Śrī Aruṇācala Akṣaramaṇamālai verse 18

This is the eighteenth in a series of articles that I hope to write on Śrī Aruṇācala Akṣaramaṇamālai, Bhagavan willing, the completed ones being listed here.

How to merge in Arunachala like a river in the ocean?

In verse 3 of Śrī Aruṇācala Pañcaratnam Bhagavan says:

அகமுகமா ரந்த வமலமதி தன்னா
லகமிதுதா னெங்கெழுமென் றாய்ந்தே — யகவுருவை
நன்கறிந்து முந்நீர் நதிபோலு மோயுமே
யுன்கணரு ணாசலனே யோர்.

Can we as ego ever experience pure awareness?

In a comment on my previous article, Is it possible for us to attend to ourself, the subject, rather than to any object?, a friend called Asun referred to one of my videos, 2018-03-19 Conscious TV interview with Michael James: The Real Behind All Appearances, and wrote:

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.”

‘I am’ is the reality, ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’ is the ego

In a comment on my previous article, What is the ‘self’ we are investigating when we try to be attentively self-aware?, a friend called Viveka Vairagya quoted an extract from chapter 99 of I am That in which it is recorded that Nisargadatta Maharaj said, ‘Relax and watch the ‘I am’. Reality is just behind it’, which prompted another friend who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Extremely Simple’ to ask, ‘But why should reality be “just behind the ‘I am’”?’

The term nirviśēṣa or ‘featureless’ denotes an absolute experience but can be comprehended conceptually only in a relative sense

In a comment on one of my recent articles, The ego is essentially a formless and hence featureless phantom, a friend called ‘Sleepwalker’ quoted a sentence from its thirteenth section, Can self-awareness be considered to be a feature of the ego? (which I had quoted from We are aware of ourself even though we are featureless, the second section in one of my earlier articles, Being attentively self-aware does not entail any subject-object relationship), namely “When we say, ‘I slept peacefully last night’, we are expressing our experience of having been in a state in which we experienced no features”, and asked whether the peacefulness of sleep is not just a feature.

Since the concept of nirviśēṣatva (featurelessness or absence of any distinguishing features) is a significant and useful idea in advaita philosophy, and since it is very relevant to the practice of self-investigation, I decided to write the following detailed answer to this question:

Sri Ramana’s mangalam verse to Vivekacudamani

When Sri Ramana translated Vivēkacūḍāmaṇi into Tamil prose, he composed a maṅgalam or ‘auspicious introductory verse’ for it.

Recently a friend asked me to translate this verse, because he was not satisfied with the translation of it on page 212 of The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi, which is as follows:

Rejoice eternally! The Heart rejoices at the feet of the Lord, who is the Self, shining within as ‘I-I’ eternally, so that there is no alternation of night and day. This will result in removal of ignorance of the Self.

The original Tamil verse is:

அகமெனு மூல வவித்தை யகன்றிட
வகமக மாக வல்லும் பகலற
வகமொளி ராத்ம தேவன் பதத்தினி
லகமகிழ் வாக வனிசம் ரமிக்கவே.

ahameṉu mūla vaviddai yahaṉḏṟiḍa
vahamaha māha vallum pahalaṟa
vahamoḷi rātma dēvan padattiṉi
lahamahiṙ vāha vaṉiśam ramikkavē.

Sri Arunachala Stuti Panchakam – an overview

I am currently preparing to upload four new e-books to the Books section of my website, namely Sri Arunachala Stuti Panchakam, Sri Ramanopadesa Noonmalai, Part Two of The Path of Sri Ramana and Sadhanai Saram, and I am drafting introductory pages for each of these. The following is an extract from the introductory page that I have drafted for Sri Arunachala Stuti Panchakam:

ஸ்ரீ அருணாசல ஸ்துதி பஞ்சகம் (Sri Arunachala Stuti Panchakam), the ‘Five Hymns to Sri Arunachala’, which is a collection of the principal devotional songs composed by Sri Ramana, is the first section of ஸ்ரீ ரமண நூற்றிரட்டு (Sri Ramana Nultirattu), the Tamil ‘Collected Works of Sri Ramana’. The following are the five main songs that comprise it:

1. ஸ்ரீ அருணாசல அக்ஷரமணமாலை (Sri Arunachala Aksharamanamalai), the ‘Bridal Garland of Letters to Sri Arunachala’, is a song composed in the metaphorical language of bridal mysticism or madhura bhava (the affectionate attitude of a girl seeking union with her lover, the lord of her heart) and consists of 108 couplets, each of which begins with a consecutive letter of the Tamil alphabet and ends with a vocative case-form of the name ‘Arunachala’.
   

Self-enquiry, self-attention and self-awareness

A few weeks ago a very long anonymous comment was posted on one of my recent articles, Self-attentiveness, effort and grace. Though this comment was posted under the identity ‘Anonymous’, the name ‘Michael Langford’ was written at the end of it.

I do not know whether or not this comment was actually posted by Michael Langford (though I suspect it probably was not), but except for his name at the end of it, the entire comment is a verbatim copy of a webpage that he wrote entitled Sri Sadhu Om - Self Inquiry, which is one of the many pages in the Awareness Watching Awareness section of the Albigen.Com website.

Most of this webpage, Sri Sadhu Om - Self Inquiry, is an edited copy of chapter seven of Part One of The Path of Sri Ramana, a PDF copy of which is available on my website, Happiness of Being. However, before his edited copy of chapter seven, Michael Langford has written the following two introductory paragraphs:

Sri Sadhu Om spent five years in the company of Sri Ramana Maharshi and decades in the company of Sri Muruganar. Sri Sadhu Om wrote a book called The Path of Sri Ramana, Part One, which contains what has been called the most detailed teaching on the method of Self-inquiry ever written. Sri Sadhu Om points out that:

Self-inquiry is only an aid to Self-Awareness;
only Self-Awareness is the True Direct Path.

However, Sri Sadhu Om never actually wrote or said that ‘Self-inquiry is only an aid to Self-Awareness; only Self-Awareness is the True Direct Path’, either in this chapter of The Path of Sri Ramana or elsewhere, and to say that he pointed out such an idea is misleading and confusing. Before explaining why this idea is misleading, however, I should first say something about the way in which Michael Langford has edited the copy of this chapter on that webpage.

Happiness and the Art of Being — complete Spanish translation is now available

Pedro Rodea has translated into Spanish many English books on the teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana, including Nan Yar? (Who am I?), Upadesa Undiyar, Sri Arunachala Pancharatnam (with the commentary by Sri Sadhu Om), Guru Vachaka Kovai (from the English translation by Sri Sadhu Om and me), Maharshi’s Gospel, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Day by Day with Bhagavan and Be As You Are, and his translations are posted either as PDF files or as zipped Word documents on his AtivarnAshram website. Some of his translations, such as Guru Vachaka Kovai, have also been published as printed books by Ignitus Ediciones.

In a post that I wrote on 22nd August of last year, Spanish translation of Happiness and the Art of Being, I said that Pedro was also translating Happiness and the Art of Being into Spanish, and that his translation of some of the chapters was available on the AtivarnAshram website. Recently he completed this translation, and it is now available on the AtivarnAshram website as a PDF e-book, which can be opened by clicking on the following link:

La Felicidad y el Arte de Ser:
Introducción a la filosofía y la práctica de las enseñanzas espirituales de
Bhagavan Sri Ramana

Some selected passages from this Spanish translation can also be accessed through links on the Michael James page of the AtivarnAshram website.