INTERVIEW

NDM: When Sri Ramana was aksed:

Question: Do you approve of sexual continence?

Ramana Maharshi: A true brahmachari [celibate] is one who dwells in Brahman. Then there is no question of desires any more.

Question: At Sri Aurobindo’s ashram there is a rigid rule that married couples are permitted to live there on condition that they have no sexual intercourse.

Ramana Maharshi: What is the use of that? If it exists in the mind, what use is it to force people to abstain?

Question: Is marriage a bar to spiritual progress?

Ramana Maharshi: The householder’s life is not a bar, but the householder must do his utmost to practise self-control. If a man has a strong desire for the higher life then the sex tendency will subside. When the mind is destroyed, the other desires are destroyed also.

Question: How to root out our sexual impulse?

Ramana Maharshi: By rooting out the false idea of the body being the Self. There is no sex in the Self.

Do you agree with what Sri Ramana said above?

Michael James: Before answering this question, I think it would be useful to make some general observations about sayings that are attributed to Sri Ramana. People often ask me questions about things that he is supposed to have said, but in many cases it turns out that what they are quoting is something they found quoted somewhere on the internet without any source being given, so I always prefer to know where and by whom such sayings were originally recorded, in order to be able to assess how reliable they are likely to be.

Many sayings that are attributed to him, particularly on the internet, are of dubious authenticity, and even when the source of any of them can be found, it is usually not a particularly reliable one. The most common source of sayings attributed to him is Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, a book in which many conversations with him between 1935 and 1939 were recorded, but even this is not the most reliable source of his teachings.

There are various reasons why such books are not so reliable. Firstly, he spoke mostly in Tamil, whereas Talks and other such books were recorded in English. Secondly, the ashram management had banned any note-taking in his presence, so whatever is recorded in such books was not written immediately but only after a few hours or more, so such recordings are only as accurate as the memory of whoever recorded them. Thirdly, when any conversation is recorded from someone’s memory, their memory will be coloured by their understanding and preconceptions, so what they record is unlikely to be exactly what was said. Moreover, the recorder of Talks also acted as an interpreter when Sri Ramana was asked questions in English, and he had a reputation for elaborating his Tamil replies when translating them into English, adding to them his own explanations, and many devotees who were there in those days told me that he did the same when recording them.

Another important reason why even well-recorded conversations may not always be a reliable guide to his teachings is that he answered each question according to the need, aspiration and level of understanding of the questioner, and since many questions he was asked were not directly relevant to his teachings, his answers often did not reflect his actual teachings.

For example, he taught that the only means by which we can experience ourself as we really are is ātma-vicāra (self-investigation or self-enquiry), which is the simple practice of self-attentiveness: attending keenly and exclusively to ‘I’ in order to experience what this ‘I’ actually is (in other words, what or who am I). However, though he made it very clear that this was the only means to attain true self-knowledge (ātma-jñāna) or spiritual liberation (mukti or mōksa), he did not try to force anyone to follow this path if they were not willing to do so, so for the benefit of people who were not willing to practise ātma-vicāra he did talk about other practices when answering their questions.

This has given some people the impression that in his view all practices are of equal value, and therefore it is often claimed, ‘Ramana Maharshi approves all paths’, which is a gross oversimplification and misrepresentation of his attitude. If people wanted to follow other paths, he did not try to prevent them, and would even discuss their practices with them, but to anyone who came to him with an open mind and heart and asked him how to experience what is real, he made it very clear that the only means to do so is to investigate what is the ‘I’ that seeks to know what is real.

The reason why he insisted that ātma-vicāra (the practice of investigating ‘I’ by keenly scrutinising it) is the only means by which we can experience what is real and thereby free ourself from all illusion is that this is what he had discovered from his own experience when as a sixteen-year-old boy he confronted the ultimate problem that all of us must eventually face, namely death. This discovery was triggered by an intense fear of death that suddenly arose within him, prompting him to spontaneously investigate whether ‘I’ would die along with the body. Because he was so eager to know this, he focused his entire attention on ‘I’ in order to find out who or what this ‘I’ actually is (and hence whether or not it actually undergoes the major change called ‘death’), and thereby he experienced himself with absolute clarity as he really is.

As soon as he experienced this, he discovered that ‘I’ is the one unchanging and infinite reality, and that everything else that is experienced (including the experiencing mind or ego) is just an illusory appearance, which can be experienced only when we do not experience ourself as we really are. Thus from his own experience he clearly knew that self-ignorance is the sole cause of the appearance of multiplicity and hence the ultimate cause of all problems, and that the experience of true self-knowledge (absolutely clear self-awareness) is the only effective solution to all our problems.  Therefore whatever questions people asked him about anything, his immediate response was always to ask them to find out who is the ‘I’ that wants to know the answers to such questions, and only if they showed that they were unable or unwilling to recognise and accept that investigating who am I would solve all their problems and answer all their questions, would he give some other answer to suit their limited aspiration and power of understanding.

Once we have understood that this was the reason why his essential teaching was that investigating who am I is the only means by which we can experience what is real, and that anything else he said that seems to contradict this teaching was said only for the sake of those who were unwilling to accept it, if we read books like Talks we will be able to recognise that much of what is recorded in them does not represent his real teachings.

In order to get a clear and sure understanding of his central teachings, it is necessary to study and consider carefully the few texts that he wrote himself, particularly Nān Yār? (Who am I?), Uḷḷadu Nānpadu (the ‘Forty [Verses] on That Which Is’), Upadēśa Undiyār (which is also known as Upadēśa Sāram, the ‘Essence of Spiritual Instructions’), Ēkātma Pañcakam (the ‘Five Verses on the Oneness of Self’) and Ātma-Viddai (also known as Ātma-Vidyā Kīrtanam, the ‘Song on the Science of Self’), and also some of the verses of Śrī Arunācala Stuti Pañcakam (the ‘Five Hymns to Śrī Arunācala’) in which he interwove his teachings.

In addition to these original writings of Sri Ramana, another important and reliable source from which we can learn his teachings is Guru Vācaka Kōvai (the ‘Garland of Guru’s Sayings’), which is a comprehensive collection of more than 1,250 verses in which Sri Muruganar (his foremost disciple) recorded many of his sayings. These verses are so reliable because Sri Muruganar was perfectly attuned to his teachings and because every verse in it was checked and often revised by Sri Ramana, so it amounts to being a joint work of theirs.

If we study and think carefully about the meaning of these texts, and if we try to put into practice the path of ātma-vicāra that he taught in them, we will gain a clarity and depth of understanding that will enable us to evaluate in a correct perspective whatever sayings are attributed to him in other books that record conversations with him. If instead we do not read the original writings of Sri Ramana and Guru Vācaka Kōvai but just read the various English books like Talks in which conversations with him are recorded, we will only be able to form a rather confused and uncertain understanding of his teachings, because the wide variety of answers that he gave to many different people according to their individual needs and aspirations do not form a coherent whole, since many of them are inconsistent with and often contradict each other.

Such inconsistencies and contradictions appear not because his did not have an entirely consistent and coherent message (which he did in fact have, as I have explained) but because he knew it would be futile to tell anyone anything that they would not be ready or willing to accept and put into practice, and hence he tailored what he replied to each person according to their individual needs and level of spiritual maturity.

This is not to say, of course, that his real teachings cannot be found in books like Talks. In every such book some useful teachings are recorded in a more or less clear manner, but we have to read what is written in such books in a critical and discerning manner, and we should not assume that whatever he was recorded as saying was necessarily exactly what he did say or that it necessarily represents his actual teachings.

Incidentally, while talking of such books, it is worth mentioning that one of the most useful and well-edited English books that record conversations with Sri Ramana is a small book called Maharshi’s Gospel. Unlike Talks and most other such books, it was published in his lifetime in both Tamil and English (though it seems that most of it was originally recorded in English), and (more importantly) it was carefully edited in order to make it reflect more or less faithfully his actual teachings.

I am sorry to have dwelt in such great detail on this question of the authenticity and reliability of sayings attributed to Sri Ramana, but I think it is important to understand that many sayings that are attributed to him were either not ever said by him, or are inaccurate recordings of what he did actually say, and that even what he did actually say was often not his real teachings but was said only to suit the aspirations, beliefs, attitude and power of understanding of whoever he was then replying to.

This problem of inauthentic or unreliable sayings that are attributed to him has unfortunately been made much more prevalent because of the internet: if he is misquoted on any blog or forum, such misquotations have a horrible habit of spreading rapidly, being quoted over and over again on different sites until they are widely believed to be authentic.

Coming now to your actual question, I tried to find the source of the questions and answers that you have quoted. When I searched a PDF copy of Talks I found that the last question and answer are quoted from section 169, and when I googled some extracts from the other questions and answers I found that they come from Be as You Are, so I checked my copy of this compilation and found that they are quoted on pp. 137-8, where their source is identified as Conscious Immortality (1984 edition, p. 43) by Paul Brunton, but with a note that says: ‘The question about Sri Aurobindo ashram comes from the original manuscript of the book. It was deleted from the published version’.

Paul Brunton did not know Tamil, so any sayings of Sri Ramana that he recorded would have been what was translated for him by an interpreter or what he heard from someone else, and hence we cannot be entirely sure whether these answers attributed to Sri Ramana are exactly what he said. However, they seem to me to be fairly typical of the answers he might have given to such questions, and some of the ideas expressed in them are ones that he did express on other occasions. For example, he often said that real brahmacarya is not just celibacy or a pre-marital state of life but is what the word actually means, namely abiding as brahman, the absolute reality, which is our essential self, ‘I am’ (carya is a verbal noun that literally means moving, proceeding, following, practising, observing, behaving or conduct), and he is recorded as expressing this idea in sections 17 and 491 of Talks.

To understand these and other such answers that Sri Ramana gave in reply to questions about sex and celibacy, we need to consider them in the context of his fundamental teachings. Therefore I will give a brief outline of his teachings here.

In his experience, as I explained earlier, the only thing that is absolutely real is the one non-dual self-awareness that we each experience as ‘I am’, and in spite of whatever may now seem to us to be the case, this ‘I am’ is infinite, eternal, immutable and indivisible. As he says in verse 28 of Upadēśa Undiyār, it is beginningless, endless (limitless or infinite) and unbroken (undivided or unfragmented) sat-cit-ānanda (sat means being, reality or what-is; cit means what-is-conscious; and ānanda means happiness or what-is-perfectly-happy). Hence, being devoid of any division or distinction, it transcends the entire appearance of duality, multiplicity and differences, including time and space.

Since ‘I am’ alone is what is real, and since happiness is its very nature, the root cause of all the problems and sufferings that we seem to experience is our seeming failure to experience ourself as we really are. Because we do not now experience ‘I am’ as it really is, we mistake ourself to be a body and mind, and hence a finite person, and as such we experience many desires and fears and are liable to experience numerous kinds of misery and dissatisfaction.

Like all our other desires, our desires for loving relationships with other people and for sexual gratification are rooted in our illusion that we are a physical body, and this illusion is in turn rooted in our self-ignorance: our lack of clear experiential knowledge of what we actually are. So long as we experience ourself as a body, we will experience all the biological urges of that body as our own. If deprived of air to breath, water to drink or food to eat for more than a certain length of time, we will be consumed by a craving for such things, and in the same way, if deprived of sexual gratification we tend to crave for it.

Our body cannot survive for long without air, water or food, whereas it can survive without sexual gratification, but nevertheless for most of us the desire for sexual gratification tends to be one of our strongest desires, and it cannot be entirely overcome so long as we experience ourself as a body. Therefore the only way to overcome this and all other desires entirely is to experience ourself as we really are.

In order to experience anything, we need to attend to it, and the more keenly and closely we attend to anything, the more clearly we will experience it. Therefore, to clearly experience ourself as we really are, we need to attend as keenly and closely as possible to ourself: that is, to our pure self-awareness, ‘I am’. This is the practice of ātma-vicāra or self-investigation taught by Sri Ramana: scrutinising ourself closely in order to find out who or what I am.

At present we are all aware that I am, but we are not clearly aware of what I am, because we are more interested in experiencing other things than we are in experiencing ourself as we really are. Because we desire to experience other things, we constantly attend to them, and thus we tend to overlook ‘I am’. Our attention to other things is what obscures our awareness of what I am, because as a result of such attention our awareness of ‘I am’ is mixed up and confused with our awareness of other things.

Therefore, to experience ourself as we really are, we need to experience ourself in complete isolation from everything else, including any thought, feeling, emotion, perception, conception, desire, fear, pleasure or pain. And to experience ourself thus, we need to attend exclusively to ‘I am’: that is, we need to be so keenly focused in attending only to ‘I am’ that awareness of all other things is completely excluded from our attention. Then only will we be able to experience ourself with perfect clarity and without even the slightest mixture of any awareness of anything else.

When we try thus to attend to ‘I am’ exclusively, our attention tends to be easily distracted by thoughts and feelings, which arise in us due to our desire to experience other things. So long as we experience anything other than ‘I’, the illusion that we are a separate entity (a mind or ego) is sustained, but when we try to experience nothing other than ‘I’, this illusion begins to dissolve. Therefore the very existence of this illusion that we are a separate ‘I’, a mind or ego, is threatened by our attempt to be exclusively self-attentive.

Thus the more we try to be self-attentive, the more our mind will rebel, struggling for its survival by trying to attend to anything else whatsoever. Therefore in order to achieve our aim to be exclusively self-attentive (and thus absolutely clearly self-aware), we have to face up to and overcome all our desires to experience anything else.

Thus we are in a position in which we are caught between conflicting desires: our desire to experience ourself as we really are and our desire to experience other things. To weaken and eventually overcome the latter, we need to strengthen the former. The stronger our desire to experience ourself as we really are becomes, the weaker all our other desires will become.

According to Sri Ramana, the quickest and most effective way to increase our love to experience ourself as we really are is to practise being self-attentive. Whenever we practise this, our desire to experience other things will cause thoughts to rise in our mind, and whenever any thought thus rises, we have a choice either to hold fast to our self-attentiveness or to allow our attention to be carried away by that thought.

Since one thought leads to another, whenever we allow ourself to be carried away by any thought, we tend to get caught up in the strong current of a continuous series of thoughts. But at any point we are always free to turn our attention back towards ourself, the ‘I’ that is experiencing those thoughts, and thus we can cut off the flow of thoughts in which we had become immersed.

However, instead of allowing our attention to be distracted away from ourself by whatever thought may try to rise, if we persist in clinging firmly to our self-attentiveness, the desires that gave rise to such thoughts will gradually be weakened, and our love to experience ourself alone will increase. This is the only effective means by which we will eventually be able to overcome all our desires. That is, it is only by cultivating and nurturing our love to experience ourself alone in this way that we will be able to free ourself from the grip of every other desire that we may have.

This process by which we can weaken and eventually destroy all our other desires by practising self-attentiveness is clearly described by Sri Ramana in the tenth and eleventh paragraphs of Nān Yār? (Who am I?):

Even though visaya-vāsanās [our propensities, inclinations or desires to experience anything other than oneself], which come from time immemorial, rise [as thoughts] in countless numbers like ocean-waves, they will all be destroyed when svarūpa-dhyāna [self-attentiveness] increases and increases. Without giving room even to the doubting thought ‘Is it possible to dissolve so many vāsanās [inclinations] and remain only as self?’ it is necessary to cling tenaciously to self-attentiveness. However great a sinner a person may be, if instead of lamenting and weeping ‘I am a sinner! How am I going to be saved?’ he completely rejects the thought that he is a sinner and is steadfast in self-attentiveness, he will certainly be reformed [transformed into his true ‘form’, which is pure self-awareness, unadulterated by any adjunct].

As long as visaya-vāsanās exist in the mind, so long is the investigation who am I necessary. As and when thoughts arise, then and there it is necessary to annihilate them all by vicāra [investigation, which is vigilant self-attentiveness] in the very place from which they arise. Being without attending to [anything] other [than oneself] is vairāgya [dispassion] or nirāśā [desirelessness]; being without leaving [separating from or letting go of] self is jñāna [true knowledge]. In truth [these] two [desirelessness and true knowledge] are only one. Just as a pearl-diver, tying a stone to his waist and submerging, picks up a pearl which lies in the ocean, so each person, submerging [beneath the surface activity of their mind] and sinking [deep] within themself with vairāgya [freedom from desire to experience anything other than self], can attain the pearl of self. If one clings fast to uninterrupted svarūpa-smaraṇa [self-remembrance] until one attains svarūpa [one’s own ‘form’ or essential self], that alone [will be] sufficient. So long as enemies are within the fort, they will continue coming out from it. If [one] continues destroying [or cutting down] all of them as and when they come, the fort will [eventually] come into [one’s] possession.

We have numerous desires to experience things other than ourself, but all of our desires are not manifest all of the time. At any given moment, most of our desires will be dormant, but will still exist within us like seeds waiting to sprout whenever suitable circumstances arise. These seeds of our desires are called visaya-vāsanās – propensities or inclinations (vāsanās) to experience visayas (anything that is other than ourself) – and when they manifest they appear as thoughts, feelings, emotions, likes, dislikes, desires, fears, attractions, aversions and so on. Thus every thought we think and everything else we experience within our mind is a manifestation of one or more of our visaya-vāsanās.

Whenever we experience any thought or feeling, it does not arise alone, but triggers a continuous series of related thoughts and feelings to arise in rapid succession. Therefore, when any such series begins, we can choose either to follow it, allowing ourself to be carried away by it, or to stop following it. But if we stop following one such series, we are liable to start following another one instead. Therefore if we wish to stop following any such series, we must instead attend to the ‘I’ that is experiencing it.

If we thus cultivate the habit of attending to ‘I’ instead of allowing ourself to be carried away by endless series of thoughts and associated feelings, the strength of our vāsanās will gradually decrease, whereas if we always allow ourself to be carried away by such series, we will be nourishing and sustain the strength of our vāsanās, the seeds that give rise to such thoughts and feelings. That is, attending to thoughts and feelings is like watering a patch of seeds, thereby encouraging them to sprout and flourish, whereas attending only to ‘I’ is like depriving those seed of water, thereby causing them to wither and die. This is why Sri Ramana says that our visaya-vāsanās will all be destroyed when we cling tenaciously to self-attentiveness (svarūpa-dhyāna), and this practice of vigilant and persistent self-attentiveness (which he also calls ātma-vicāra or self-investigation) is what he refers to when he says; ‘As and when thoughts arise, then and there it is necessary to annihilate them all by vicāra in the very place from which they arise’.

The very place from which all thoughts arise is ourself, so we can destroy them at that very place only by clinging firmly to self-attentiveness. This is all that we need do in order to experience ourself as we really are, as Sri Ramana clearly indicates when he says: ‘If one clings fast to uninterrupted svarūpa-smaraṇa [self-remembrance] until one attains self, that alone [will be] sufficient’.

As I explained above, when we try to cling fast to uninterrupted self-remembrance or self-attentiveness, we are threatening the very existence of our mind and all its progeny (its latent desires, which exist in seed-form as visaya-vāsanās), so they will persistently rebel, trying to rise forcibly in the form of thoughts in order to distract our attention away from ‘I’. Therefore at every moment we can choose either to attend only to ‘I’ or to be distracted by all the thoughts that are trying to draw our attention away to anything other than ‘I’.

Since by clinging firmly to self-attentiveness we are destroying all such thoughts in the very place from which they arise, Sri Ramana says, ‘So long as enemies are within the fort, they will continue coming out from it. If [one] continues destroying all of them as and when they come, the fort will [eventually] come into [one’s] possession’, meaning that if we continue destroying all our thoughts by ātma-vicāra as and when they arise, we will eventually be able to enter and take possession of the fortress of our heart, the innermost core of our being, which is our real self, ‘I am’. In other words, we will experience ourself as we really are, and thereby destroy the illusion that we are a finite person consisting of a mind and body.

Among the many visaya-vāsanās or desires that we have to overcome in this way, two of the strongest are our desires for loving personal relationships and for sexual gratification (which are two desires that tend to be very closely interlinked). But however strong these or any other desires may be, the only effective way to overcome them is by persistent practice of self-attentiveness, because when we cultivate the habit of clinging firmly to self-attentiveness, we will be depriving all our other desires of the attention upon which they thrive, and thus they will gradually wither and dry up, until eventually our love to experience ourself as we really are will become so strong that it will consume all our other desires entirely, just as the light of the rising sun consumes all the darkness of night.

However, until all our desires are destroyed in this way, we have to decide how to cope with them in our day-to-day lives. If we could cling steadfastly to self-attentiveness at all times, our desires would not be a problem, but in practice we are not able to spend all our time attending only to ‘I’ because our desires to experience other things are still too strong, so though we may try to practise being self-attentive as much as possible, much of our time will be spent in attending to other things.

Even while we are engaged in attending to other things, we can to some extent keep our stronger desires in check by trying to ignore them as much as possible. But if a desire is very strong, the more we try to ignore it, the more it will try to distract us. For example, though we may try to ignore our desire for sexual gratification as much as possible by not thinking about such matters, if the thought of it once comes to our mind, our old desire for it may rise very strongly, making other such thoughts overwhelm us with renewed force.

We all know from experience that we more we gratify our desires, the stronger they tend to become, so excessive gratification is like pouring petrol on a fire. As Sri Ramana says in verse 592 of Guru Vācaka Kōvai:

Just as by [being fed with] ghee [clarified butter] a fire will only flare up and will not be calmed and extinguished, so by one’s achieving and gratifying the desires one has formed, the fire of desire will never be satisfied and appeased.

On the other hand, if we avoid gratifying a strong desire, it can smoulder away within us, growing more and more intense, because the nature of desire is such that before gratification it creates the illusion that whatever is desired will be a source of great pleasure or satisfaction, whereas after gratification that desired thing will be seen to be actually quite trivial. As Sri Ramana says in verse 371 of Guru Vācaka Kōvai:

We have never seen any empty abyss that is so impossible to fill as intense desire, which can never be satisfied, because it [always] pauperises one, making even an atom seem as great as Mount Meru before it is achieved, and vice versa after it is achieved.

We can never quench or adequately satisfy any desire by indulging it, but by gratifying it occasionally and to a moderate extent, we can remind ourself how trivial is the pleasure that we seem to derive from it, and thus we can to some extent keep it in check and avoid allowing it to consume us, as ungratified desires can do. Therefore it is sometimes best for us to strike a via media between over-gratification and complete denial. For example, we certainly cannot overcome our desire for sexual gratification by over-indulging in sex, but for many people trying forcibly to deny this desire is also counterproductive, because it is a desire that can grow stronger the more it is denied, just as the desire for air to breath, water to drink or food to eat will become very intense if it is forcibly denied.

Therefore we each have to find what works best for us. For some people living a celibate life (either permanently or for some time) may be the best way to keep the desire for sex in check, whereas for other people it may be better to be married or in some other equivalent loving relationship in which their sexual desire is gratified to a moderate extent. Though our desire for sex may be strong, when it is gratified we find that the pleasure that we derive from it is actually quite trivial, so occasional gratification can help us to remember that our desire for it tends to delude us into believing that it will give us much greater pleasure than it actually does. This is perhaps the reason why Sri Ramana once said to someone who was troubled by thoughts of sex, ‘It is better to do it than to be always thinking about it’ (as recorded by Alan Chadwick in A Sadhu’s Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi, 6^th edition (2005) p. 65).

However, no matter how we may try to keep our desire for sex in check, we cannot expect to overcome it entirely until we experience ourself as we really are and thereby destroy forever the illusion that we are a physical body. And as I explained above, according to Sri Ramana the practice of ātma-vicāra (self-investigation or self-attentiveness) is the only means by which we can experience ourself as we really are.

NDM: Some say that Sri Ramana told his followers that "only a very, very minuscule fraction of seekers are “ready” to become fully enlightened through self-inquiry.

He insisted that such a person would’ve had to have worked through many, many lifetimes of earnest, rigorous and skillful spiritual practice in order to be primed for this technique."

Do you know if he had any other teachings designed for those who were not primed or ready for this, other than his atma vichara method?

Michael James: As I explained above, statements are often attributed to Sri Ramana that he did not actually say, and this is clearly one such statement. On numerous occasions he said that ātma-vicāra (self-investigation or self-enquiry) is the only means by which we can experience ourself as we really are, and he explained the reasons for this very clearly in his original writings. Only to those who were unwilling to accept this did he talk about other types of spiritual practice, but he explained that no other practice could be a direct means to true self-experience, and that at best such practices can purify the mind and thereby give it the clarity to understand and accept that in order to experience ourself as we really are we must investigate ourself by attending only to ‘I’.

Not only did he teach that ātma-vicāra is the only means by which we can experience ourself as we really are, but he also taught that it is the easiest of all kinds of spiritual practice. In verse 4 of Ātma-Viddai he says:

To untie the bonds beginning with karma [that is, the bonds of action and of all that results from it], [and] to rise above the ruin beginning with birth [that is, to transcend and become free from the miseries of embodied existence, which begin with birth and end with death], [rather] than any [other] path, this path [ātma-vicāra] is exceedingly easy. [...]

Therefore he taught that ātma-vicāra is both the only direct means and the easiest means, so it is suitable for anyone who genuinely wants to know what they really are. In verse 17 of Upadēśa Undiyār he says:

When one investigates the form of the mind without forgetting, [it will be clear that] there is no such thing as ‘mind’. This is the direct path for everyone.

In the next verse he explains that though ‘mind’ is a collective name for all thoughts, the root of all thoughts is only the thought called ‘I’ (the ego), so in essence what is called ‘mind’ is only this ‘I’. Therefore what he means in verse 17 by ‘investigating the form of the mind’ is investigating this root-thought ‘I’. As he explained elsewhere, this thought called ‘I’ is cit-jada-granthi, the knot that (seemingly) binds the conscious to the non-conscious, because it is a confused mixture of the pure consciousness ‘I am’, which alone is real, and a physical body, which is an unreal superimposition. Thus the ego or thought called ‘I’ is nothing other than our real self, the pristine ‘I am’, appearing as something that it is not, namely a body. Hence it is like a rope that appears to be a snake.

If we look carefully at such a snake, we will see that it is actually only a rope, and thus we will recognise that there was no such thing as a snake there at all. Likewise, if we look carefully at this mind (the ego or thought called ‘I’), we will see that it is actually only the pure and infinite consciousness ‘I am’, and thus we will recognise that there was no such thing as ‘mind’ at all. Therefore the first line of this verse, ‘When one investigates the form of the mind without forgetting’, is a description of uninterrupted ātma-vicāra, and Sri Ramana says that this is not only the direct path (the direct means by which we can experience ourself as we really are), but also the direct path ‘for everyone’. In other words, it is not only for a select few who are somehow specially qualified for it, but for everyone who wants to experience what this ‘I’ really is.

The only ‘qualification’ we need to investigate ‘I’ is that we should want to experience what this ‘I’ actually is, but this is like saying that the only people who are qualified to put food in their mouth, chew it and swallow it are those who want to eat it. Just as we would not compel anyone to eat if they do not want to, Sri Ramana never attempted to compel anyone to practise ātma-vicāra if they did not want to do so.

If anyone claims that they want to attain liberation or self-knowledge but that they do not want to practise ātma-vicāra, they would be like a person who claims that they want to read a book but that they do not want to look at what is printed in it. Just as it is necessary to look at what is printed in a book in order to read it, so it is necessary for us to investigate ourself by carefully attending to this ‘I’ in order to experience it as it really is.

The actual practice of ātma-vicāra is just trying to experience ‘I’ as it really is by attending to it keenly and vigilantly, so as Sri Ramana often pointed out, the nature of this path and of its goal are essentially the same: both entail only experiencing ourself. As he says in verse 579 of Guru Vācaka Kōvai:

Because of the non-dual nature of [our] enduring self, [and] because of the fact that excluding self there is no other gati [refuge, means or goal], the upēya [the aim or goal] which [we are to] reach is only self and the upāya [the means or path] is only self. Know them to be non-different (abhēda).

Since differences entail duality, they are diametrically opposed to the non-dual nature of self, so in its view no differences actually exist, and hence whatever differences we experience are just a false appearance. Therefore, since our goal is self, which is absolutely non-dual and hence completely devoid of differences of any kind whatsoever, any practice whose nature is fundamentally different to it cannot be a means to experience it. Hence, since pure unadulterated self-awareness is the nature of self, it must also be the nature of the means by which we can experience it. Hence, since ātma-vicāra is just the attempt we make to experience such pure self-awareness or self-attentiveness, it is the only means by which we can merge and become one with our real self.

For some people who felt inclined toward the path of bhakti or devotion, Sri Ramana recommended that they should surrender themselves entirely to God, so he sometimes said that self-investigation and self-surrender are the only means by which we can attain liberation or self-knowledge. However, he also made it clear that self-investigation and self-surrender are not two different paths but one and that same, because in order to investigate and experience ourself as we really are we must be willing to give up our present false self, our mind or ego, which is what we are not, and in order to surrender this false self, we must know what our real self actually is. Therefore in the thirteenth paragraph of Nān Yār? (Who am I?) he said:

Being completely absorbed in ātma-nisthā [self-abidance, the state of just being as we really are], giving not even the slightest room to the rising of any thought other than ātma-cintana [self-contemplation], alone is giving ourself to God.

It is true that most people are not interested in practising either ātma-vicāra or complete self-surrender as described here by Sri Ramana, so in that sense they are not ‘ready’ for it, but this is simply because they do not want real ‘enlightenment’, which is the state in which we experience ourself as we really are, thereby giving up the false self that we now mistake ourself to be. Unless we are willing at least to begin separating ourself from the body and mind that we now experience as ‘I’, we are not yet ready for either ātma-vicāra or complete self-surrender.

Though most people at any given time are not yet willing to practise either ātma-vicāra or complete self-surrender, in due course (either during the lifetime of their present body or during that of some future body) each of them will reach the point where they sincerely want to experience themself as they really are and are therefore willing to begin letting go of their false self, and as soon as they reach this point they will be willing to practise the only correct and direct path to this goal, which can be described either as ātma-vicāra or complete self-surrender.

Most people are not interested in practising any spiritual path, and though many others like to do so, most of them are drawn to paths other than ātma-vicāra or complete self-surrender. None of those other paths can be a direct means to self-knowledge, because we cannot know ourself without attending to this ‘I’ (which is the practice called ātma-vicāra) or without giving up whatever we wrongly take to be ourself (which is complete self-surrender), but they can be a rather circuitous means to it, because they can purify the mind, cleansing it (at least to some extent) of some of its grosser desires and attachments, and thereby giving it the clarity to understand that the only means to attain liberation or self-knowledge is to investigate what this ‘I’ that want to attain them actually is.

In verses 2 and 3 of Upadēśa Undiyār Sri Ramana says:

The fruit of action having passed away [remains] as seed [and thereby] causes [one] to sink in the ocean of action. [Therefore action] does not give liberation.

Action (karma) done [with love] for God and without desire [for any personal benefit] purifies the mind and [thereby] it shows the path to liberation.

All spiritual practices other than ātma-vicāra are actions or karmas, because they entail attending to something other than ‘I’, which means that our attention is moving away from ourself towards that other thing or things, so ātma-vicāra is the only spiritual practice that is not a karma, because it does not entail any movement of our attention away from ourself, its source. Therefore what Sri Ramana says in these two verses applies to all spiritual practices other than ātma-vicāra, so what he is in effect saying is that if we do any other spiritual practice with the correct attitude (that is, motivated not by desire for any gain or benefit for oneself as a person, but only by love for God or any such spiritual ideal), it will purify our mind and thereby enable us to recognise what the correct path to liberation is. In other words, it will enable us to recognise that ātma-vicāra is the only means by which we can liberated from the bondage of mind and action.

Whatever spiritual practice we may do, and for whatever motive we may do it, there must be an ego or finite ‘I’ to do it and to have that motive, so any spiritual practices other than ātma-vicāra will help to perpetuate the illusion that this finite ‘I’ is real. Only in ātma-vicāra do we investigate this ‘I’ to see whether or not it is actually real, so ātma-vicāra is the only spiritual practice that can directly undermine this illusory ‘I’ and expose its unreality.

Therefore in verse 14 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu Anubandham Sri Ramana teaches us that by practising ātma-vicāra we will achieve the true aim of all forms of spiritual practice, each of which can be classified as being a form of one of the four yōgas, namely karma (the path of desireless action), bhakti (the path of devotion), yōga (the path of union) and jñāna (the path of knowledge):

Investigating to whom are these, karma, vibhakti, viyōga and ajñāna, is itself karma, bhakti, yōga and jñāna, [because] when [one] investigates [oneself], [it will be clear that] they [karma, vibhakti, viyōga and ajñāna] never exist without ‘I’ [which is itself not real]. Being permanently as self alone is true.

The aim of any spiritual practice is to rectify some defect or deficiency, such as karma (action), vibhakti (lack of devotion), viyōga (separation from God) or ajñāna (ignorance of self), but no such defect or deficiency can exist without a finite ‘I’. If this ‘I’ were real, its defects and deficiencies might be real, but if it is just an illusory appearance, they too must be illusory appearances. Therefore before try to rectify any defect or deficiency, we should first try to see whether or not this ‘I’ is real.

As Sri Ramana says in verse 17 of Upadēśa Undiyār (which I quoted above), if we examine this ‘I’ (the mind or ego), we will find that it does not actually exist, so when it seems to exist it is just an unreal appearance. Therefore, since its seeming existence will cease when we carefully examine it (just as the seeming existence of the illusory snake will cease when it is carefully examined), the only effective way to rectify all its seeming defects and deficiencies entirely and forever is to examine it. In other words, investigating this ‘I’ that seems to experience so many defects and deficiencies is the only effective means by which we can achieve the goal of all spiritual practices.

Until we investigate this ‘I’, it will continue to seem real, and hence all its defects and deficiencies will also seem to be real. Therefore trying to rectify its defects and deficiencies without investigating whether it is real is like cutting the leaves and branches off a dense bush: until its root is destroyed, it will continue sprouting new leaves and branches. Likewise, until we annihilate this false ‘I’ by examining it, its defects and deficiencies (its desires, fears, attachments, selfishness, ignorance, pride and so on) will continue sprouting in one form or another.

Just as what seemed to be a snake was actually only a rope, so what now seems to be this finite, defective and deficient ‘I’ is actually only the one infinite, indivisible and immutable real ‘I’. Even when it seems to be finite and hence defective and deficient, this ‘I’ is actually infinite and hence devoid of any defect or deficiency, so when we investigate ‘I’ we will discover that it was never defective and deficient. Therefore in the final sentence of this verse Sri Ramana says, ‘Being permanently as self alone is true’, meaning that we have never been anything other than the pure adjunctless ‘I’, which is the one eternal, infinite and perfect reality.

The fact that ātma-vicāra is the only means by which we can experience ourself as we really are and thereby destroy the illusion that we are a mind or ego was repeatedly emphasised by Sri Ramana both in his original writings and in the answers that he gave to questions asked by anyone who genuinely wanted to know the nature of reality and the means to experience it. For example, in Nān Yār? (Who am I?) he says:

[...] to attain that happiness, which is one’s own [true] nature that is experienced daily in [dreamless] sleep, which is devoid of the mind, oneself knowing oneself is necessary. For that, jñāna-vicāra [knowledge-investigation] who am I alone is the principal means. (first paragraph, with bold type as in the original text)

Only by [means of] the investigation who am I will the mind subside; [...] (sixth paragraph)

To make the mind subside [permanently], there are no adequate means other than vicāra [self-investigation]. [...] (eighth paragraph)

[...] For restraining the mind it is necessary to investigate oneself [in order to experience] who [one really is], [but] instead [of doing so] how [can one experience oneself by] investigating in texts? It is necessary to know oneself only by one’s own eye of jñāna [knowledge or awareness]. [...] Knowing one’s yathārtha svarūpa [real self] [by] investigating who is oneself who is in bondage is alone mukti [liberation]. The name ‘ātma-vicāra’ [refers] only to [the practice of] always keeping the mind in [or on] ātmā [self]; [...] (sixteenth paragraph)

Likewise, in verse 27 of Uḷḷadu Nārpadu he explains that ātma-vicāra is the only means by which we can experience the real non-dual state of self, which is what is indicated in the mahāvākyas or ‘great sayings’ of the Vedas such as aham brahmāsmi (I am brahman [the absolute reality]) and tat tvam asi (that [God or brahman] you are):

The state in which ‘I’ exists without rising is the state in which we exist as that [brahman]. Without investigating the source from which ‘I’ rises, how to attain the annihilation of oneself, where ‘I’ does not rise? [And] without attaining [this ego-annihilation], say, how to abide in the state of self, in which one is that?

The two rhetorical questions that he asks in this verse clearly imply that: (1) we cannot attain the egoless state, in which ‘I’ exists without rising as a finite mind, unless we investigate ourself, who are the source from which this ‘I’ rises; and (2) we cannot abide in our natural state of self, in which we are nothing other than brahman, unless we attain the state in which we do not rise as a separate ‘I’. In other words, we cannot experience ourself as ‘that’ or brahman, the one absolute reality, unless we investigate ourself, the source from which the ego-‘I’ arises.

In verse 22 of Uḷḷadu Nārpadu he asks another rhetorical question with a similar meaning:

Consider, except by turning the mind back within and immersing it in God, who shines within that mind giving the mind light, how to know God by the mind?

Though this verse seems to be couched in the dualistic terminology of devotion, what it is actually describing in that terminology is only the practice of ātma-vicāra, because the word pati (which literally means the master, lord or God) here denotes the true nature of God, which is nothing other than our own real self. As such, God shines within our mind as our essential self-awareness, ‘I am’, and thereby he gives our mind the light of awareness or consciousness by which it is able to know both itself and the appearance of all other things. Therefore Sri Ramana asks how we can know God, our essential self, by our mind except by turning our mind back within and immersing it in the clear light of pure self-awareness, which is God.

Here ‘turning the mind back within and immersing it in God’ denotes the practice of ātma-vicāra, which is trying to turn our mind or power of attention away from all other things, back towards itself, ‘I’, and thereby to make it merge and become one with its own essential self, which is God, the source of its light of awareness. Therefore, by asking how it is possible for us to know God except by thus ‘turning the mind back within and immersing it in God’, Sri Ramana clearly implies that we cannot know God, the one absolute reality, except by practising ātma-vicāra.

NDM: Papaji said that none of his Western students were enlightened, that obviously would have included all the well known western teachers out there today who claim they belong to his lineage.

He said that no one was holy enough to receive what he knew. He said that he gave them spiritual lollipops and hinted they were enlightened to get the ‘leeches’ off his back. These are direct quotes of Papaji himself in the book ‘Nothing Ever Happened’.

Do you know if Sri Ramana ever gave Papji or anyone else permission to teach his version of atma Vichara?

Michael James: Sri Ramana never gave anyone ‘permission’ to teach ātma-vicāra, firstly because the reason he taught ātma-vicāra was not for us to teach it to others but only for each of us to practise it ourself, and secondly because teaching it does not require any permission, since it is not in any way a secret or something that should not be shared with anyone who cares to know about it.

Sri Ramana was once asked whether he had any secret teaching that he gave only to selected disciples, and he replied something to the effect: ‘Here it is all an open secret. Everyone knows ‘I am’, and ‘I am’ is all I know, so that is all I teach’ (as told to me by someone who was present at the time, and in Day by Day with Bhagavan it is recorded that on 8-10-46 in reply to a similar question he said: ‘There is nothing more to be known than what you find in books. No secret technique. It is all an open secret, in this system’). Therefore, since he taught ātma-vicāra openly to everyone who was interested to know what ‘I’ am or what is real, there was no need for him to give anyone special permission to share the same teaching with others.

This, incidentally, is the reason why neither he nor any of his real disciples ever tried or wanted to establish a paramparā or lineage of gurus to succeed him. Since he openly shared with everyone all that he knew from his own experience, including the clear and simple means by which we can each attain the same experience, there was no need for him to establish any kind of lineage. Moreover, he did not actually consider himself to be a guru, because he saw no difference between himself and others, so for him there could have been no question of establishing a lineage of gurus.

However, though in his non-dual view there is neither any disciple nor any guru, he did not deny that from the viewpoint of a spiritual aspirant a guru is necessary. He always taught that the real guru is only our own essential self, ‘I am’, but that since we are in the habit of attending constantly to other things and thereby ignoring our essential self, it is necessary for it to manifest outwardly in human form in order to teach us through words that we need to turn our attention back towards ourself in order to experience our essential self. Since the purpose of the human form of the guru is only to teach this, once that human form has made this teaching openly available to all who seek it (as Sri Ramana did), there is no need for any lineage of gurus, because the teachings remain available even after the human form has passed away.

Regarding the sayings of ‘Papaji’ (HWL Poonja) that you refer to here, I do not know how accurately these have been recorded, but if these are what he actually said, I find it very strange that anyone who claims to be a disciple of Sri Ramana should say such things, because they seem quite opposed to all that Sri Ramana taught, and they display a strong bhēda-buddhi or sense of difference that is quite alien to his teachings and experience.

A visitor once praised Sri Ramana, saying to him, ‘Your realisation is unique in the spiritual history of the world’, to which he replied in English: ‘What is real in me is real in you and in everyone else. Where is the room for any difference?’ (as told to me by someone who was present at the time). Since in his experience the only thing that actually exists is self, ‘I am’, he did not see any difference between himself and others, so he never claimed to know anything that was not known by others, and he often said that in his view there is no one who is ignorant of self. This attitude of his is clearly expressed by him in verse 38 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu Anubandham, which he composed in answer to someone who asked him how he was able to remain so unmoved by either praise or blame:

Besides oneself, who is there? If whoever says whatever about oneself, what [does it matter]? When oneself always abides inseparably in the state of self without knowing [any differences such as] ‘myself and others’, what indeed [does it matter] whether one praises or disparages oneself?

The same non-dual experience that made him indifferent to both praise and disparagement also made it impossible for him to see any difference between himself and others. Therefore he taught us that if differences of any kind seem to exist in our view, we need to rectify our view by experiencing ourself as we really are instead of as the person that we now seem to be.

NDM: Do you know if Papaji was celibate like Sri Ramana was or engaged in sexual relations of any kind?

Michael James: I believe he was married and had children, which means he was not always celibate, though perhaps he was in his later life. I do not know enough about him to say more than this about any sexual relationships he may have had, and anyway I do not think that such personal matters about other people need concern us.

As Sri Ramana taught us, enquiring about others is anātma-vicāra (investigating what is not ourself), so it will not benefit us in any way. Therefore we should aim to do only ātma-vicāra (self-investigation), since this alone will enable us to experience ourself as we really are and thereby destroy our present illusion that we are a person, a finite being among so many other such finite beings.

NDM: Also have a question on Swami Suddhananda, a Vedanta teacher who seems to have violated the sanyasi dharma. James Swartz says that Vedanta works, and that one should separate "the teaching from the teacher", in this instance that would mean even if the teacher is dishonest and sexually abuses his students? Is this not just a lame excuse or like the proverbial "blind leading the blind" in a pit?

Michael James: I do not know the Swami you are referring to, so I do not know if any allegations about him are true, and hence I can only answer in general terms and not about his specific case.

If any spiritual teacher is dishonest or sexually abuses his students, that is obviously wrong, and he or she is not qualified to be a spiritual teacher. If anyone takes on the role of a spiritual teacher, they are taking on a huge responsibility, and they should accept that their students or followers will have certain reasonable expectations of them. Therefore if they cannot live up to such expectations, they should be honest and admit the fact, and they should not continue to pose as anything that they are not.

Regarding sexual abuse of any kind, that is unjustifiable under any circumstances. This is why ethical issues need to be considered in any questions about sexual conduct, whether the sexual conduct of a spiritual teacher or aspirant or of anyone else. Considering such questions from the point of view of a spiritual aspirant, I explained earlier that though the physical act of sex is not in itself an obstacle on the spiritual path, our desire for sex is a potential obstacle, so we need to minimise this desire as much as possible, but in that connection I did not mention any ethical considerations, so now is an opportunity to do so.

I believe the one overruling moral obligation we all have with regard not only to sexual conduct but also to anything else that we may do is that as far as possible we should always try to avoid causing harm to any other person or sentient being. The principle behind this obligation is called ahimsā (non-harm), which is rightly considered to be one of the foundations of any form of yōga or spiritual practice, and which is the one basic and essential moral principle that is most widely revered in all the dharmic religions (the family of religions that originated in India such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism).

With regard to sexual conduct, ahimsā means that we should avoid any sexual behaviour that could in any way cause harm to anyone. If two adults engage in sexual activity together with mutual consent, shared expectations, honesty and a reciprocal sense of obligation towards each other, and if they do so in circumstances that would not cause any harm to anyone else (such as by betraying the trust or legitimate expectations of a spouse or other type of established sexual partner, or by giving birth to an unwanted child whom neither of them would be willing to take proper care of), they would not be violating the principle of ahimsā, and hence there would not essentially be any moral wrong in what they are doing.

Though according to certain social norms it may be considered wrong, for example, to have sex before marriage or outside marriage, social norms are generally arbitrary and vary from one society or culture to another, so they do not necessarily determine what is inherently immoral, whereas ahimsā is a moral principle that is based on the universal ideals of compassion and reason, so it does necessarily determine what is inherently immoral. In all circumstances, in any society or any culture, it is morally wrong to cause unnecessary harm to anyone (though there are many circumstances in which it is not obvious how this general principle should best be applied, because sometimes avoiding causing one harm will cause another one).

As spiritual aspirants it is particularly important that we live as far as possible according to this principle of ahimsā, so we should avoid any sexual conduct that is liable to harm anyone. Obviously the most direct and immediate way in which sexual conduct can harm someone is when any form of sexual abuse in involved, whether in the form of violent rape, subtle coercion or deliberate deceit. Therefore any such abusive conduct should obviously be avoided, but such abuse is not the only way in which sexual behaviour can cause harm to others.

Human relationships are based on trust, and trust gives rise to certain reasonable expectations and consequent obligations, which can sometimes be betrayed by certain types of sexual behaviour, and this can lead to damaged relationships and consequent suffering. One obvious example of this is when someone betrays the trust of their wife, husband or other type of established sexual partner by engaging in sexual activity with someone else, and another example would be if a spiritual teacher who outwardly poses as celibate, whether formally as a monk or sannyāsi (a person who has formally renounced worldly life and is therefore usually expected to be celibate) or informally, were to deceive his or her devotees by secretly engaging in any sexual relationship.

A married person who betrays the trust and expectations of their spouse in this way can cause suffering not only to their spouse but also, if it results in a broken or disharmonious marriage, to their children. However, if a spiritual teacher betrays the trust and expectations of their followers in this way, and if they happen to have many followers, they could cause suffering, disillusionment and a sense of betrayal in the hearts of many more people than an unfaithful spouse would cause. Even if a spiritual teacher betrays the trust of only one devotee in this way, they can still cause considerable harm, because people tend to invest a huge amount of trust, faith and love in their spiritual teacher.

Some people deceive themselves into believing that because they are following a spiritual path (or believe that they have attained some sort of spiritual goal), they have somehow transcended the moral obligations that bind other people, and hence that they are free to behave as they please. Such people have not even began to follow the true spiritual path, because what following it entails above all else is self-denial: that is, curbing not only our desires but also the rising of the separate ‘I’ that has those desires. Therefore giving free rein to our desires is the very antithesis of following a spiritual path.

So long as we experience the existence of other people and other sentient beings, we are morally obliged to avoid as far as possible causing them any harm in any way whatsoever, and as spiritual aspirants we should feel this moral obligation even more strongly than others. We should not feel this moral obligation restricts our freedom in any way, because it should actually help us to curb our desires, and we are truly free only to the extent to which we are free from our desires and consequently from our ego, which is their root cause.

If we truly wish to be free of all moral obligations, we must free ourself from the delusion that we are a person, because this delusion is the sole cause for the appearance of this world, in which so many other people and sentient beings seem to exist along with this person we take to be ‘I’. In order to free ourself from this delusion we must experience ourself as we really are, and in order to experience ourself thus we must investigate what this ‘I’ actually is.

Non-Duality Magazine Interview

(continued)

NDM: What about nirvikalpa samadhi as a way of quenching desires, as well as a means to realisation? Did Sri Ramana ever speak about this and attaining this through raja yoga? Also what is your view on this?

According to Sri Ramana our sole aim should be to know ourself: that is, to experience ourself as we really are. Since this is our goal, and since we cannot experience anything unless we attend to it, the only means by which we can achieve this goal is self-attentiveness.

He also taught us that we seem to experience other things only when we experience ourself as a body, as we do in waking and dream. Therefore, since experiencing anything other than ‘I’ entails experiencing a body (and hence also a mind) as ‘I’, by the very act of experiencing anything other than ‘I’ we are perpetuating our mistaken experience that we are a body. Hence we cannot experience ourself as we really are so long as we experience anything other than ‘I’.

Therefore our aim should be to experience nothing other than ‘I’, and trying to do this is the practice that he called ātma-vicāra or self-investigation. Thus, as he says in verse 579 of Guru Vācaka Kōvai (which I quoted and discussed above), there is no essential difference between the nature of our goal and the nature of the means by which we can achieve it: both entail only experiencing nothing other than ‘I’. The only difference between the means and the goal is that the means involves effort whereas the goal is effortless, because it is the state in which we have discovered that experiencing nothing other than ‘I’ is our real nature.

Until we discover this (that is, until it is natural and effortless for us to experience nothing other than ‘I’), we need to make effort to experience nothing other than ‘I’. The reason this effort seems necessary, even though experiencing nothing other than ‘I’ is our real nature, is that we now have strong desires or likings to experience many things other than just ‘I’, so effort is needed to counter the outward-driving influence of such desires. However, though effort is now needed, it is only an effort to experience the non-dual (otherless) self-awareness that is our real nature. And once we experience this, all desire to experience anything else will be destroyed, so this experience will become effortless.

There is thus a clear and logical connection between the path that Sri Ramana taught and the goal to which this path should lead: the goal is to experience nothing other than ‘I’, and the path or means to achieve this goal is to try to experience nothing other than ‘I’. It is also clear why this is the only means to achieve it, because trying to experience anything other than ‘I’ cannot enable us to experience nothing other than ‘I’ (or at least it cannot directly enable us to experience this, even if it can do so in a very roundabout way).

Whatever other means we may adopt in order to experience nothing other than ‘I’, we will sooner or later have to try to experience nothing other than ‘I’, because unless we try to do so we will never succeed in doing so. Therefore any other means can at best only prepare us to adopt this path of trying to experience nothing other than ‘I’, and cannot directly enable us to experience it.

Therefore, since it is obvious that we will sooner or later have to try to experience nothing other than ‘I’, which we can do only by trying to focus our entire attention on ‘I’ alone, why should we not try to do so from the outset? Why should we try to experience or attend to anything else when we know that ultimately we can achieve our goal only by trying to attend to and experience nothing other than ‘I’?

Therefore, when you ask whether nirvikalpa samādhi can be a means to ‘realisation’ or achievement of this goal, we first have to consider what this term ‘nirvikalpa samādhi’ actually means: if it denotes an experience of anything other than ‘I’, it cannot directly enable us to experience nothing other than ‘I’, whereas if it denotes a clear experience of nothing other than ‘I’, it is just another name for the practice that Sri Ramana called ātma-vicāra or self-investigation: the practice of trying to attend to and experience nothing other than ‘I’.

What then is the actual meaning of this term ‘nirvikalpa samādhi’? A convenient way of understanding the term samādhi is that it is the state in which dhi (the mind or buddhi) is sama (even, flat, level, same, equal or equanimous), though this is not the actual etymological meaning of this term. Etymologically samādhi is a noun form of the verb samādhā, which means to put or hold together, compose, settle, establish, set right, fix, repair, put in order, arrange or restore, and which by extension means to collect or compose one’s thoughts, concentrate or fix one’s mind upon. Thus samādhi means collecting, composing or concentrating one’s mind, and thus denotes any state in which the mind is concentrated on or absorbed in one thing.

Since there are numerous things on which the mind can be concentrated or in which it can be absorbed, the term samādhi is used to denote a wide variety of different states, and hence it is often qualified by various adjectives such as nirvikalpa (without vikalpa), savikalpa (with vikalpa), bāhya (outside or external) and āntara (inside or internal). Nirvikalpa means without any vikalpa, and vikalpa means change, alternation, variation, variety, diversity, multiplicity, difference, distinction, indecision, doubt, hesitation, false notion, fancy or imagination.

Any state that is truly nirvikalpa (devoid of any change, variation, diversity, difference, distinction or imagination) must be a state in which nothing other than ‘I’ is experienced, because everything other than ‘I’ changes, and an experience of anything other than ‘I’ entails the basic distinction between ‘I’ and other. However, even sleep is a nirvikalpa state, but though we do not experience anything other than ‘I’ in sleep, we do not clearly experience what this ‘I’ is, because we fall asleep only because we are too tired to attend to anything else, and not because we tried to focus our entire attention on ‘I’ alone.

Just as sleep is a nirvikalpa state that we enter by a means other than self-attentiveness, there are other nirvikalpa states that we can enter by means other than self-attentiveness. For example, by practising yōgic techniques of prāṇāyāma (breath-restraint) it is possible to make the mind subside temporarily in a nirvikalpa state, but because that state is not entered by self-attentiveness, it will lack the clarity of self-awareness that is required for us to experience ourself as we really are. Therefore, just as the mind wakes up from sleep, it will sooner or later wake up from such an artificially induced state of nirvikalpa samādhi.

Since vikalpa means difference or distinction, we might expect that there would be no difference between one nirvikalpa state and another, but paradoxically different types of nirvikalpa samādhi are described. For example, a distinction is sometimes made between bāhya nirvikalpa samādhi (external nirvikalpa samādhi) and āntara nirvikalpa samādhi (internal nirvikalpa samādhi). However a more important distinction made by Sri Ramana was between kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi (‘wooden’ nirvikalpa samādhi, that is, a nirvikalpa state in which the body and mind remain like a log of word, unresponsive and unaware of the outside world) and sahaja nirvikalpa samādhi (natural nirvikalpa samādhi, that is, our natural state of pure self-awareness, in which nothing other than ‘I’ is experienced, but in which the body and mind may seem to be functioning normally in the view of any other person).

Another term that is used to describe kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi is kēvala nirvikalpa samādhi (solitary or isolated nirvikalpa samādhi), and though it is a sleep-like state, it is distinguished from sleep by the degree of clarity that is said to be experienced in it. To illustrate this difference, Sri Ramana sometimes said that in sleep the mind is sunk in darkness whereas in kēvala nirvikalpa samādhi it is sunk in light. However, in other contexts he said that sleep is a state of darkness only from the perspective of the waking mind, because in sleep we do experience ‘I am’, though not with perfect clarity. Likewise, ‘I am’ is experienced in kēvala nirvikalpa samādhi, but not with perfect clarity.

In both these states, sleep and kāṣṭha (or kēvala) nirvikalpa samādhi, though the mind has subsided (and hence there is awareness of nothing other than ‘I am’), it has not been destroyed, because our clarity of self-awareness is still to a greater or lesser extent clouded and obscured. Sleep is a state that the mind enters when it is simply too tired to continue attending to anything else, and kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi is a state that the mind enters by an artificial means such as prāṇāyāma or some other such yōgic practice.

What clouds and obscures our natural clarity of self-awareness in sleep or kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi is what is called āvaraṇa: the veiling or obscuring power of māyā, which is the fundamental form of māyā, being the self-forgetfulness or lack of clarity of self-awareness that enables all its other effects to manifest. The other effects of māyā are caused by its secondary form, which is called vikṣēpa: its power of projection, scattering, dispersion, dissipation, confusion or agitation.  Āvaraṇa is like the darkness in a cinema, which is required in order for any picture to be seen on the screen, whereas vikṣēpa is like the power that projects the diverse pictures that appear on the screen.

In waking and dream both āvaraṇa and vikṣēpa are functioning, so we experience both a basic lack of clarity of self-awareness (that is, though we are aware that I am, we are not clearly aware what I am) and a diverse display of other things (thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a seemingly outside world and so on), whereas in sleep and kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi what persists is only āvaraṇa, because vikṣēpa has temporarily ceased to function, so we experience only the same basic lack of clarity of self-awareness. Until āvaraṇa (this basic lack of clarity of self-awareness) is destroyed by absolute clarity of self-awareness, vikṣēpa cannot be destroyed, but will cease functioning only temporarily and will continue to reappear again and again.

To destroy vikṣēpa we must destroy its root cause, āvaraṇa, and to destroy āvaraṇa we must experience what this ‘I’ actually is by focusing our entire attention keenly and vigilantly on it alone. However, since we cannot make any effort to attend keenly to ‘I’ either in sleep or in kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi, we can try to experience perfect clarity of self-awareness only when we have risen from either of these states.

In contrast to either of these states, sahaja nirvikalpa samādhi is our natural state of clear self-awareness, because it is a state that the mind enters only by the practice of self-attentiveness: that is, by attending only to ‘I’. That is, the nirvikalpa samādhi that results from attending only to ‘I’ is sahaja nirvikalpa samādhi, whereas the nirvikalpa samādhi that results from attending to anything else is kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi. The former will weaken and eventually destroy all our viṣaya-vāsanās or desires to experience anything other than ‘I’, and thus it will undermine and destroy the mind, which seems to exist only when it experiences something other than ‘I’, whereas the latter is just a state of temporary subsidence of mind, in which all its viṣaya-vāsanās remain intact, although temporarily dormant.

Sri Ramana generally used the term sahaja nirvikalpa samādhi, or simply sahaja samādhi as he more frequently called it, to describe our natural state of absolutely clear self-knowledge, which is our goal, but he also sometimes used it to describe the practice of self-investigation or self-attentiveness, which is the only means by which we can attain this goal. For example, in the introduction (avatārikai) that he wrote to his Tamil translation of Sri Adi Sankara’s Dṛg-Dṛśya-Vivēka (Discrimination between the Seer and the Seen), he wrote:

[…] when that āvaraṇa [the veiling power of māyā, which obscures our natural clarity of self-awareness] is removed by the practice of sahaja samādhi, which is always scrutinising oneself alone without bāhyāntara-dṛṣṭi-bhēda [any difference or distinction between seeing what seems external or what seems internal], only advitīya brahmātma-svarūpa [our own essential self, which is brahman, the absolute reality, the ‘one without a second’] will remain and shine […]

This practice of sahaja samādhi (which he defines here as investigating, scrutinising or attending only to oneself, ‘I’) is the only type of samādhi that he advised us to practise or try to achieve, because it is the only practice that will destroy our fundamental illusion that we are this mind that we now experience as ‘I’. That is, unless we attend only to ‘I’, we cannot experience what we really are, and unless we experience what we really are we cannot destroy the illusion that we are this mind.

Since all that we need to do in order to experience what we really are is to attend only to ‘I’, and since we do not need to know about any type of samādhi in order to attend only to ‘I’, Sri Ramana generally did not speak about samādhi but only emphasised the need for us to try to experience what this ‘I’ actually is. He spoke about this practice in terms of samādhi or discussed the various different types of samādhi only when he was asked questions in such terms, or when he was discussing texts in which such terms are used.

Long before we ever heard of any technical vocabulary such as samādhi or nirvikalpa samādhi, and whether or not we understand what any of these terms mean, we were and always are aware that ‘I am’, so for us to investigate and experience what this ‘I’ actually is it is not necessary for us to understand or even to know about these terms. Therefore, rather than confusing us with any such unnecessary or unfamiliar terminology, Sri Ramana simply advised us to investigate and try to experience what this ‘I’ actually is: who am I?

Because the terms samādhi and nirvikalpa samādhi are used to denote various different states, they are not precisely defined terms and can therefore lead to confusion. Therefore, rather than discussing all the different types of samādhi, Sri Ramana classified any state of subsidence of mind as being either manōlaya (temporary subsidence of mind) or manōnāśa (destruction or permanent subsidence of mind). As he says in verse 13 of Upadēśa Undiyār:

Subsidence [of mind] is [of] two [kinds]: laya [temporary subsidence] and nāśa [destruction]. That [mind] which is lying down [in laya] will rise. If [its] form dies [in nāśa], it will not rise.

The subsidence of mind that is brought about by prāṇāyāma and other practices of rāja yōga is only kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi, which (like sleep) is a form of manōlaya, whereas the subsidence of mind that is brought about by ātma-vicāra or self-attentiveness is sahaja nirvikalpa samādhi, which when achieved perfectly is manōnāśa. As Sri Ramana says in the eighth paragraph of Nāṉ Yār? (Who am I?):

To make the mind subside [permanently], there is no adequate means other than vicāra [self-investigation]. If restrained by other means, the mind will remain as if subsided, [but] will emerge again. Even by prāṇāyāma [breath-restraint], the mind will subside; however, [though] the mind remains subsided so long as the breath remains subsided, when the breath emerges [or becomes manifest] it will also emerge and wander under the sway of [its] vāsanās [dispositions, inclinations, impulses or desires]. […] Therefore prāṇāyāma is just an aid to restrain the mind, but will not bring about manōnāśa [the annihilation of the mind].

Therefore in verse 14 of Upadēśa Undiyār he says:

Only when [one] sends the mind, which subsides [only temporarily] when [one] restrains the breath, on ōr vaṙi [the path of investigation] will its form cease [die or be destroyed].

The Tamil word ōr is both a verb that means to investigate, examine, consider attentively or know, and an adjective that means ‘one’, so ōr vaṙi can either mean the ‘path of investigation’ or the ‘one path’. However, since the only means by which the mind can be destroyed is the path of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra), whichever way we choose to interpret the meaning of ōr vaṙi, it denotes only this one path of self-investigation.

What he wrote in such passages about prāṇāyāma applies equally well to all the other practices of rāja yōga, because they all entail attention to something other than ‘I’ and can therefore bring about only manōlaya and not manōnāśa. Until a yōgi ‘sends the mind on the path of investigation’ (that is, until he or she directs his or her attention only towards ‘I’), he or she will not be able to experience what this ‘I’ really is, and hence will not be able to destroy the illusion that the mind is ‘I’.

What prevents us from experiencing ‘I’ as it really is are our viṣaya-vāsanās, our desires, inclinations or liking to experience anything other than ‘I’, so in order to experience what we really are we need to destroy all our viṣaya-vāsanās, which we can do only by cultivating the liking to experience nothing other than ‘I’, and obviously the only way to cultivate this liking is to practise trying to experience nothing other than ‘I’. Since viṣaya-vāsanās manifest only when the mind is active, and remain dormant when it subsides, we cannot practise self-attentiveness and thereby weaken the hold of our vāsanās so long as our mind is subsided in any state of manōlaya such as sleep or kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi. Therefore Sri Ramana strongly discouraged anyone allowing their mind to subside in kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi, and he used to say that before the mind subsides in any type of manōlaya we should try to attend vigilantly to ‘I’, and that if it has subsided in such as state, as soon as it revives we should resume our practice of self-attentiveness.

To illustrate that kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi will not help us to eradicate our viṣaya-vāsanās Sri Ramana used to tell the following story: A yōgi lived on the banks of the Ganga, where he practised rāja yōga, and he was so adept in his practice that his mind often subsided in kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi. Once after he woke from a long period in such samādhi he felt thirsty, so he asked his disciple to bring him a cup of water from the river. Before his disciple returned with the water, he had again subsided in samādhi, and this time his samādhi was so deep that he remained in it for 300 years, but as soon as he awoke he again asked for water, this time rather angrily, thinking his disciple had been slow to bring it.

Sri Ramana said that this illustrated that viṣaya-vāsanās remain perfectly intact when the mind is subsided in kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi or any other state of manōlaya, because even the last thought that was in the yōgi’s mind before he subsided in samādhi rose again as soon as he woke up. The reason that they are not destroyed in such samādhi, just as they are not destroyed in sleep, is that they are inclinations or likings to experience something other than ‘I’, so they can be weakened and eventually destroyed only when instead allowing our mind to be driven by them we choose instead to try to experience ‘I’ alone.

That is, since we have cultivated our viṣaya-vāsanās by our own volition (that is, by choosing to think of and to try to experience certain viṣayas or things other than ‘I’), we can destroy them only when by a contrary volition (that is, by choosing to attend to and to try to experience nothing other than ‘I’) we cultivate an all-consuming love to experience only ‘I’. This is why in the tenth and eleventh paragraphs of Nāṉ Yār? (Who am I?), which I quoted in full in my answer to your first question above, Sri Ramana said:

Even though viṣaya-vāsanās, which come from time immemorial, rise [as thoughts] in countless numbers like ocean-waves, they will all be destroyed when svarūpa-dhyāna [self-attentiveness] increases and increases. Without giving room even to the doubting thought ‘Is it possible to dissolve so many vāsanās and remain only as self?’ it is necessary to cling tenaciously to self-attentiveness. […]

As long as viṣaya-vāsanās exist in the mind, so long is the investigation who am I necessary. As and when thoughts arise, then and there it is necessary to annihilate them all by vicāra [self-investigation] in the very place from which they arise. […] If one clings fast to uninterrupted svarūpa-smaraṇa [self-remembrance] until one attains svarūpa [one’s own essential self], that alone will be sufficient. So long as enemies [viṣaya-vāsanās] are within the fort [the heart or core of one’s being], they will continue coming out from it. If [one] continues cutting them all down as and when they come, the fort will [eventually] come into [one’s] possession.

NDM: I have seen ‘on-line accounts’ that say that Sri Ramana practiced nirvikalpa samadhi in a cave after his teenage realisation. Some say 3 years, others say 20 years. How truthful are these? For example:

In a cave on the mountain he became absorbed in meditative awareness of immanence for two or three years oblivious of his body, so that insects ate parts of his legs, his body wasted as he was rarely conscious enough to eat, and his hair and fingernails grew to great length. After this his slow return to physical normality took several years. (http://www.philtar.ac.uk/encyclopedia/hindu/ascetic/ramana.html)

Complete Absorption in the Self

He now began his life of complete inner absorption in the great Universal Self. He sat in various places within the temple complex, avoiding contact with people as much as possible. For days, and weeks on end he was lost in samadhi, unconscious of the world and his body. Insects and vermin crawled over his legs and chewed his flesh but he was completely unaware of it. His consciousness was swimming in the vast ocean of Universal Awareness. His body began to lose weight and weaken but he took no notice of it.

I knew nothing, had learned nothing before I came here. Some mysterious power took possession of me and effected a thorough transformation. I knew nothing and planned nothing. When I left home in my 17th year, I was like a speck swept on by a tremendous flood. I knew not my body or the world, whether it was day or night. It was difficult even to open my eyes. The eyelids seemed to be glued down. My body became a mere skeleton. Visitors pitied my plight as they were not aware how blissful I was. It was after years that I came across the term Brahman when I happened to look into some books on Vedanta brought to me. Amused, I said to myself, ‘Is this known as Brahman!?!’ (http://www.cosmicharmony.com/Sp/Ramana/Ramana.htm)

Michael James:  On the day in July 1896 when he was overwhelmed by an intense fear of death, Sri Ramana keenly investigated himself in order to see whether or not ‘I’ is something that would cease to exist when the body dies, and due to the intensity of his self-attentiveness he experienced what ‘I’ actually is, namely the one infinite and eternal reality, other than which nothing exists. Thus his mind or finite (personal) self was completely destroyed in the absolute clarity of pristine self-awareness, so from that moment he remained permanently absorbed in and as the one infinite (transpersonal) self or ‘I am’.

This natural state of complete self-absorption is what he later sometimes described as sahaja samādhi or sahaja nirvikalpa samādhi, as I explained above. So yes, from that day onwards he was permanently absorbed in this state of sahaja nirvikalpa samādhi, but this was not a state that he ever needed to practise after that first brief moment of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra), because at that moment he merged entirely in it, ceasing thereby to exist as anything separate from it.

As he often indicated, either implicitly or explicitly, after merging and becoming one with the infinite ‘I am’, he did not experience anything other than that, so in his view there was neither any body nor any world. When asked about the seeming actions of his body, mind and speech, he said that these exist only in the view of others, but not in his view.

Such statements seem to us to be paradoxical, and so long as we experience duality, which entails the basic distinction between ‘I’ and other, we cannot adequately understand the experience of a jñāni such as Sri Ramana, who experiences nothing other than ‘I’, and in whose view there is neither any action nor anything that could act or do anything. As he says in verse 31 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu:

For those who enjoy tanmayānanda [the ‘bliss composed of it’, namely the real self], which rose [as ‘I [am] I’] destroying the [false] self [the mind or ego], what one [action] exists for doing? They do not know anything other than self, [so] who can [or how to] conceive their state as ‘it is such’?

He also emphasises the actionlessness of the state of non-dual self-knowledge in verse 15 of Upadēśa Undiyār:

When the form of the mind is annihilated, for the great yōgi who is [thereby] established as the reality, there is not a single doing [or action], [because] he has attained his [true] nature [which is actionless being].

The words that I have translated here as ‘a single doing [or action]’ are ōr seyal, and as I explained earlier while discussing the meaning of verse 14 of Upadēśa Undiyār, the Tamil word ōr is both an adjective that means ‘one’ and a verb that means to investigate or know, so ōr seyal can either mean ‘one doing [or action]’ or ‘[any] act of knowing’. Whereas knowing or experiencing anything other than ‘I’ is an action or ‘doing’, because it entails a movement of our attention away from ourself towards something that seems to be other than ourself, knowing or experiencing only ‘I’ is not an action but is the state of just being (summā iruppadu), because ‘I’ is inherently self-aware, so its very nature is to experience itself as ‘I am’, and to experience itself thus its attention need not move anywhere, but just has to rest peacefully in and as its source, ‘I am’.

This non-doing nature of self-knowledge is also emphasised and explained by Sri Ramana in verse 26 of Upadēśa Undiyār:

Being self alone is knowing self, because self is devoid of two. This is tanmaya-niṣṭhā [‘abidance composed of it’, that is, the state of being firmly established as tat or ‘it’, the one absolute reality called brahman, which is our real self].

As he often explained, we do not have two selves or two ‘I’s, so self-knowledge is not a state in which one ‘I’ knows another ‘I’, but is just the state in which ‘I’ experiences itself by just being itself. Because we now like to experience things other than ‘I’, it seems to us that we need to make effort to experience only ‘I’, but when our mind is destroyed by perfectly clear self-awareness, its liking to experience other things will be destroyed along with it, after which we will find that experiencing nothing other than ‘I’ requires no effort, because pure non-dual self-awareness is our very nature. This is why in verse 15 Sri Ramana said, ‘[…] there is no act of knowing, [because] he has attained his [true] nature’.

However, though Sri Ramana was firmly established in this state of absolutely non-dual and otherless self-knowledge (which is what is called sahaja nirvikalpa samādhi, the natural state of absorption, which is completely devoid of any vikalpa, change or difference), and though he therefore did not experience himself as a body or mind, or experience anything else other than ‘I am’, in our view he continued to exist as a body, which travelled from Madurai (the town when he confronted his intense fear of death and thereby experienced what ‘I’ really is) to Tiruvannamalai and lived there for the next 54 years, until its death in 1950.

During those 54 years his body underwent various changes. For its first few years in Tiruvannamalai it spent most of the time sitting oblivious to the world, so much so that for much of the first two or three months it sat in a neglected shrine called Patala Lingam (situated under the thousand-pillared hall in a corner of the vast Arunachaleswara Temple) unnoticed by anyone and without eating any food or even moving, allowing ants or other insects to feed on its thighs. When it was eventually found there, no one was able to wake it, so they gently lifted it to take it to a cleaner place, and since the coagulated blood, pus and scabs on its thighs had stuck to the filthy insect-infested ground on which it was sitting, the wounds were opened and began to bleed afresh, but still it showed no signs of waking.

Naturally people took such signs of intense self-absorption to mean that he was practising nirvikalpa samādhi, but he later explained that that was not the case, because whether his body was active or remained like a log of wood, he was always effortlessly absorbed only in self. Over the next few years his body gradually began to resume normal activities, but for several years he did not speak. People assumed that this meant he was observing a vow of silence, but he later said that his silence then was not deliberate, but that he had just lost the habit of speaking and felt no inclination to resume.

However, he explained all such things only many years later, so in the early years people imagined all sorts of things about his state, and the general belief was that when he first came to Tiruvannamalai he was practising some sort of intense tapas (spiritual austerity) in order to achieve liberation. He was unconcerned about such  rumours and beliefs, so for many years he did not refute them, but when people later began to ask him what he was actually doing at that time, he made it clear that he had already achieved in Madurai all that needed to be achieved. As he once cryptically remarked in this context: ‘The sun that rose in Madurai is the same sun that is shining here in Tiruvannamalai. It has not changed in the least’.

Though he thus refuted many of the old beliefs about and misinterpretations of his state in those early years, the remnants of such beliefs still tend to persist in the popular imagination, because it is truly difficult for any of us to understand his state until we ourself experience it. This is why in various accounts of his life there are still some implications that he was practising nirvikalpa samādhi or some such thing, and almost all accounts inevitably seem to suggest that he was still a person who had certain personal experiences. So long as we consider him to be the person that he seemed to be, rather than the one infinite reality that we each experience as ‘I am’, we cannot avoid thinking of him in terms of someone who experienced the same some of diversity and otherness that we each experience.

One on the clearest examples of how emphatically he later refuted the belief that he was practising or seeking to achieve anything during his early years in Tiruvannamalai is what he said in reply to Prof. DS Sarma on 4^th October 1946. What he replied to Sarma in Tamil on that day was recorded by Sarma in English and sent to him for his approval before Sarma published it in an article in The Vedanta Kesari (vol. 33, No. 9: January 1947, p.327), and since then it has been reproduced in many books and journal such as Hinduism Through the Ages by DS Sarma, Sri Ramana Reminiscences by GV Subbaramayya and The Mountain Path (April 1977, pp. 80-1). It was also recorded independently by Devaraja Mudaliar in Day By Day with Bhagavan (entry dated 4-10-46: 2002 edition, pp. 317-8). What Sarma recorded is that he asked Sri Ramana:

In the lives of the western mystics we find descriptions of what is called the mystic way with the three well-marked stages of purgation, illumination and union. The purgatory stage corresponds to what we call the sādhana period. Was there any such period in the life of Bhagavan?

To this Sri Ramana replied emphatically:

I know no such period. I never performed any prāṇāyāma or japa. I knew no mantras. I had no idea of meditation or contemplation. Even when I came to hear of such things later I was never attracted by them. Even now my mind refuses to pay any attention to them. Sādhana [spiritual practice] implies an object to be gained and the means of gaining it. What is there to be gained which we do not already possess? In meditation, concentration and contemplation, what we have to do is only not to think of anything, but to be still. Then we shall be in our natural state. This natural state is given many names — mōkṣa, jñāna, ātma, etc., and these give rise to many controversies. There was a time when I used to remain with my eyes closed. That does not mean that I was practising any sādhana then. Even now I sometimes remain with my eyes closed. If people choose to say that I am doing some sādhana at the moment, let them say so. It makes no difference to me. People seem to think that by practising some elaborate sādhana the Self would some day descend upon them as something very big and with tremendous glory and they would then have what is called sākṣātkāram [‘making evident’: that is, evident perception or ‘realisation’]. The Self is sākṣāt [evident], all right, but there is no kāram [making] or kṛtam [made] about it. The word kāram implies one’s doing something. But the Self is realized not by one’s doing something, but by one’s refraining from doing anything — by remaining still and being simply what one really is.

‘What one really is’ is something that is clearly and perfectly self-aware, so ‘remaining still and being simply what one really is’ means just being calmly and clearly self-aware without any action of mind, speech or body. This practice or ‘path’ of just being (summā iruppadu) is clearly described by Sri Ramana in verse 4 of Āṉma-Viddai:

To untie the bonds beginning with karma [that is, the bonds of action and of all that results from it], [and] to rise above the ruin beginning with birth [that is, to transcend and become free from the miseries of embodied existence, which begins with birth and ends with death], [rather] than any [other] path, this path [ātma-vicāra] is exceedingly easy. When [one] just is, having settled [calmly as pure self-awareness] without even the least karma [action] of mind, speech or body, ah, in [one’s] heart [the innermost core of one’s being] the light of self [will shine forth clearly as ‘I am I’]. [Having thereby drowned and lost our finite self in this perfectly peaceful and infinitely clear state of pure self-awareness, we will discover it to be our] eternal experience. Fear will not exist. The ocean of [infinite] bliss alone [will remain].

As I explained earlier, attending to (or experiencing) anything other than ‘I’ is an action (karma), whereas being self-attentive (experiencing nothing other than ‘I’) is not an action but our natural state of being. Therefore what Sri Ramana describes in this verse as sol māṉada taṉuviṉ kaṉmādi siṟidiṉḏṟi summā amarndirukka (when [one] just is, having settled without even the least action of mind, speech or body) is just the state of pure self-attentiveness that he also described as ātma-vicāra (self-investigation).

This is the easiest of all paths or spiritual practices, because every other path entails attending to something other than ‘I’, and is therefore an action, whereas this path entails attending only to ‘I’, so it is not an action but our natural state of pure self-aware being. Moreover, not only is this the easiest path, but it is also the only path that will lead us directly to our goal, because our goal is the action-free state of pure self-awareness, so it can be attained only by action-free pure self-awareness. Any other path can at best only purify the mind and thereby enable it to understand that the only way to experience ‘I’ as it actually is is to try to experience it alone, in complete isolation from everything else, including all actions of mind, speech or body.

Though kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi is also a state that is devoid of any action of mind, speech or body, it is not a sādhana or practice, but is a state in which the mind subsides as a result of some practice that entails attending to something other than ‘I’. Because it results in this way, it is a state devoid of clear self-awareness, so it cannot help one to experience ‘I’ as it really is.

In order for us to experience ourself as we really are, we must focus our entire attention upon this ‘I’. As Sri Ramana repeatedly made clear, there is no other means by which we can experience what we actually are and thereby liberate ourself not only from all karmas and their fruits (actions and their consequences) but also from the instruments that do karmas (namely the mind, speech and body) and from what experiences their fruit or consequences (namely the mind).

Kāṣṭha nirvikalpa samādhi or any other type of samādhi except sahaja samādhi is just a temporary lull (laya) in the activity of the mind, like the lull that we effortlessly enjoy every day in deep sleep, but it will not bring about complete annihilation of mind (manōnāśa), because it is not a state of clear self-awareness. Since absolutely clear self-awareness is our goal, the only means by which we can achieve it is absolutely clear self-awareness, so by practising ātma-vicāra or keenly focused self-attentiveness we must try to experience our natural state of absolutely clear self-awareness.

This is the sum and substance of the simple and clear teachings that Sri Ramana has given us based upon what he discovered from his own experience.