Guru Ramana III

The Guru

Bhagavan then illustrated this saying by the following story: A king once visited his minister at the latter’s house. There he was told that the minister was busy with his incantations. The king accordingly waited for him, and when he was free to meet him, asked him what incantation it was. The minister told him that it was the Gayatri. The king then asked the minister to initiate him into the use of it, but the latter declared that he was unable to. Thereupon the king learnt it from someone else and the next time he met the minister he repeated it to him and asked him whether it was right. The minister replied that the incantation was right but that it was not right for him to say it. The king asked why; the minister called an attendant who was standing nearby and told him to arrest the king. The order was not obeyed. The minister repeated it and still it was not obeyed. The king then flew into a temper and ordered the attendant to arrest the minister, which he immediately did. The minister laughed and said that that was the explanation the king had asked for. ‘How?’ the king asked. ‘Because the order was the same, and the executive was the same but the authority was different. When I pronounced the order there was no effect; but when you did it, the effect was immediate. It is the same with incantation.’ 

Bhagavan might offer consolation or might retort, ‘How do you know there is no progress?’ And he would explain that it is the Guru, not the disciple, who sees the progress made; it is for the disciple to carry on perserveringly with his work even though the structure being raised may be out of sight of the mind.

There is a verse in the Bhagavata (here Bhagavan quoted the verse in Tamil) which says: Just as a man who is drunk is not conscious whether his upper cloth is on his body or has slipped away from it, the Jnani is hardly conscious of his body, and it makes no difference to him whether the body remains or has dropped off.1

Contact with them (jnani) is good. They will work through silence. By speaking, their power is reduced. Speech is always less powerful than silence. So silent contact is the best.

Self Enquiry

Because every kind of path except Self-enquiry presupposes the retention of the mind as the instrument for following it, and cannot be followed without the mind. The ego may take different and more subtle forms at different stages  of one’s practice but it is never destroyed. The attempt to destroy the ego or the mind by methods other than Self-enquiry is like a thief turning policeman to catch the thief that is himself. Selfenquiry alone can reveal the truth that neither the ego nor the mind really exists and enable one to realise the pure, undifferentiated Being of the Self or the Absolute.

To ask the mind to kill the mind is like making the thief the policeman. He will go with you and pretend to catch the thief, but nothing will be gained. So, you must turn inward and see where the mind rises from and then it will cease to exist. (In reference to this answer, Sri Thambi Thorai of Jaffna, who has been living as a sadhu in Pelakothu for over a year, asked me whether asking the mind to turn inward and seek its source is not also employing the mind. I put this doubt before Bhagavan.) B.: Of course, we are employing the mind. It is well known and admitted that only with the help of the mind, can the mind be killed. But instead of setting about saying there is a mind and I want to kill it, you begin to seek its source, and then you find it does not exist at all. The mind turned outwards results in thoughts and objects. Turned inwards it becomes itself the Self.

Just as a man would dive in order to get something that had fallen into the water, so one should dive into oneself with a keen, one-pointed mind, controlling speech and breath, and find the place whence the ‘I’ originates. The only enquiry leading to Self-realisation is seeking the source of the word ‘I’. Meditation on ‘I am not this; I am that’ may be an aid to enquiry but it cannot be the enquiry. If one enquires ‘Who am I?’ within the mind, the individual ‘I’ falls down abashed as soon as one reaches the Heart and immediately Reality manifests itself spontaneously as ‘I-I’. Although it reveals itself as ‘I’, it is not the ego but the perfect Being, the Absolute Self.2

B.: The notions of bondage and liberation are merely modifications of the mind. They have no reality of their own, and therefore cannot function of their own accord.

You came from the same source in which you were during sleep. Only during sleep you could not know where you entered. That is why you must make the enquiry while awake.

Heart is another name for Self.

If distracting thoughts are a danger on one hand, so also is sleep a danger on the other hand. In fact, people who are beginning a spiritual path may find themselves assailed by an overpowering wave of sleepiness whenever they begin to meditate. And then, if they stop meditating, this passes and they are not sleepy at all. This is simply one form of the ego’s resistance and it has to be broken down.

Other Methods

Breath and vital forces are also described as the gross manifestations of the mind. Till the hour of death the mind sustains and supports these forces in the physical body; and when life becomes extinct, the mind envelops them and carries them away.

What is wrong with it? When a schoolboy says: ‘It is I that did the sum correctly’, or when he asks you: ‘Shall I run and get the book for you’, would he point to the head that did the sum correctly or to the legs that will swiftly get you that book? No, in both cases, his finger is pointed quite naturally towards the right side of the chest, thus giving innocent expression to the profound truth that the source of ‘I’-ness in him is there. It is an unerring intuition that makes him refer to himself, to the Heart which is the Self, in that way. The act is quite involuntary and universal, that is to say, it is the same in the case of every individual. What stronger proof than this do you require about the position of the Heart-centre in the physical body?

Some Upanishads also speak of a hundred and one nadis which spread from the heart, one of them being the vital nadi. If the ego descends from above and is reflected in the brain, as the yogis say, there must be a reflecting surface. This must also be capable of limiting the Infinite Consciousness to the limits of the body. In short, the Universal Being becomes limited as an ego. Such a reflecting medium is furnished by the aggregate of vasanas of the individual. It acts like the water in a pot which reflects an object. If the pot is drained of its water there will be no reflection. The object will remain without being reflected.

The object here is the Universal Being-Consciousness which is all-pervading and therefore immanent in all. It need not be cognised by reflection alone. It is self-resplendent. Therefore, the seeker’s aim must be to drain away the vasanas from the heart and let no reflecting medium obstruct the light of the Eternal Consciousness. This is achieved by the search for the origin of the ego and by diving into the heart. This is the direct path to Self-realisation. One who adopts it need not worry about nadis, brain, sushumna, kundalini, breath-control and the six yogic centres.

On the whole, the Maharshi did not approve of vows of silence. If the mind is controlled, useless speech will be avoided; but abjuring speech will not quieten the mind. The effect cannot produce the cause.

The spark of spiritual knowledge (Jnana) will consume all creation like a mountain-heap of cotton. Since all the countless worlds are built upon the weak or non-existent foundations of the ego, they all disintegrate when the atom-bomb of knowledge falls on them. All talk of surrender is like stealing sugar from a sugar image of Ganesha and then offering it to the same Ganesha.

You say that you offer up your body and soul and all your possessions to God, but were they yours to offer? At best you can say: ‘I wrongly imagined till now that all these, which are Yours, were mine. Now I realise that they are Yours and I shall no longer act as though they were mine.’ And this knowledge that there is nothing but God or the Self, that ‘I’ and ‘mine’ do not exist and that only the Self exists, is Jnana.

The Goal

Who asks this question – a Realised Man or an unrealised man? Why worry about what the Realised Man does or why he does anything? Better think about yourself. He was then silent. After a while, however, he explained further, ‘You are under the impression that you are the body, so you think the Realised Man also has a body. Does he say that he has one? He may seem to you to have one, and to do things with it, as others do. The charred ashes of a rope look like a rope but they are of no use to tie anything with. So long as one identifies oneself with the body, all this is hard to understand. That is why it is sometimes said in answer to such questions that the body of the Realised Man continues to exist until his destiny has worked itself out, and then it falls away. An example of this that is sometimes given is that an arrow which has been loosed from the bow (destiny) must continue its course and hit the mark, even though the animal that stood there has moved away and another has taken its place (i.e., Realisation has been achieved). But the truth is that the Realised Man has transcended all destiny and is bound neither by the body nor by its destiny.