Why to write about self?

A question that I am asked quite frequently is why I take so much trouble to write about the nature of self and the means by which we can know ourself as we really are, when all that we really need to do is just to be vigilantly self-attentive. For example, a friend wrote to me recently asking:

If we are Infinite Self (Being), without qualities and interests, wherefrom comes the urge or interest to engage in so much writing on the subject of the Self.

If the mind is a myth, is then also all your writing a myth? We can say yes, but this ultimate myth (concept) of Self will destroy all other myths and concepts.

Is then your desire to write so much on the subject of the Self, satisfying your spiritual need, or is a consequence of your compassion for deceived suffering souls?

The following is the reply that I wrote:

Yes, the mind is certainly a myth, māyā, a figment of our self-deceiving power of imagination. Therefore our whole mind-centred life is also just a myth, as is our writing or any other activity that we may do. In fact everything that this unreal mind experiences is a myth, except for its fundamental knowledge ‘I am’, which alone is real.

Why then should there be any urge to write about self and the means to know it as it really is?

The answer is that so long as we experience ourself as this mind, we experience it and everything known by it as real. So long as we are dreaming, the dream is real for us. Though we have understood intellectually that all this is unreal, our experience is still that it is real.

We can actually experience the truth that the mind and all it knows is unreal only when we wake up from this dream by knowing ourself as we really are, and to know ourself as we really are we must withdraw our attention from all thoughts — all objective knowledge, everything other than ‘I’ — and focus it entirely upon ourself.

To practise this successfully requires intense bhakti and vairāgya — love to know and to be our real self, and freedom from desire for anything else — and we can gain such intense bhakti and vairāgya only by persevering patiently in our practice of self-attentiveness.

Until our bhakti and vairāgya are sufficiently intense, we will repeatedly succumb to pramāda or self-negligence, slipping down from our natural state of vigilant self-attentiveness or clear self-consciousness and thereby experiencing this mind and its body-bound life as real. Since we are not yet able to remain free of pramāda constantly, we have to wean our mind gradually away from its infatuation with this body-bound life by doing everything that we can to draw it back to self.

In this struggle to overcome pramāda, our nididhyāsana or practice of self-attentiveness will be greatly aided by śravaṇa and manana — studying and reflecting upon the teachings of our guru, Sri Ramana. For me any writing that I do is a form of manana, and therefore I write in order to keep my mind dwelling upon the need to be constantly self-attentive.

In other words, I write primarily for my own spiritual benefit, but if in this dream life — in which other people seem to be as real as our mind, which alone knows them — there are people who feel it beneficial to read what I have written, I am happy to share my writings with them.

I suppose you could call it compassion, but it is just like the compassion that a group of terminally ill patients would feel for each other. We are all after all in the same boat, struggling to overcome the self-imposed delusion in which we each now find ourself.

How to start practising atma-vichara?

A friend wrote to me recently asking:

How to start with atma vichara?? Some says, “look at your thoughts”, some says, “see from where it occurs”, some says “see who does all this” — what in this is to be followed??? doesnt the one sees is also mind???

Even though always the grace of guru is showered, why is that we cannot have atma vichara always???

Please kindly clarify me in the approach of atma vichara because I many times doubt whether the way of vichara that I do is right.

The following is the reply that I wrote:

Ātma-vichāra is not looking at any thought other than our primal thought ‘I’, which thinks all other thoughts.

All other thoughts are anātma (non-self), anya (other than ourself) and jaḍa (non-conscious), and hence we cannot know our real self by looking at them. We are constantly looking at our thoughts throughout our waking and dream states, but we do not thereby know our real self. In fact, our attention to thoughts is the obstacle that obscures our knowledge of ourself, because we can attend to thoughts only when we experience ourself as this thinking mind.

The only thought that we should look at in order to know ourself as we really are is our primal thought ‘I’, because unlike all other thoughts, none of which are conscious, this thinking thought ‘I’ is conscious, both of itself and of the thoughts that it is thinking. That is, this thinking thought ‘I’ is the knowing subject, whereas all other thoughts are just objects known by it.

This thinking thought ‘I’ is conscious because it is chit-jaḍa-granthi, the ‘knot’ that binds consciousness to the non-conscious. That is, it is an entangled mixture of our ever-conscious real self, ‘I am’, and this non-conscious body (which is only a thought or imagination) and other thoughts, which inevitably arise when we imagine ourself to be this body.

In this entangled mixture, ‘I am this body’, the only real element is our fundamental consciousness ‘I am’. The other element, ‘this body’, is merely an imagination, and hence it is created only by our act of thinking. When we do not think anything, as in deep sleep, this body does not exist, just as a dream-body does not exist when we are not dreaming.

Since that which exists in all our three states of consciousness, waking, dream and sleep, is only our fundamental consciousness of being, ‘I am’, it alone is real, and everything else is just a false figment of our imagination. Since we experience our present waking body only in waking and not in dream or sleep, and since we experience a dream-body only in a dream and not in waking or sleep, these bodies are mere transitory appearances, and hence they cannot be real but are just thoughts that arise along with our thinking mind.

Of all the things that we think or imagine, the root is only our thinking thought ‘I’, which is our mind, the ephemeral consciousness that always experiences itself as ‘I am this body, a person called so-and-so’. Thus this false experience ‘I am this body’ is our primal imagination, and because it obscures the real nature of ourself, our pure ‘I am’, it enables us to imagine all other thoughts.

Since the only reality in our thinking thought ‘I’, which is this primal imagination ‘I am this body’, is our essential consciousness of being, ‘I am’, if we look at it carefully we will see the reality that underlies its false appearance, just as if we look carefully at an imaginary snake we will see the rope, which is the reality that underlies its false appearance.

Since no other thought contains this essential element of self-consciousness, ‘I am’, by looking at any other thought we will not be able to recognise it the reality that underlies it, no matter how long and carefully we may look at it. Looking at other thoughts is like looking at the pictures on a cinema screen, whereas looking at our thinking thought ‘I’ is like looking back at the light that projects those pictures.

If we were to look directly at the light shining out of a cinema projector, we would see not only the rapidly moving film in front of the light, but would also see the bright unmoving light behind that moving film. At first the moving film may seem to obscure the unmoving light behind it, but if we continue to stare at it steadily, our eyes will be dazzled by the light and hence we will cease to see anything other than that.

Likewise, when we look directly into the core of our consciousness, ‘I am’, its true clarity may at first seem to be obscured by an unceasing flow of thoughts, but if we continue to keep our attention fixed steadily upon it, it will shine ever more brightly and clearly and will thereby gradually dissolve all the shadowy appearance of thoughts, until it finally shines alone in all its infinite splendour and non-dual glory.

You ask what is to be followed, ‘look at your thoughts’, ‘see from where it occurs’ or ‘see who does all this’. As I have explained above, ātma-vichāra is not looking at any thought other than our primal thought ‘I’, so we should not follow the advice of anyone who says ‘look at your thoughts’, but we can follow either or both of the other two instructions, ‘see from where it occurs’ and ‘see who does all this’, which both mean essentially the same thing.

From where do all thoughts occur? They occur, arise or appear only from ourself, the ‘I’ who think them, and not from anything else. Therefore ‘seeing from where thoughts occur’ means seeing ourself, the thinking ‘I’, in whose imagination and by whose imagination all thoughts are formed.

Likewise, who does all this? Everything — every thought, word and deed — is done only by this same thinking ‘I’. Even though physical actions may appear to be done by our body, and words may appear to be spoken by our voice, our body and voice are both only instruments by which our mind acts. All bodily actions and words originate from our thoughts, and those thoughts are all thought only by ‘I’, the primal thought, which is our thinking mind. Therefore ‘seeing who does all this’ means seeing ourself, the ‘I’ that feels ‘I am thinking’, ‘I am speaking’ and ‘I am doing’.

Since this thinking, speaking and doing ‘I’ appears in waking and dream but disappears in sleep, it is not our real ‘I’, but is only an impostor who poses as ‘I’. However, it could not pose as ‘I’ if it did not contain at least an element of our real consciousness ‘I’, so when we see it very carefully, we will come to see the real ‘I’ that underlies and supports it, enabling it to appear as ‘I’.

That is, when we look carefully at this false thinking ‘I’, concentrating our entire attention upon it, we will see beyond the body and other imaginary adjuncts that we have superimposed upon it and will thereby recognise the pure adjunct-free consciousness ‘I’ that underlies it, just as when we look very carefully at the imaginary snake, we will see beyond its superficial appearance and will recognise that it is actually only a rope.

Our real ‘I’ does not think or do anything, but just is. That is, its essential nature is just being, and it is ever untouched by any thought or action. The ‘I’ that thinks and does action is only a superficial and transitory appearance, an illusion that exists as such only in its own self-deceiving imagination, but that which seems to appear thus as this false thinking and doing ‘I’ is only our real being ‘I’. Therefore when we examine the appearance carefully, we will come to see it as it really is — that is, as the thought-free, action-free, non-dual being ‘I’.

You also asked, ‘doesnt the one sees is also mind?’ (by which I assume you meant, ‘isn’t the one who sees also mind?’). Yes, that which makes effort to see itself, the false thinking ‘I’, is only our mind, which is nothing other than this thinking ‘I’ itself.

Our real being ‘I’ always knows itself perfectly clearly, because its nature is absolutely pure self-consciousness, so it does not need to make any effort to practice ātma-vichāra. That which needs to make effort to know itself as it really is is only our mind, the false thinking ‘I’.

When this mind makes effort to know ‘who am I?’ by looking very carefully at itself, it automatically subsides and merges in its real state of clear thought-free self-conscious being, and thus it experiences itself as the real being ‘I’ that it always truly is. That is, this mind rises and is active only so long as it attends to other thoughts — that is, to anything other than itself — but when it tries instead to attend only to itself, it subsides and ceases to be active, because without the imaginary support of anything other than itself this mind cannot stand or appear to exist.

When the illusion of thinking and doing is superimposed upon our being ‘I’, it appears to be this thinking ‘I’, our mind or ego, so our mind depends upon its constant activity of thinking in order to sustain its seeming existence. Thinking is the activity of attending to something that appears to be other than ourself, so it will cease when we focus our entire attention exclusively upon ourself, and thus our thinking mind will subside in our natural state of clear self-conscious being, in which it will cease to be this thinking ‘I’ and will instead remain as the being ‘I’ that it always really is.

Finally you ask, ‘Even though always the grace of guru is showered, why is that we cannot have atma vichara always?’ Grace is always abundantly available in our heart, where it shines clearly as our real consciousness, ‘I am’, but to benefit from it fully we must surrender ourself to it entirely by making our attention ahamukham (turning it to face selfwards) and thereby subsiding within.

We can keep our attention fixed on ourself only to the extent to which we have genuine love to do so. So long as we still have desire to experience anything other than our real self, our desires will impel us to think of those things and thus we will repeatedly succumb to pramāda or self-negligence, slipping down from our natural state of vigilant self-attentiveness or clear self-consciousness.

Whatever love we now have to turn away from the objects of our desires and to attend only to our real self, ‘I am’, has been enkindled in our heart only by the grace of guru, and having once enkindled the flame of this love, grace will continue to protect it, nurture it and help it to flourish, just as a gardener would protect and nurture a beautiful plant that he has grown from seed.

Grace is certainly doing its part, as it always has and always will, so it is up to us to do our part by surrendering ourself to it, attending to it exclusively and thereby allowing it to swallow us in the perfect clarity of pure self-consciousness, which is its true form. The more we persevere in our effort to attend only to self, the more clearly the light of grace will shine in our heart as ‘I am’, and the more it will thereby enkindle our love to be ever self-attentive.

Our love to be self-attentive is true bhakti — svātma-bhakti or love for our own self — and its intensity is directly proportionate to the intensity of our vairāgya or freedom from desire to attend to anything other than ourself. We desire to attend to other things only because of our lack of true vivēka, discrimination or right judgement — the ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal, the eternal and the ephemeral, and to discern that true happiness exists only in our real self and not in any ephemeral appearance such as our mind or the objects of its desires.

True vivēka can arise only from the inner clarity of mind and heart that is enkindled in us by the clear light of grace, which always shines within us as ‘I am’. Therefore when we attend to our essential consciousness of being, ‘I am’, we are opening our heart to the influence of grace, allowing it to shine clearly within us and thereby to enkindle and nourish the clarity of true vivēka in our heart.

When we begin to practice ātma-vichāra — self-investigation or self-attentiveness — we are starting a process that will escalate with ever-increasing momentum, like a snowball rolling down a hill, because the more we attend to ‘I am’, the more clearly we will experience it, and the more clearly we experience it, the more brightly the clarity of true vivēka will shine in our heart, thereby enabling us to free ourself from our desires and to love to be self-attentive ever more intensely, until eventually our mind will be swallowed forever in the absolute clarity of pristinely pure self-consciousness.

Atma-vichara – the practice of 'looking at' or 'seeking' ourself

A friend wrote to me recently asking:

I was wondering if you are familiar with John Sherman (http://www.riverganga.org/) and his teaching and if you think what he says is the same as what you are saying self-inquiry is? John constantly says what he is teaching is to simply look at yourself. I asked you once before about “The Most Rapid and Direct Means to Eternal Bliss,” at that time you had indicated that the approach was the same as what you were saying on your blog and in your book.

The following is adapted from the reply that I wrote:

I had not heard of John Sherman until I read your mail, but I just now looked at his website and read part of one transcript, A Worldwide Meeting with John Sherman - November 1, 2008. To be honest I was not very impressed by what I read, because it appears to me that he does not have a truly deep or subtle understanding of Sri Ramana’s teachings.

For example, in one passage in this transcript he says:

... there’s an extremely important distinction to be made between the verbs “to seek” and “to look,” and between the ideas that “I am seeking myself,” and “I am trying to look at myself.” Those are two very different approaches. The actuality of the vichara seeks nothing. Seeking implies some expectation or hope of getting something. Nothing is to be gotten here, nothing needs to be sought, and no seeking needs to be ended. The possibility of looking at you, of course, happens in time. ...

In the context of ātma-vichāra or self-investigation there is truly no distinction between ‘looking’ and ‘seeking’, because both words provide clues to the practice of ātma-vichāra, which is the non-objective and hence extremely subtle effort that we make to experience our natural state of perfectly clear thought-free self-consciousness, and which is therefore too subtle to be adequately described by any words.

Like ‘attention’, ‘scrutiny’ or ‘investigation’, ‘looking’ and ‘seeking’ are words that indicate but do not adequately describe the ineffable state of ātma-vichāra. When describing the practice of ātma-vichāra in his original Tamil verses and other writings, two verbs that Sri Ramana frequently used are நாடு (nāḍu) and தேடு (tēḍu), which both mean ‘seeking’, ‘searching’, ‘investigating’, ‘examining’ or ‘scrutinising’, because ātma-vichāra is the effort that we make to ‘investigate’, ‘examine’, ‘scrutinise’, ‘look at’ or ‘attend to’ ourself in order to experience our essential self-consciousness perfectly clearly, and as such it can also be described as the practice of ‘seeking’ or ‘searching for’ absolute clarity of self-consciousness.

Therefore John Sherman is not correct when he says that ‘The actuality of the vichara seeks nothing’. Of course vichāra is not seeking anything new or other than ourself, but since we now appear to lack perfectly clear self-knowledge, it is the practice of seeking that clarity, which is always our true nature. In other words, vichāra is simply seeking to know ‘who am I?’ by keenly ‘looking at’ or scrutinising our fundamental consciousness ‘I am’.

When John Sherman objects that ‘the vichara seeks nothing’, he is taking the verb ‘seeks’ too literally, and is failing to understand the intended meaning that lies behind it in this context. The literal meaning of vichāra is ‘investigation’, ‘examination’, ‘scrutiny’, ‘discernment’ or ‘ascertainment’, and like any other form of investigation, ātma-vichāra or self-investigation is a search for true knowledge about that which we are investigating.

Moreover, when he says that ‘The possibility of looking at you, of course, happens in time’, it is clear that he does not truly know what the state of ‘looking at you’ — that is, the state of pure non-dual self-attentiveness or self-consciousness — really is, because it is not possible to experience that state in time. Time is an illusion created and experienced only by our mind, so as long as we experience time we are still mistaking ourself to be this mind, and hence we cannot be experiencing the true clarity of self-consciousness.

The experience of absolutely clear self-consciousness dissolves and devours the illusion of time, just as the rising sun dissolves and devours the early morning mist.  Time is a constant flow or movement from past to future, never actually stopping even for a moment in the present, and this unceasing movement of time obscures the ever motionless and unchanging nature of true self-consciousness. Therefore, when we experience time, our natural clarity of self-consciousness is obscured, and when we experience our natural clarity of self-consciousness, time ceases to exist.

Therefore pure self-consciousness can only be experienced in the precise present moment, which is truly not a moment in time (as I explain in chapter 7 of Happiness and the Art of Being), but is the eternal, unchanging, motionless and therefore timeless presence of our own essential being, ‘I am’. That is, the precise present moment is the timeless state of being that lies at the heart of our illusion of time, and of everything else that we experience. It is therefore the only doorway through which we can pass beyond the illusion of time into our true state of timeless being.

It appears that John Sherman is also confused when he talks of ‘the appearance of consciousness’ or ‘the arising of consciousness’ in passages such as ‘... The purpose of all creation flows from the evolutionary nature of the appearance of consciousness ...’, ‘... the evolutionary unfolding of creation, the arising of consciousness, and the arising of self-consciousness within consciousness ...’ and ‘... Timelessness and no-thought are that from which consciousness has arisen ...’. In this confusion about the word ‘consciousness’ and about the nature of that which this word truly denotes, he appears to be influenced by some of the English books that supposedly record the teachings of Nisargadatta, whom he refers to elsewhere in this transcript. (However, though some books record Nisargadatta talking about consciousness as if it had an arising, origin or appearance, I do not know what he actually said in his native Marathi, or what word he used that has been translated as ‘consciousness’.)

True consciousness (which is our pure adjunct-free self-consciousness, ‘I am’) is the eternal reality, and hence it never appears or arises. The consciousness that seems to ‘appear’ or ‘arise’ is not true consciousness, but is only the false object-knowing form of consciousness that we call our ‘mind’. Though true consciousness is the sole reality underlying the false appearance of our mind, there is a very important distinction between it and our mind (like the distinction between the underlying rope and the false snake that it appears to be), so it is confusing to use the term ‘consciousness’ when we mean ‘mind’, unless it is clear from the context that we are using this term only in that limited sense.

When John Sherman talks about consciousness ‘appearing’ or ‘arising’, he is clearly implying that consciousness is not the absolute reality, but according to Sri Ramana consciousness is the absolute reality, and is therefore eternal and unchanging, which means that it never appears or disappears — never arises or subsides.

With regard to ‘looking at yourself’, John Sherman says:

... First, prior to anything else, look at you. Just look at you. Not your true self, not beingness, not timelessness, no-thought or no-mind, not emptiness, not clarity, not freedom, not liberation, not God, not any of that. Just look at you, the ordinary, the everyday you that is at the bottom of the whole show. You are at the bottom of all of it, really. And you are here, you are never absent. You are the most ordinary thing in all creation. You are never absent, you never change, you are untouched, you are unmoved, you are unhelped and unhurt; you are as you have always been, and you are absolutely, forever accessible to yourself. ...

His instruction ‘look at you’ is correct, because ātma-vichāra is just the practice of being attentive to and therefore clearly conscious of our essential self, ‘I am’. He is also correct in saying ‘Just look at you, the ordinary, the everyday you’, provided that what he means by ‘the ordinary, the everyday you’ is only our mind (that is, not the countless thoughts that are constantly arising in our mind, but only the thinking mind itself), because when we look carefully at the very root or essence of our mind, which is our thinking thought ‘I’, what we are actually looking at is only our real self, which underlies the false appearance of this thinking ‘I’, just as when we look carefully at the false snake, what we are actually looking at is only the real rope that underlies its false appearance.

However, he confuses the whole practice when he says, ‘Just look at you. Not your true self, not beingness, not timelessness ...’. When we look at ourself — that is, at our essential consciousness ‘I’ — what we are really looking at is not anything other than our true self, our timeless being (even though our true self now appears to us to be this false thinking ‘I’). We cannot look at ourself correctly without looking at our true self, ‘I am’, because our true self alone is that which now appears to be our false self.

What does John Sherman think he is asking us to look at when he says, ‘Just look at you. Not your true self ...’? How can we look at ourself without actually looking at our true self? Even if we imagine that we are only looking at ‘the ordinary, the everyday you’, we are actually looking only at our true self, just as we would actually be looking only at the rope even when we imagine that we are only looking at a snake.

Moreover, why should we ‘look at ourself’ if our aim is not to see our true self? We look at our false self only to see what we really are, just as we would look carefully at the imaginary snake only to see what it really is.

If he had understood what it really means to ‘look at ourself’, he would not say ‘Not your true self’, but would clarify that when we look at ourself, we are truly looking at our real self, even though we now imagine ourself to be this false thinking consciousness called ‘mind’.

Unfortunately there are many people nowadays who superficially read one or two books on the teachings of Sri Ramana and, imagining that they have understood them correctly, begin to teach others with little or no reference to his original written teachings. As a result there are many so-called ‘teachings’ available in books and on the internet that superficially appear to be the same as the teachings of Sri Ramana, but which actually lack the true clarity that is the hallmark of his real teachings.