Bhagavan Ramana Teachings

[Subramanian.R]

You need not cease thinking.  Only think of the root of thought; seek it and find it.

The Self shines by itself.

When that is found, thoughts cease of their own accord.  That is freedom from bondage.

Let go the passing thoughts and hold on to the unchanging Self.

No external remedy need be sought for release.  It is within your competence to think and thus be bound or to cease
thinking and thus be free.

You are neck deep in water and yet cry for water. It is as good as saying that (..) a fish in water feels thirsty.

To identify oneself with the body and yet seek happiness is like attempting to cross a river on the back of an alligator.

In such an endless tangle, there will be no peace.

The body is a necessary adjunct of the ego.  If the ego is killed, the eternal Self is revealed in all its glory.

After the Rain.

Arunachala Siva. 

[Subramanian.R]

Bhagavan Ramana Teachings:

why cling to our state of uncertainty and doubt, which is worse than poison, binding us as it does the mind, which forever
asserts, 'It is impossible... which it is, for the mind.

Conflict is the essence of this impure mind. This deluded mind, thinking it knows all, forces us to take to the position of
an 'onlooker', a position rooted in untruth.

'There are no others' affirms Sri Ramana. 'There is only the Self.'

'The answer to 'Who am I?' is the asking, He says.

You are the asking.

You are THAT.
You are the Self.

V. Ganesan.

Arunachala Siva.
     

[Subramanian.R]

Since you identify yourself with the physical body, you speak of this world as being physical and the other world as spiritual.

Whereas, that which IS is only spiritual.


The realized being does not see the world as different from himself.

For a realized being, the Self alone is the Reality.

If you consider yourself the body, the world appears to be external.

But when, you are the Self, the world appears as Brahman.

After the Rain.

Arunachala Siva. 
i 

[Ravi.N]

Another visitor asked: What should we do to make the mind still?
M.: First let the mind be caught hold of and brought here: then we
shall consider ways and means of stilling it.
D.: I meant to say that it is always changing - even when we do our japa.
M.: Japa is meant only for stilling the mind.
D.: What japa is good for it?
M.: Anything suitable, such as Gayatri.
D.: Will Gayatri do?
M.: Can anything excel it? Only those who cannot do it look for others.
It contains the whole range of truth in it. Chanting (japa) will lead
to dhyana (meditation) and it is the means for realising the Self.
D.: Will half an hour a day do for it?
M.: It must be done always, or as long as you can.
Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi(Talk 322)

[Ravi.N]

The next day a visitor asked Bhagavan, with reference to the words dhimahi in the gayatri, ?What is the idea meant? I am not able rightly to grasp it.?
B: The words only mean fixing the aham in the Self, though literally they mean, ?We meditate?.
Visitor: I am not able to form a conception of the ?Tat? or the Self. Then, how am I to fix the aham in the Tat.
B: Why should you bother to conceive the Tat which you don?t know? Try to find out the ?I? that you know, what it is and whence it arises. That is enough.
Day by Day with Bhagavan

[Ravi.N]

A visitor asked, ?What should one, who is an absolute beginner, do in this (i.e., spiritual) line??
Bhagavan: The very fact that you put this question shows you know what to do. It is because you feel the want of peace, that you are anxious to take some steps to secure peace. Because
I have a little pain in my foot, I am applying this ointment.
Visitor: What is the method to be adopted for securing peace?
B: The conception that there is a goal and a path to it, is wrong. We are the goal or peace always. To get rid of the notion that we are not peace is all that is required.
V: All books say that the guidance of a Guru is necessary.
B: The Guru will say only what I am saying now. He will not give you anything you have not already. It is impossible for anyone to get what he has not got already. Even if he gets any
such thing, it will go as it came. What comes will also go. What always is will alone remain. The Guru cannot give you anything new, which you have not already. Removal of the notion that
we have not realised the Self is all that is required. We are always the Self. Only, we don?t realise it.
Day by Day with Bhagavan

[Subramanian.R]

Bhagavan Ramana Teachings:

'We are God (Iswara). Iswara Drishti (i.e seeing ourselves as God) is itself Divine Grace. So we need Divine Grace to get
God's Grace'.  Maharshi smiles....


V. Ganesan.

Arunachala Siva.

[Subramanian.R]

The world which you say is real is mocking at you for seeking to prove its reality, while of your own Reality you remain ignorant.

What is the standard of Reality?

That alone is Real which exists by itself, which reveals itself by itself and which is eternal and unchanging.

Does the world exist by itself?

Was it ever seen without the aid of the mind?

Of yourself you can say, 'I exist'. That is, yours is not mere existence, it is Existence of which you are conscious.

The world neither exists by itself, nor is it conscious of its existence.

Vedanta says that there is no nana (diversity), meaning that all is the same Reality.  If the world be taken as chit
(consciousness), it is always real.

There is only one thing Real!

Let your standpoint become of that of wisdom, then the world will be found to be God.

After the Rain.

Arunachala Siva.       

[Subramanian.R]

Bhagavan Ramana Teachings:

Maulana Mansur al -Hallaj of the Middle East was sent to the gallows by the Orthodoxy for saying 'Ana'l Haqq'.
I am God.  That was in the 9th century AD. Centuries earlier than that, two millennia before now, a carpenter's
son of Nazareth in Israel, who said 'I and my Father are one' and 'I am the Truth' was nailed to the Cross at the
instance of Orthodoxy.  A few centuries before the Good Shepherd was thus eaten up by the bad wolves of Orthodoxy,
an Athenian sculptor turned philosopher called Socrates was made to dink a deadly cup of hemlock for the 'heinous crime'
of telling the Athenians, 'Gnothi Seauton,' Know Thyself.

Mansur, Jesus and Socrates were all men of Truth, true God-men. What they said was nothing but the Truth. Yet,
why were they killed by their fellow men?  Mind you, their killers were all religious people not non believers.

The killers believed that God is out there, up there, beyond there, not within.  They thought as men still do, that men and women
with their bodies and minds, were different from one another and that God ruled over their destinies. Mansur, Jesus and Socrates
on the contrary, had lost their individuality and found the ever lasting, limitless, luminous Truth - God - within them, called by
them variously as Haq, Allah, Eli and so on. When they said 'I' they meant the one universal Self within each being, whereas to their
killers 'I' was no more than the person uttering the word.

contd.,

V. Ganesan.

Arunachala Siva.           

[Subramanian.R]

In what does all this Universe exist?

What is all this, from what does it arise?

For what and by what does it all appear?

It is the Self alone, that is the cause.,

After the Rain.

Arunachala Siva.

[Subramanian.R]

Bhagavan Ramana Teachings:

Even in this country, where the Maha Vaakyas like 'I am Brahman', 'You are That Brahman', etc., were given to men
thousands of years ago, there has been a long philosophical feud between those who said that the individual soul is
God, Absolute Itself, and those who said, 'No, they are two different thins; jiva is just an aspect of God, the personal
God, and the part cannot hold the Whole'.

Bhagavan Ramana, in His benedictory verse to His Tamizh translation of Acharya Sankara's Atma Bodham said, 'Can Sankara,
the Enlightener of the Self, be different from one;s own Self? Who He does this day, abiding as the inmost Self in one, speak
to this in the Tamizh language?' It would therefore, not be proper to speak of Bhagavan Ramana and Acharya Sankara, or
for that matter, Mansur, Jesus, Socrates, Buddha and other Self realized beings as different beings!  They are the same Self
manifesting in various ways in various times.

V. Ganesan.

Arunachala Siva.     

[Subramanian.R]

That inner Self, primeval spirit, eternal, ever effulgent, full and infinite bliss, single, indivisible, whole and living, shines
in everyone as the witnessing awareness.

That Self in its splendor, shining in the cavity of the Heart as the subtle, pervasive, yet unmanifest ether, illumines this
universe like the Sun.

The Self is never born nor dies, it neither grows, nor decays, nor does it suffer any change. When a pot is broken, the space
inside it is not, similarly, when the body dies, he Self in it remains eternal.

After the Rain.

Arunachala Siva.           

[Subramanian.R]

Bhagavan Ramana Teachings:

However, the manifestation of the Self as Bhagavan Ramana, was one of  perfect Silence and Stillness. Sri Ramana
made no assertions and never preached nor discoursed. He was a mountain of Peace and Stillness. Clad in loincloth
and, in the early years, His hair unkempt and nails uncut, He was immersed in the Self. He had no need to instruct much
less reform people, because, to His illumined eyes, the world was Brahman, and everyone was That only.   Yet, people
both the learned and the unlearned revered Him as a Swami, a Sage. One day a man of great asceticism, of monumental
Sanskrit scriptural scholarship and matchless poetic skill, came and saw the young boy, and was conquered, and bade His
students refer to the Sage thenceforth as Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi. How did the Mahakavi, the great poet, recognize
Sri Ramana as Maharshi, the great Seer as Bhagavan (the divine one, the blessed one)?  Ganapati Muni, for that was his name,
said, 'Thanks to God given Knowledge.'

V. Ganesan.

Arunachala Siva.               

[Subramanian.R]

All phenomena, consisting of names and forms are of the nature of mind alone.

All that appear outside are in reality inside.  What is called the heart is no other than Brahman.

The distinction between inner and outer is only with reference to the body.

In truth, there is neither inner nor outer.

For whom is there inside or outside?'

They can be only so long as there are the subject and object.

For whom are these two again?

Both resolve into the subject.

See who is in the subject.

Investigation leads you to pure consciousness beyond it.

After the 'Rain.

Arunachala Siva. 

     

[Pythagoras]

Hello,

Does Bhagavan specify on the soul? Because everyone has an individual soul which leads up to the present date carried by their karma. But is that the same thing as the universal Brahman?