, not the world.
Ram: Yes.
The world is the Self and I’m the Self.
The problem is my understanding is confused. I need to know what the world is and what I
am and what my projections are. That is
all. I need to destroy the confusion I
have about each of these three aspects of my being. And he’s right that in the presence of the
guru this understanding can come.
What
does ‘in the presence of the guru mean?’
What actually happens there? How
does the presence of the guru remove my confusion? Sometimes it works through words. This is the best and easiest…if you have an
open mind and you only want liberation.
Sometimes it works by just sitting there and observing…seeing from where
the guru sees…and seeing how the guru operates his life from that position…and
seeing that you are that position and that that position is free of
everything…the world and your ego/mind.
There are a number of different ways that this can come to you. It doesn’t mean that the guru gives you a
certain kind of glance or some incredible ‘energy’ just wipes your ego out once
and for all.
JOHN: Laxmana said that you can go so far on
your own and then you need contact with a mahatma.
Ram:
I agree with that.
JOHN: But it is said that enlightenment is very
rare.
Ram: Ananda, who was thought to be the Buddha’s
most highly qualified disciple, didn’t get it when he was with the
Buddha. When you are attached to your vasanas
you will have beliefs like this. Your vasanas…
meaning ego which is nothing but your vasanas… do not want you to
believe that it is easy. So you have
the belief that there is some impossible experiential situation, in this case a
totally dead mind, that will make you whole and complete…happy. Whatever.
Or it’s holding out for something it thinks the world has to offer… the
love of somebody, for example… and won’t entertain the belief that you are
love. The ego doesn’t want you
free. So it encourages you to pick up
beliefs that conclude that enlightenment is unbelievably rare. Sure, the scripture says it is very hard and
it also says it is very easy. It is
easy if you are rightly resolved…if you really know what you want. It is very difficult if you are just playing
at seeking. You can’t have your cake and
eat it too.
JOHN: Let’s go on. (reading)
“Therefore when the world appears (to be real) the Self does not
appear. And when the Self appears or
shines the world does not appear.”
Ram: It’s a very tricky statement. We need to dig beneath the surface. We have to know what is the meaning of
‘appear’ and ‘disappear.’ It sounds like
the world or the mind has the power to obliterate the Self.
JOHN: So he must mean the mind’s attachment to
the world.
Ram: What he’s doing is giving the mind and the
Self the same order of reality. Is this
a problem of Ramana’s understanding or is this a problem of the translation?
JOHN: Well, I think this has all been corrected
by Ramana himself.
Ram: There’s many a
slip twixt the cup and the lip. You
don’t know what the translator or the typist or printer did with the
manuscript, etc. Never mind, it’s a
statement that bears analysis. Somebody
knew that it was a bad statement and put ‘to be real’ in parentheses because
without this qualifier you have nonsense.
There should also be the same modifier at the end of the first sentence
…’the Self does not appear’ (to be real) and at the end of the
second sentence…’the world does not appear’ (to be real)’.
Without the phrase ‘to be real’ we have what appears to be
a statement that the world disappears when the Self is known and the Self
disappears when the world is known.
Which we know cannot be true. But
if we amend it with the phrase ‘to be real’ included in the appropriate places
it jibes with scripture…and makes sense… even though it is only partially
true. The operative word is
‘appears.’ Appears means that the mind
is misunderstanding something.
Mind you this is not a statement of enlightenment. It is a bit of knowledge that needs to be
applied at the intermediate stage, the stage of inquiry. It is meant to help to distinguish between
the mind and the Self. The person has
the belief that his mind, his ‘world’ is real.
So when he is caught up in that and focused on experience, he does not
see the truth, his Self. There’s a
verse in the Gita that says the same thing.
“What’s day for the jnani (sage) is night for the agnani
(worldly person). What’s night for the agnani
is day for the jnani.” It means
you can’t have it both ways…see the mind and the Self both as real. You have to come down on the side of the Self
as the sole reality. Once you have done
that then you can see that the mind is also real…but you know that it enjoys a
lower order of reality…an apparent reality…a time-bound reality. So it isn’t a problem. There is no conflict between different orders
of reality. When you’re on the path to
enlightenment you have to completely negate the world, the mind, etc. So this statement is meant to help you do
that. It’s another case of how you
can’t have your cake and eat it too…until you have attained enlightenment.
JOHN: Here’s another statement. ‘When a person enquires into the nature of
the mind, the mind will end, leaving the Self as the residue.”
Ram: This is what is called enlightenment by
default and is compromised by the language of experience, the belief that the
spiritual path takes place in time. It
seems to but it doesn’t really because the problem is ignorance and it doesn’t
take any time for light to destroy darkness…it’s immediate.
It’s
true but it’s not the truth because the Self is there all along even when the
mind is there. That’s how the mind was
known to be a problem…because the Self was there. So the Self never just appears at the end of
a long sadhana. The Self was
there all along observing the sadhana, motivating the sadhana,
doing the sadhana and was available for understanding at any point during the sadhana. Sometimes the person hasn’t even done sadhana…
like Ramana… and they wake up to the Self.
JOHN: Is this because of their innate purity?
Ram: Nobody knows.
JOHN: But it would tend to be somebody who is
not much in the world, wouldn’t it?
Ram: Sure, or somebody who has just suffered a
lot, Saul on the road to Damascas.
That’s what happened to me. I was
an awful person, a real devil. Life was
a living hell. Then one fine morning on
the way to the Post Office I was just lifted out of it and instantly became
aware of this divine factor. It took me
years to get it clear what it was… and that I was it… but I set out to do the
work.
JOHN: Can we go back to the original statement
that the mind obscures the Self and that it needs to be destroyed for the Self
to shine and the subsequent statement that ‘the mind will end leaving
the Self as residue?” Maybe there are two kinds of minds.
Ram: Good!
Yes, we need to ask what type of mind he is talking about. Because if that’s true, Ramana wasn’t
enlightened… because his mind kept working.
He says so. The mind that needs
to be destroyed is the conditioned mind, the extroverted rajasic/tamasic
mind. The mind created by sadhana,
the sattvic mind, remains. It is
the mind that makes the inquiry.
Vedanta’s view is that the mind
‘ends’ when you understand that the mind is not you. In reality the mind keeps functioning but you
have divorced it. It may not have ended
from its point of view… but it has ended from yours. You don’t take it seriously any more.
JOHN: So it seems that the absence of thought
isn’t enlightenment.
Ram: If the absence of thought is enlightenment
then we’re all enlightened …because who hasn’t slept?
You can use this Yogic
language if you want…Ramana wasn’t actually in the scriptural tradition…he just
picked it up slowly as he went along.
He may have eventually understood the limitations of the language of
Yoga but we need to also keep in mind who he’s talking to…probably most of them
were more familiar with the language of Yoga than with the language of
Vedanta…it’s always like that.
It’s
the same today…perhaps worse because now you have a lot of people who are
switching from bhakti and yoga and even Buddhism to Advaita
Vedanta. Part of this is just a fad
because the satsang gurus are all using the words Advaita Vedanta, often
without much comprehension, but it is understandable particularly if the person
has been on one of those paths for years.
Why? Because all their
experiences have not solved the problem of limitation and they like Vedanta’s
idea that you are limitless and that this is something to be understood, not
gained as an experience.
Most of these
people are quite confused because they are entering new terrain, the language
of identity, but they haven’t left their old country, the language of
experience, so they have conflicting concepts about enlightenment. They have no idea how you can just know the
Self and that would set you free. They
do not understand that they are already free and that the only thing standing
in the way is the belief that they aren’t.
They also do not understand that beliefs can be destroyed…by
knowledge. They hang on to their
beliefs…like religious people…as if they were knowledge.
Ram: It is and it isn’t. It covers both the situation where there is
no mind, in which case there is nothing to discriminate and it covers the
situation where there is a mind. It is
just a statement of things from the Self’s point of view. The Self knows the difference between itself
as Self and itself as mind. The mind is
the Self appearing as an apparently changing reality. The technical Sanskrit
term is mithya. It isn’t
completely real but it isn’t completely unreal. It really isn’t an illusion, except in the
sense that an illusion has some basis in fact.
Without the fact supporting the illusion, the illusion can’t exist.
JOHN: Could you give an example?
Ram: Sure, the famous snake in the rope. You won’t see the snake unless there is a
rope there. So you won’t see the mind
unless there is a substrate for it to be sitting on. That substrate is you, the Self.
JOHN: The world is the mind because the world
arises in the mind?
Ram: Yes.
And the mind is the Self because it arises out of the Self. The mind is not independent of the Self. But…and this is freedom… you, the self, are
independent of the mind. It is the
reason you don’t have to kill the mind to be free of it. You are already free of it.
If this
is a non-dual reality as the scripture says and there is such a thing as the
mind the mind has to be the Self. So the
only question is what kind of self is it?
It’s the self apparently changing.
When you know this you aren’t afraid of the mind because you understand
going in that whatever you are getting out it’s relationship with the world is
not going to last. So you just enjoy or
suffer the mind as it is. The big
problem is thinking that the things in the mind and the world should be
unchanging. If you do think this way
then you suffer periodic disillusionment.
When somebody falls in love they need to know that it will not
last. If you can enjoy it knowing that
it will not last, fine.
Ram: Well, you pay attention to your experience
and respect it. It’s funny how people
know that nothing lasts yet they perversely expect it to…at least when things
are going well. When they aren’t…that’s
another case. Your experience shows that
nothing in the world/mind lasts. The
scripture harps tireless on this subject…anitya, anitya, anitya. If the mahatmas say it, you can bank on it.
JOHN: Ramana makes a strong statement when asked,
‘Will there not be realization when the world is there (taken to be
real)?’ He says, ‘There will not be.”
Ram: I think we spoke about this before. The statement means it will seem to be real
if you see the world as an independent reality. They put the phrase ‘taken to be real’ in
because ‘is there’ makes it seem that the world has to be physically not seen
for realization to happen. One might
believe that perceptually, experientially the world is going to disappear. It’s a common belief among spiritual types.
JOHN: That’s right. And that makes it even
worse. It makes it scary.
Ram: They think that if it hasn’t disappeared they
aren’t enlightened.
JOHN: And they also think that the enlightened
are walking around in some sort of deep grey void.
Ram: Maybe that’s what all these zombie types that
congregate at the spiritual centers are doing.
Maybe they are the only really enlightened ones.
JOHN: Ha!
Could be.
Ram: It’s probably some sort of imitation syndrome. You have the ‘fake bliss’ people, the ones
running around with ridiculous smiles frozen on their faces…with the eyes
unfocused and looking upward… and you have the fake meditators…the ones who
have all the meditation paraphernalia and learn some snazzy asanas and stride
into the temple with that ‘inward’ look and sit down dramatically on their
meditation mat and close their eyes…for about two minutes. Then you see them sneaking glances around to
see who is picking up on their wonderful ‘meditation.’ Or the fake saints… the ones that are just
tripping over themselves to ‘help,’ to ‘be there for you,’ to give you that
very meaningful support hug…so you know how doggone compassionate they
are. Perhaps these zombie types have
heard that enlightenment is the grey worldless void… as you so eloquently put
it…and they have mastered the grey void look.
There’s one that comes in the Seshadri Ashram canteen. The waiters
figure she’s nuts. She looks at
her food like it’s in
JOHN: Indeed.
Ram: Language is very important because these
people are getting their ideas from somewhere.
Two languages obtain in the spiritual world. The most popular and most imprecise is the
language of experience which has been propagated by the yogic tradition. The least popular and most precise is the
language of identity or knowledge employed by Vedanta. You can see that in Ramana’s text. It is mostly the language of Yoga. He brings in the language of Vedanta
occasionally…at the precise points where it is needed.
In the
best of all possible worlds there should be no cross-pollination. Each has its value and is specific to its
view of enlightenment. Because the yogic
view of enlightenment is ‘experiential,’ it employs a dualistic language
because experience is dualistic, the relationship between a subject and an
object. According to this view
enlightenment is a unique, permanent experience of the Self. The problem with this view is that the
Upanishads, the ultimate authority on the nature enlightenment, describe the
self, which is everything that exists, in the language of identity as a
‘non-dual’ reality and enlightenment as the knowledge ‘I am the limitless self’
based on the discovery of oneself as such.
You experience yourself as non-dual and then the knowledge that you are
one whole complete being arises simultaneously with that experience. Enlightenment is grasping and identifying
with that knowledge. The usual
progression in understanding takes one from the language of experience to the
language of identity. Now this it the
crux. It explains the fundamental
problem of all these people who have been seeking but not finding
enlightenment. There are many people in
the spiritual world who have had considerable experience of the reflection of
the self in the mind when the mind was in a sattvic condition and who would be
classified as self realized according to the stages of enlightenment mentioned
above. This is what Ramana calls ‘antar
mukha,’ turning the mind inward…watching or realizing or experiencing
the Self.
But,
rightly, these people are not satisfied and continue to entertain doubts about
their ‘state.’ Usually the doubt has to
do with making the state permanent, which is impossible since the person and
his pure mind is still in the realm of time.
In other words there is always the realistic fear that the experience
will not last. And even though they are
so close to enlightenment experientially, it still eludes them. And the reason? Because they are prisoners of
the language of experience. The language
we use indicates the way we think. And
at this stage, when the experience is more or less continually available, the
only barrier to converting the experience to a ‘permanent’ state, not that
enlightenment is a state, is the way one thinks. What needs to happen at this
point is that the individual needs to convert the language of experience to the
language of identity. The language of
identity states that the experiencer and what is being experienced are not two
separate things, that they are in fact the same. When any object is experienced the knowledge
of that object arises simultaneously in the intellect. And if the mind in which the reflection of
the self appears is pure, the knowledge of the self will arise with it in the
intellect. This knowledge is in the form
of a thought, an akandakara vritti, an unbroken idea that I am the whole and
complete actionless awareness that I am experiencing. (Wow!
That’s me! Whoopee! I’m it!!!) If the person is accustomed to
thinking of the self as an object, (the language of Yoga) he or she will be
reluctant to surrender the experiencer, and the self will continue to remain as
an experienced object. The surrender is
in terms of letting go of the idea of oneself as an experiencer and embracing
one’s limitless identity. This is the
destruction of the mind that the Yogis talk about.
Were
the person to be trained in the language of identity, this problem would not
arise. In fact the person would
immediately recognize the content of the experience as ‘I’ and that would
finish the work. What all this clinging
to experience is about is hanging on to the container and therefore sacrificing
the content. It’s like a person pouring
the coke out of the bottle and drinking the bottle. We can throw away the container. It is non-essential. We need the contents…the Self.
The
whole of Vedanta can be reduced to one simple equation found in the Upanishads
‘You are that’ where ‘that’ is the self and ‘you’ is the self in the form of
the experiencer and the verb ‘are’ is indicates the identity between the two.
JOHN: Probably that is where JOHN is struggling
right now, existentially speaking.
Because I think that’s probably true of me…I see everything as an
experience…
Ram: That’s what I’ve observed. You describe everything to do with you in
terms of what’s happening. I believe
that ‘Nothing ever happened’ teaching of Papaji’s” is meant to neutralize the
belief that what happens has something to do with you.
I’ve
been saying that you are the master of the universe…meaning that without you,
the I, experience is not possible. I’m
saying to hell with the experience…you make it anything you want…because you’re
the boss. Experiencing isn’t bossing
me. I’m bossing it. Without me it doesn’t amount to a hill of
beans. That’s freedom. I don’t have to erase it. I just take it how I please. This is why bad days are good days for the
enlightened. They can see themselves in
everything. Looking to experience for
validation is the tail wagging the dog.
We’re trying to set things straight…get the dog wagging the tail. That’s how it is…dogs wag their tails, not
the other way around like Yoga says. It
says if you get this experience, nirvikalpa samadhi, then you are
enlightened. Vedanta says that you are
enlightened…no matter what experience you are having.
JOHN: I’d like to
go over that statement by Ramana again which says that when the mind comes out
of the Self the world appears…
Ram: This teaching comes from Samkhya and was
incorporated into Vedanta and Yoga.
It’s called karana-karya vada, the cause and effect teaching. “When the mind comes out of the Self”
means that the mind is just an effect of the Self, the self transforming itself
into a form…a mind. For example this
coke bottle is an effect of glass. Glass
is the cause and the effect is the bottle.
You break the bottle and the bottle is no more…but glass still
exists. So the mind is just the self…in
a form. It depends on the Self but the
Self is independent of it. As I’ve said
repeatedly the removal or destruction of the mind, unlike the bottle, is all in
terms of understanding. There is no
actual destruction. You see how it
is…and that finishes your attachment to the belief that the mind is an
independent entity.
JOHN: This understanding is what you’re calling
freedom.
Ram: Yes.
There are two kinds of superimpostion.
When either of them is destroyed the result is freedom. Both take place in the mind and have nothing to do with physical
reality. One is where you see the snake
and when you understand that it is a rope it doesn’t come back. This is unconditioned superimposition. There is nothing left to condition the
perception of the rope after knowledge has taken place. The other is the mirage…which you negate through
knowledge too…but the perception of water remains. There is still something conditioning surface
of the earth after knowledge…but you know it isn’t real.
It’s
only ignorance that make vasanas and the mind a problem. If you can see that they are superimposed on
the Self out of ignorance…they become non-binding. Let the sex vasana come, the money vasana,
whatever is meant to be unspiritual…it’s just me…like the web of a spider…it
comes out of me and is drawn back into me…and is made of my own consciousness. The vasanas are like a mirage and
enjoy only an apparent reality.
JOHN: Here’s another of Ramana’s statements on
Self inquiry that I think is very interesting. “How could this search be done in
books? All the texts say that in order
to gain liberation you must make the mind quiet. Once this has been understood there is no
need for endless reading. In order to
quieten the mind one has only to enquire within oneself what oneself is. “
Ram: This statement may lead a person to conclude
that no scriptural information would be useful in Self inquiry. But you can’t make in inquiry without
knowledge. In fact he starts out this
very text with teaching lifted bodily out of the scripture that is meant to
negate the whole world. You can’t perform
inquiry without the knowledge that I am not the body, mind, etc. You can’t just sit there without any
information like a Dodo and say, “Uh…Who
am I? Duh…Hey God…who am I?” This is not going to work. And even if the heavens are rent asunder
with the booming voice of God…”YOU ARE PURE CONSCIOUSNESS!!!”
JOHN: Ha Ha Ha!
Ram: Even if He
tells you to your face, you will have no way to evaluate this information. “Uh? I
am? What does that mean?” I need knowledge. I need to know how who I am relates to my
body and mind and the world around. It
has to be contextualized or it is useless.
Scripture does an excellent job of contextualizing the ‘I’.
JOHN: Here’s another one. Somebody asks him ‘What is wisdom insight,
jnana dristi? And Ramana says, “Remaining
quiet is wisdom insight.”
Ram: I think I’ll argue with that statement. It’s the language of experience trying to
co-opt the language of identity. Let’s
use one of Ramana’s most frequent teachings to unmask this statement. Let’s ask “Who is remaining quiet?” There are only two possibilities, the Self
and the ego. It won’t be the Self
because the Self is silence. And it is
not a doer so it can’t ‘remain.’
‘Remain’ implies ‘not remaining’ or noise. So an ego remaining quiet is wisdom insight? I don’t think so. I go to my room get in bed and close my eyes
and go to sleep and I’m quiet as a mouse… and that makes me wise?
JOHN: Papaji’s main teaching was ‘be
quiet.’ And by this he meant not being
silent but to be still. And in this stillness,
inquiry just happens by itself.”
Ram: Yes.
It is natural for the mind to become curious and ask questions when it
is still. But I think this is quite a
relaxed view of Ramana’s teaching. He
seemed to advocate a more aggressive discrimination.
It
could also mean that jnanam, knowledge is dristi, seeing. The seers, rishis who gave us the
Vedas saw (dristi) the truth (jnanam) and enshrined it in the
form of the Vedas. It could also mean,
‘to see is to know.” You really need to
have all of these teaching contextalized. They all fit into the wonderful
bouquet of ideas that is called Vedanta.
JOHN: By ‘quiet’ doesn’t he mean not be caught
up in all the thoughts? To have a
sattvic mind?
Ram: Dispassionate.
JOHN: And to be focused inside.
Ram: Yes.
JOHN: He doesn’t mean ‘not talk.’
Ram: No.
JOHN: What do you have to say about Ramana’s
statement “Desirelessness is wisdom?”
Ram: The Osho crowd
is not going to like this one, are they?
Why is desirelessness wisdom?
Because the Self is whole and complete.
It doesn’t want anything.
JOHN: Here’s a similar one. “Desirelessness is refraining from
turning the mind toward any object.”
Ram: This is a good one too. Here’s he’s defining it as a quality of the
ego. He’s saying that an ego that
doesn’t allow the mind to go to objects is wise. No, that’s not strictly correct. The mind naturally goes to objects. He probably means that one doesn’t react to
the mind’s contact with objects…just witnesses it and lets it be. That is, when you see a pretty girl you know
you’d like to get in bed with her but you don’t go over and chat her up. You just let the thought die. Why is this wise? Because you are love, you are pleasure, you
have it all already. A few sense
ticklings are not going to make you happier.
JOHN: Along this same vein he says, ‘Wisdom
means the appearance of no object.”
Ram: All due respect, but this is a misleading
statement. I know what he means but the
words do not convey the meaning. This
makes wisdom sound like your grey void theory of enlightenment. “I’m enlightenened. I don’t see anything. It’s all blank.” Actually
the statement means that when the object is perceived the mind is not
attracted or repelled by it. Or if the
‘object’ is the mind (and the mind is definitely an object to the Self)… that
is when the attractions or repulsions of the mind are the object… there is no
attraction or aversion to them. This is
either a very dispassionate mind or it is a statement about the Self.
JOHN: This is a little off topic but what do you
think about all the interest in enlightenment and enlightened beings these
days?
Ram: It’s good.
People are starting to think a bit.
But, for the life of me I can’t figure out why the gurus are making such
a fuss about enlightenment.
JOHN: The fuss?
You’re a guru.
Ram: No, I’m not.
I’m the Self. Period. If you need to know something and I can help
you know it, then teaching can happen.
But that does not give me an identity as a teacher. Even if it does in your mind, I don’t accept
that projection. When you know you are
the Self you know that enlightenment is no big deal. If there is such a thing as ‘an enlightened
being’ then he or she deserves no respect whatsever.
JOHN: What?
Ram: You are already the Self, even when you think
you aren’t. It is not that you are
gaining something that you didn’t have.
So when you say you found it, you are actually saying that you were a
fool for a long time. In
JOHN: So it’s saying that you are always the
Self. You cannot not be the Self. So the
question of bondage and freedom does not arise.
Ram: Right.
It’s a myth. ‘Realizing’ one’s
true nature does not mean experiencing one’s true nature because you are always
experiencing your true nature. It
means knowing that I am the Self, limitless awareness.
JOHN: I came across another book published by
Shambala Press called The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi which is much
more comprehensive than the small pamphlets we have been discussing. How do you feel about discussing some
additional points concerning Ramana’s teachings?
Ram: Fine.
In fact what are called Ramana’s teachings are just the tip of the Vedic
iceberg. Because of who he was he did
not run all over
JOHN: Yes, it was a different time, no website,
Ramana t-shirts. Anyway, I’ve mentioned
several times that we should talk about self inquiry as a practice and I came
across an interesting question and answer that addresses this issue. Someone asks him “What is the method of
practice?” and he replies “As the
Self of a person who tries to attain Self-realization is not different from him
and as there is nothing other than or superior to him to be attained by him,
Self-realization being only the realization of one’s own nature, the seeker of
liberation realizes, without doubts or misconceptions, his real nature by
distinguishing the eternal from the transient and never swerves from this
natural state. This is known as the practice
of knowledge. This is the inquiry
leading to Self-realization.”
He
seems to be saying that self inquiry is more than just asking “Who am I?”
Ram: That’s right.
From speaking with people who come here looking for Self-realization
I’ve learned that many think all one has to do is say “Who am I?” and somehow
the answer will be revealed. But this
isn’t how it is. The fact is that the
nature of the ‘I’ is well known. If you
have a doubt just read the Upanishads or Shankara or any Vedantic text. It is very clear. There are literally hundreds of words that
indicate the Self. There is a peculiar
belief that the Self is some mysterious unknown presence only apprehended
through mystic means about which one can say nothing. Unspeakable.
Indefinable. Beyond words, etc.
But actually, the Self is the only thing one can speak about with
precision and certainty…because it is the only reality. All the rest of it, what people think of as
real cannot really be described...because it is neither completely real nor is
it completely unreal. In this statement Ramana uses perhaps the most common
word to indicate the nature of the Self.
He says It is eternal. This distinguishes it from the body/mind/ego
complex and the world around…which is constantly changing. We think of the body
as real and have a word for it but when you look into the body you can’t come
up with anything substantial. It keeps
resolving into subtler and subtler elements until it disappears altogether. But no matter how much you analyze it, you
cannot reduce the Self to anything else.
It cannot be dissolved. .
JOHN: So inquiry is not a matter of getting
knowledge then, it is a matter of applying it?
Ram: Yes,
Ramana, says that inquiry is separating the real from the unreal, the
eternal from the transient. So it is a
practice. Before you can practice you
need to know what is real and what isn’t.
Twelve centuries before Ramana, Shankar uses the exact same words,
“practice of knowledge’ in Atma Bodh to describe this process. And it was already part of the tradition when
Shankar came along. The practice is
called ‘viveka’ and the Vedantic literature is full of it.
JOHN: It seems quite intellectual. How does it
work?
Ram: It isn’t ‘intellectual’ in the pejorative
sense that one hears the world used today.
But it definitely relies on an astute use of the intellect. There is this notion that Ramana taught in
silence and that only by sitting in silence, not by using the mind in any way,
can one realize the Self… but this is patently untrue. Here Ramana is not recommending
silence. Mind you, meditation, sitting
in silence is a very useful practice but Ramana himself makes it very clear
that in Self inquiry the intellect is involved, is in fact the instrument of
realization. In his description of his
own awakening one can see that he was obviously conscious and thinking. And
there is no reason why one can’t think when the mind is silent. In fact in that state conscious thinking is
beautiful, a real joy. There is even a
yogic term for it, savikalpa samdhi. It
means samadhi with thought. Vikalpas are
thoughts.
JOHN: This is quite surprising. The common notion is that the intellect needs
to be shut down for the Self to be realized.
Ram: That is the view of Yoga. Controlling the mind is useful to prepare the
mind for Self realization but it is not tantamount to Self realization. We need to remember that the mind is
transient and therefore unreal. So how
are you going to control something that is non-eternal? The one who is trying to change, the ego, is
non-eternal, meaning never the same from moment to moment, and what is meant to
change is non-eternal. Therefore, how
can there be any permanent change? Even
if there is change as a result of your efforts you will have to keep up the
effort to keep the changes operational.
So you find yourself having to do all these things to be what you want
to be. This is always the problem when
you try to change the mind, or stop the mind.
Inquiry is not a question of controlling of the mind.
JOHN: So how does this discrimination work?
Ram: Well, first we need to know that any Tom,
Dick or Harry cannot just practice inquiry. In the first line of the very next
paragraph Ramana says, This is suitable only for the ripe souls.” You need to be prepared. Prepared means mature, indifferent to the
blandishments the world has to offer: pleasure, security, power, fame,
etc. And secondly, one needs a burning
desire to be free of his or her own mind.
This is different from saying that one needs a dead or different
mind. The mind is going to be with you
in one form or another whether you like it or not, so the only sensible
question is how to live happily with it.
When you realize what the Self is and that you are it you see that you
have always been free of the mind.
And
this does not mean that any experienced person is qualified to practice Self
inquiry and attain enlightenment. Many,
perhaps most, experienced people haven’t learned anything important from their
experience.
JOHN: Anything important? That’s a rather sweeping generalization.
Ram: Perhaps that is a clumsy way of saying what I
wanted to say. By that I mean they
haven’t learned that experience is not going to solve the happiness issue and
that liberation is possible. So they
just keep chasing the same things. I
read the other day that Ted Turner, who is a billionaire, and his wife, Jane
Fonda, a beautiful rich actress, divorced.
In the article the interviewer asked what was the cause of the breakup
and Jane said that Ted just couldn’t stop doing business, meaning he didn’t
spend enough time with her. Now here is
a very successful accomplished person who literally has everything, except
love, and he is unsuccessful in getting love because he can’t stop his
addiction to making deals. Not only is
he unsatisfied with the amount of money he has, his obsession keeps him from
enjoying the love of a woman, much less from understanding that his view of
himself is the problem. So no matter how
accomplished you are in your field of experience, without coming to the right
conclusion about oneself you will not qualify for enlightenment.
JOHN: And discrimination does.
Ram: Absolutely.
And to get to the point, discrimination or inquiry is the moment to
moment practice of the understanding that the experiencer and what one is
experiencing is not real and that witness, the awareness because of which the
experiencer is capable of experience is real.
And how it works is that whenever an impulse to do something or have
something or feel something or change something comes up in the mind, as it
does all the time, one does not just mindlessly set out to manifest the desired
result, but one thinks “What lasting benefit will I get by doing, getting,
experiencing this?” Will I be more,
better, different? Will I gain lasting
happiness or will I still be what I am?
Assuming that the one doing the practice is the ego… which it would
necessarily be… will that person be any wiser with reference to his or her own
Self by doing/thinking/feeling/experiencing something? And, the answer is always no. True you may be wiser with reference to a
specific idea, but will you actually become whole and complete and free of your
mind by doing what you are contemplating doing?
For example, you may invest in the stock market and lose a bundle
because the corporate fat cats are cooking the books. So you learn to not take people’s word for
things concerning money, but are you fundamentally different because you don’t
have the money you once had? Or are you fundamentally different because you are
more wary? No. You are still what you are.
JOHN: So self transformation is not Self
realization.
Ram: It may be useful to clean up your ego a bit
before you set out to set it free but the very fact that you are trying to change
means that you are not free. A friend
and I rented a house we found on the internet recently from a woman who was
going on vacation and when we moved I noticed a collage on the wall celebrating
her recent spiritual awakening. And
pasted on the collage were different sized words from different periodicals
that said, “One day I got tired of being the same so I made the BIG JUMP.”
What
you have here is a spiritual awakening, but not Self realization. This is a person who has been stuck with some
bad values and consequently caught up in some unhealthy habits who finally gets
the courage to confront herself and make changes in the way she lives. And this is very good, an important first
step. But this is not Self
realization. Awakening is not Self realization
although during an awakening you may come to experience and understand that
there is a Self.
JOHN: This is an important distinction, I think.
Ram: Yes it is.
The reason this is not Self realization is because the one who landed is
the same one who made the jump. Once the
proper values and good habits are in place a new problem will surface…is this
all? Because you haven’t addressed the
fundamental problem…who am I…you have just corrected some karmic mistakes the
ego made. I’m not saying that spiritual
awakenings aren’t good but once you are awake to how foolish you are and the
possibility of getting out of it, then you can perhaps start to seek
wisdom…which at some point will entail asking who made the jump.
Now, if
Ramana is saying that the Self never changes and you are the Self and the Self
is endless bliss, then you will never want to jump out of yourself. So what we have in the case of this woman is
an ego changing itself. And no matter
how much the ego changes for the better it is never going to change into the
Self. When you realize that you are the
Self it doesn’t matter to you what the ego is.
You accept it as it is. You
understand that it wouldn’t be the way it is if it could help it and you let it
be. Or you work on it dispassionately if
that is your karma. When you no longer
see yourself as it, it will gradually become more like the Self…but it will
never become the Self. So thinking that
you are going to become different is not the way to go.
JOHN: So you’re saying that working out your
karma or trying to be different will not produce wisdom?
Ram: Yes, definitely. There is a belief, a rationalization
actually, that one needs to go through all sorts of experiences to get
enlightened. But if this were true then
anyone who had had a lot of experiences or experiences of a certain type would
be enlightened. In the spiritual world
you find the idea that you need ‘experience of the Self’ to be enlightened. But if you interview anybody who has come
here seeking enlightenment you will find out that every one of them has had at
least one ‘experience of the Self,’ sometimes many...yet...and here’s the
point...they are still seeking. During
my ‘mystic’ phase which went on for three years, every other day something
extraordinary, something transcendent, happened. But what good did it do? At the end of the
day I was still the same old fool, looking for the next incredible experience.
JOHN: Come on.
It must have had some value.
Ram:
You’re right. It made me realize that I
was chasing the wrong thing…experience.
It made me begin to think in terms of understanding. And shortly after I
came to that conclusion I met a jnani.
What I
needed was to see that no matter what kind of experience I had I was still the
same. This is discrimination. It is very difficult to practice because the
ego can’t stand its incompleteness and is passionately committed to getting
what it wants or avoiding what it doesn’t want to feel good. You find people with grey hair, people who
should know better, still chasing things in this world. I like to hang out in Peter’s cafe and talk
with people and I can tell you stories all day of people who came here hot for
enlightenment but even hotter for a relationship, people willing to put sadhana
on the back burner or take it off the stove altogether when the ‘right’ person
comes along. There was a very handsome
German woman who came here two years ago, very ‘spiritual,’ looked like a
proper saint. She went to the ashram and
sat in Virupaksha cave, etc. for a month or so.
I used to see her meditating in Skandashram. But after about a month she came into Peter’s
with an eye peeled for something to happen…like people do in coffee shops. And sure enough one day she met this English
guy, a real party animal, everyone knew his trip,acting like a very cool yogi
and she fell for him like a ton of bricks.
I think her fantasy was that they would walk hand in hand into the
sunset of enlightenment. And what
happened to her sadhana? And after a few
weeks they went off to
JOHN: So you’re saying that inquiry is always
choosing not to go with your vasanas?
Ram: No, not really. It’s knowing that if you go with them you
will not get lasting satisfaction. In a
way you can’t avoid doing certain things, there is too much internal pressure.
To fight them would cause to much stress and personality distortion… what is
called repression. But you can go
through the experiences that life has to offer minus the belief that life is
capable of making you happy. You can aim
for a clear balanced mind. This is the
purpose of viveka and the fruit of inquiry.
It neutralizes your likes and dislikes.
This is the difference between a samsari, a worldly person, and a mumukshu,
a person practicing enquiry.
JOHN: I have another teaching that I would like
to discuss.
Ram: Sure, but let me make one more comment on
this one before we move on because Ramana defines enlightenment in the first
part of this quote and it is important to know what enlightenment is if you are
seeking it. He says, “As the Self of a person who tries to
attain Self-realization is not different from him and as there is nothing other
than or superior to him to be attained by him, Self-realization being only the
realization of one’s own nature…etc.
I think
this statement should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand
what enlightenment is. Ramana makes if
very clear that it is not about being different from what you are or of getting
something that is better than what you already have…like a high state of
consciousness. He uses a very
interesting word here…only…to make the point that incredible spiritual
experiences or altered states of consciousness or transforming oneself is not
enlightenment. He says it is ‘only’
realizing what you are.
JOHN: But isn’t this realization something
unique?
Ram: No.
What is being realized might be considered unique if you had been
ignorant for a long time but this realization is no different from realizing or
understanding or knowing anything. When
it happens there is always a sense of irony because it is something that has
always been well known. What could be any more familiar to you than you? It may seem like a big deal because something
that is so obvious can be easily be taken for granted and forgotten. So Self realization is always a re-discovery,
not a discovery.
JOHN: So this is the whole cosmic joke idea.
Ram: Yes. To solve the riddle you need a trick, a
technique, which Ramana calls inquiry or viveka. You need to be reminded that you are eternal,
that you have always been, that nothing can be added to or subtracted from you,
that experience is impermanent, and that you need to start paying attention to
your own mind and its ideas to the contrary and get to work dismissing
them. As long as you hold erroneous
views about yourself you will not hold the right view about yourself.
JOHN: Which is that you are whole and complete.
Ram: Yes, that experience depends on you, but that
you do not depend on experience.
JOHN: That nothing can affect you.
Ram: That you don’t
need anything at all to make yourself happy.
So what is the next statement?
JOHN: Ramana lists sadhanas that people should
practice to get the mind prepared for moksha. And the last on in the list in jnana. He says, “Jnana is the annihilation of
the mind in which it is made to assume the form of the Self through the
constant practice of inquiry. The
extinction of the mind is the state in which there is a cessation of all
efforts. Those who are established in the this state never swerve from their
state. The terms mouna, silence, and
akarma, inaction, refer to this state alone.”
Ram: This is a
difficult statement to understand because of the way Ramana is using the words. It needs explanation. Let’s go through it carefully and think
through every idea.
In the
first place this is an unusual definition of jnana. Jnana can have several meanings but generally
it means either simple knowledge or Self knowledge. Here the word is defined by what it
does. Jnana destroys the mind. Before we get into how and why it destroys
the mind I think we need to be clear what the word ‘mind’ is referring to. I don’t think he means that the mind is
actually destroyed, if by destruction we mean that it is incapable of ever
thinking again. If that were true then
Ramana would not be able to discuss this subtle point with us because his mind
would have been destroyed. I think what is meant by mind here is actually
ignorance, the power that keeps one thinking incorrectly about one’s self and
the the world, the ideas, beliefs, and opinions that hide the Self. Knowledge destroys ignorance.
This
‘practice of knowledge’ is inquiry… as Ramana has already stated. What is the purpose of inquiry? The mind is
made to assume to form of the Self. How
does this work? Well, the mind has the belief that it is limited, separate,
incomplete, inadequate, etc. This is its
‘form.’ And what needs to happen? It
needs to be reconditioned by the application of knowledge. What knowledge? That the ‘I’ is unlimited, non-dual,
complete, actionless awareness. Why do
you want the mind ‘to assume the form of the Self?’ Because an unenlightened mind is
samsara. The enlightened mind is
nirvana. You are not going to get the
Self enlightened because it is already enlightened. You can enlighten the mind because it isn’t.
JOHN: And
the way you do this is to change the way you think about yourself? Your thinking about yourself must coincide
with the truth about yourself?
Ram: Yes.
Absolutely. If you set out to
stop or destroy the mind you haven’t understood. Why?
Because the one who is trying to stop or destroy the mind is the
mind. You will always have to leave a
part of the mind untouched. And this
untouched part is the ego, ignorance.
The
next statement is very important. It
shows the primary effect of the removal of one’s ignorance about oneself. Ramana says, The extinction of the mind is
the state in which there is a cessation of all efforts.
The wording
can leave us with a doubt so we need to rephrase this statement. It does not mean that you die or enter a
comma…which is what happens when all activity stops. It means that inquiry results in the
knowledge that the ‘I’ is not a doer. ‘Not a doer’ means that the ‘I’ initiates
no actions…for the purpose of completing itself. It can inspire action in the ego/mind but it
has nothing to gain through action. So
when you realize that you are the ‘I’ you no longer run from or chase things in
this world. It is the doer, the ego,
that is involved in all this getting and keeping, avoiding and rejecting.
The
third sentence needs explaining because the language is imprecise. It is, “Those who are established in the
this state never swerve from their state.”
If enlightenment is simply the realization of your nature it is jnanam,
knowledge. So there is no question of
‘swerving.’ Swerving is a verb, an
action word, so it implies maintaining one’s understanding. This statement is true when one is practicing
inquiry because identification with the vasanas can cause you to forget who you
are. But it does not apply to a jnani
because if knowledge is knowledge it will not be forgotten. For example, have you ever forgotten what a
tree is? You learned what it was fifty
years ago and never once were you subsequently in doubt when you heard the word
tree. The reason you haven’t is because
knowledge is permanent. When Ramana
says, ‘never swerve’ it does not mean that there is any will power
involved. It means that the
understanding about who one is is permanent.
Let’s
take up the last sentence. “The terms
mouna, silence, and akarma, inaction, refer to this state alone.” I think we discussed the fact that the Self
is not a ‘state’ so let’s forget the word state, or lets take the Self to be a
‘state’ that doesn’t change. What is
being offered here is the idea that the cultivation of the qualities of silence
and non-action by an ego is not Self realization although it may be a valuable
sadhana, but that the Self is silent, meaning free of duality and action. So when you realize who you are you realize
that you are free of thought and incapable of acing with the belief that the
action or the result will complete or free you.
You are free of both because both require duality. And since you are non-dual, doing and
thinking do not belong to you.
JOHN: Great.
Here’s a statement that I found confusing. Perhaps you can help me make sense of it.
Ram: I’ll try.
JOHN: “Those who follow the path of inquiry realize
that the mind which remains at the end of the the inquiry is Brahman. Those who practice meditation realize that
the mind which remains at the end of the meditation is the object of their
meditation. As the result is the same in
either case, it is the duty of aspirants to practice continuiously either of
these methods till the goal is reached?”
Ram: Brahman is a
name for the Self. You will recall that
in describing inquiry or viveka Ramana said the self was eternal. Well, if something is eternal it is also
limitless. The world ‘mind’ here does
not refer to the thinking mind, since it is definitely limited. The world mind refers to the Self. But inquiry is a way of using the
discriminating mind to get knowledge of the Self. The object of meditation is always the
Self. One fixes one’s attention on the
Self, assuming that the mind is properly prepared, and one ‘studies’ or
inquires into it’s nature. In other
words it thinks about what it is meditating about.
One
could read this statement and get the idea that inquiry was one path and
meditation another. Meditation without
inquiry will not produce jnana, the knowledge that one is whole and complete
actionless awareness. It can produce
prolonged experience of bliss. But the
experience depends on there being a meditator and on that meditator continuing
to meditate. So meditation is a subtle
kind of action involving a doer.
However, when a person has firmly locked the mind on the Self, which is
one of Ramana’s definitions of inquiry, the meditator can’t help but
investigate the object of meditation, the Self.
True most meditators do not know the Self and many don’t even know of
the Self because they are practicing
meditation for lifestyle reasons, to relieve stress, for example. But someone who is meditating to realize the
Self would necessarily have an inquiring mind.
But if a meditator believes that Self realization is some sort of
permanent experience of bliss he or she may be trying to suppress the intellect
which is thought to be some sort of enemy on the path of meditation… and
therefore not gain knowledge. It is
possible to sit motionless, happy as a clam, for days without so much as a
handful of thoughts passing through the mind.
But at the end of the meditation what is left? Not jnanam, the knowledge that the meditator,
the ‘I’ is the Self.
JOHN: I’ve noticed what seems to be a
contradiction when we are talking about moksha.
On the one hand Ramana says that Self realization is only the
realization of one’s own nature and on another he seems to be saying that it is
a kind of state that one never ‘swerves’ from… which implies a doer and an
experience to be maintained. Would you
care to comment on this?
Ram: You bet.
I’ve been harping on this distinction for about thirty years because how
you see enlightenment has everything to do with whether or not you attain
it. The first statement is a statement
of enlightenment as a rediscovery of one’s primary identity. The second is a statement of enlightenment as
an experience to be maintained. And we
find Ramana using both. Is there a
contradiction?
There
is and there isn’t. It depends on what
point of view you take. If you take the
Self’s point of view there is no swerving.
So when the knowledge that you are whole and complete ordinary
actionless awareness is knowledge, that is, when it is not subject to change,
your inquiry, your sadhana, is finished.
But until this has happened you are in the Self realization phase,
subject to forgetting this fundamental fact about yourself, and therefore,
since you can ‘swerve’ you need to continually remind yourself that you are the
Self.