Michael mentioned in one of his recent videos (I’ll be paraphrasing) that one of the problems of vedantic teachings is that historically, the simple teachings of the Upanishads started to be complicated to understand because all the commentaries, and the commentaries on the commentaries (and the commentaries on the commentaries on the commentaries!) appeared...
I think that I understand your explanation on the descending and ascending process but when I try to write something on the subject, I become wordless-thoughtless and, instead of feeling freedom, since there are not walls from every angle which, at first, enabled me to turn towards myself to a great extent, now I’m having the opposite feeling of being immured and paralyzed and don’t know how to proceed from here. Does it make any sense? Why is it so?
வெளிவிட யங்களை விட்டு மனந்தன்
னொளியுரு வோர்தலே யுந்தீபற
வுண்மை யுணர்ச்சியா முந்தீபற.
அகமுகமா ரந்த வமலமதி தன்னா
லகமிதுதா னெங்கெழுமென் றாய்ந்தே — யகவுருவை
நன்கறிந்து முந்நீர் நதிபோலு மோயுமே
யுன்கணரு ணாசலனே யோர்.
In an interview when you were asked “When you talk to me now, is there feeling of pure awareness?” you responded that “it is always there in the background” (because of many years of practice) even though you don’t experience it in its purity. Then you added that “the distinction between pure awareness and the awareness that we call mind or ego, the awareness of things, that distinction becomes clearer and clearer.”
Can you tell from your experience if practicing Self investigation is something that is started in a “wrong” manner and evolves into the correct practice over the years?This article is adapted from the reply I wrote to him.
I think I have the correct intellectual understanding of how to perform Self investigation but in practice I get trapped again and again: I try to be aware of myself alone but as I cannot be objectified my attention is always landing on subtle objects. It takes a while to realize this, then I try to redirect my attention to myself again which results in dwelling on another subtle object and so on. I feel that directing my attention happens only in the realm of the mind and I seem to be unable to investigate into the one who is directing his attention/ attend to myself because I am not skilled enough to attend to anything other than objects. Has this search with my attention landing on objects to go on until I gain the skill to transcend it and attend to myself?
And isn’t the attitude of “Now I will try to direct my attention to myself” in itself wrong because the I in this sentence can only attend to objects? Don’t I have to investigate instead into from where this intention arose? Because that I am unable to do right now.
I have just finished reading your article— There is only one ‘I’, and investigation will reveal that it is not a finite ego but the infinite self.
Thank you for this video, Michael. We can think of the dream state only with respect to (what seems to be) the waking state. So when Bhagavan says that waking state also is only a dream, how to understand this statement? Since we know the dream state only with respect to this waking state, if the waking state too is a dream, then there is no longer any standard left against which to place dream and thus to make sense of it. Typing this question, it seems like the standard must be the state of deep sleep. So basically, there is no state that can be called the waking state? Only dream and sleep? Also, it seems like no rational person will deny that this world is quite possibly only a dream or mental imagination. But how can we be sure that we can ‘wake’ up from this dream, and how? Bhagavan has taught that this is possible, should we take this on faith? And try to experience it ourselves through our practice? I ask because previously, I have followed several different people, some whose teachings were very superficial although at that time I may have felt otherwise, but with Bhagavan’s teachings I feel sure that I don’t have to search any further, I don’t have to dig any more wells, as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa said in an analogy. But this feeling is not sufficiently empowered by a clarity of understanding Bhagavan’s teachings or doing deep self-investigation, but largely just a feeling in my heart, if [I] may put it like that. So I am still very immature and lacking in both bhakti and vairagya.The following is my reply to this:
If I give it some thought, and try to recall last night’s dream, it becomes quite clear that in dream I am aware of myself without being aware of this body. But if I try to see the same thing (that I am aware of myself without being aware of this body) regarding dreamless sleep, it is not very clear. Why is it that the memory of having existed in dream is much clearer than the memory of having existed in dreamless sleep? Or is it that in the case of dream, what is clearer to me is only the memory of having existed as some body, and not the memory of simply existing?
Desires, fears, etc belong to the ego or to the person? The person is insentient and cannot desire or fear anything, so they must belong to ego, I suppose. But then why do these desires and fears have such a personal nature? For example, the desire for money, lust, status, etc, they are only the body’s desires. Is it that when ego identifies this body as ‘I’, it takes this body’s desires and fears to be its own? Or are desires and fears only the ego’s desires and fears?
Yes, the mind is māyā, so its nature is to distort and confuse, making what is simple seem complicated, what is clear seem clouded, what is plain seem obscure, what is obvious into something mysterious and what is subtle into something gross. The only way for us to overcome this natural tendency of the mind is to persistently turn within to see what we actually are, which is not this mind but just the clear light of pure and infinite self-awareness.
I understand that there is one ego, which creates the illusion of many people and a world. If one person in this illusion, i.e. you or I, becomes realized, how is that going to destroy the ego as a whole? When Ramana became realized, this didn’t stop the world appearing for me. I know Ramana when asked about others said there are no others and if all is a dream of course he is correct, but others myself including continue to dream we exist despite Ramana becoming enlightened. Is realization a gradual breaking down of the ego individual by individual?The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to her:
My second question: What is Shakti? I have looked it up and it seems to say it is energy which creates and that it is part of who we naturally are. This seems contradictory to how I now see realization as being. I now see realization as a kind of nothingness, not dissimilar to deep sleep. Can you remind me is this correct? Is shakti the same as ego and the cause of illusion?
Am I correct to say the following? At the beginning, there was only true self. Then, somehow or other, it deluded itself and believed it to be the ego — which is the root of everything. Then, the ego got reborn over and over. What we are trying to do now is to turn what seems to be the ego within and in so doing, the ego dissolves, revealing true self that it always has been — and thus, ending all our sufferings.
My question is: If our true self is always only aware of itself, how did it delude itself at the very beginning? The “I thought” arises only if one looks outside, correct? So, if our true self is only aware of itself, how does it delude itself to begin with?
The philosophy of advaita is interpreted by people in various ways according to the purity of their minds, so there are many people who consider themselves to be advaitins yet who do not accept dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda [the contention (vāda) that perception (dṛṣṭi) is causally antecedent to creation (sṛṣṭi), or in other words that we create phenomena only by perceiving them, just as we do in dream], because for them it seems to be too radical an interpretation of advaita, so they interpret the ancient texts of advaita according to sṛṣṭi-dṛṣṭi-vāda, the contention that creation is causally antecedent to perception, and that the world therefore exists prior to and independent of our perception of it. Those who interpret advaita in this way do not accept ēka-jīva-vāda, the contention that there is only one jīva, ego or perceiver (which is one of the basic implications of dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda), and since they believe that phenomena exist independent of ego’s perception of them, they do not accept that ego alone is what projects all phenomena, and hence they interpret ancient texts to mean that what projects everything is not ego or mind but only brahman (or brahman as īśvara, God, rather than brahman as ego).
If we mistake a rope to be a dangerous snake, we cannot kill that snake by beating it but only by looking at it very carefully, because if we look at it carefully enough we will see that it is only a harmless rope and was therefore never the snake that it seemed to be. Likewise, since we now mistake ourself to be ego, the false awareness ‘I am this body’, we cannot kill this ego by any means other than by looking at it very carefully, because if we look at it carefully enough we will see that it is only pure and infinite awareness and was therefore never the body-mixed and hence limited awareness that it seemed to be.
Today a friend wrote to me:
I noticed today in GVK verse 622, Bhagavan is recorded as saying: “When rightly considered, nothing will be more wonderful and laughable than one’s toiling very much through some sadhana to attain Self in the same manner as one toils to attain other objects, even though one really ever remains as the non-dual Self.”
I am ‘excited’. For the first time I read about or understood the distinction between the illusory nature of the world and that of the individual — John Grimes’ book p. 147 and 148. Seeing the rope as snake and seeing the white conch shell as yellow conch shell due to the unseen or unrecognized yellow glass. Wonderful explanation that struck me.The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to him:
Brahman manifesting as world, but seeing only the world as real is illusion like seeing the rope as snake. The individual though only brahman, and also felt as I, but due to ego (yellow glass), mistaking I as me or mine.
Thus while both are illusions, the second one is that in aspect or nature of ‘I’, although I is seen or experienced. When the ignorance is removed, it will be known that it is brahman that was being all the while experienced hitherto also as ‘I’ — that is there are not two ‘I’s.
Michael once wrote to me (in reply to one of my emails):Referring to this, another friend using the pseudonym ‘ādhāra’ wrote a comment saying:
The mind knows that the chair is a chair, an object of wood, etc., but this is not what the chair actually is. If we analyse a little deeper, both the chair and the wood are ideas in our mind, and we have no way of proving to ourself that any chair or wood actually exists independent of our ideas of them. Hence Bhagavan says that the whole world is nothing but ideas or thoughts, as for example in the fourth and fourteenth paragraphs of Nan Yar?:
Except thoughts [or ideas], there is separately no such thing as ‘world’.
What is called the world is only thought.
However, Bhagavan did not say that we as an ego are excluded from the “world”. On the contrary it is said that we are part of the world in waking and dreaming. So we can conclude that we too are only an idea or a thought or a projection.The following is my reply to this:
We definitely do not even have proof/evidence that we exist independent of our idea of that. Therefore we cannot reasonable/well-founded have to presume that we are more than an idea. There is no evidence to support this thesis.
Nevertheless we can put our trust in Bhagavan Ramana because he inspires confidence and looks trustworthy. To follow Bhagavan’s teaching is even urgently necessary.
