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    THE QUINTESSENCE OF WISDOM

    OR

    THE THIRTY VERSES OF SRI RAMANA

    Freely Rendered into English

    WITH

    An Introduction and Commentary

    By

    M. ANANTANARAYANAN, I.C.S.

    Chief Justice, Madras High Court.

    Foreword By

    Dr. S. RADHAKRISHNAN

    Ex-President, Indian Union.

    T. N. VENKATARAMAN,

    President, Board of Trustees,

    SRI RAMANASRAMAM,

    Tiruvannamalai, (S. INDIA)

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    THE THRESHOLD

    An Introduction to the

    "QUINTESSENCE OF WISDOM"

    OR

    THIRTY VERSES OF SRI RAMANA

    FOREWORD

    The quintessence of religion is self-knowledge. It is an adventure of the spirit, a quest afterthe real and the immanent, a continuous process of emancipation from the shackles of

    doctrines, prejudices and practices. True religion is rooted in inner experience, a unique

    realisation of Being.

    "The Thirty Verses" of Sri Ramana, which has now been rendered into English by Sri

    Anantanarayanan, gives us this religion of the spirit, based on the Indian scriptures, and

    acceptable to the modern mind. It is an ethical and rational approach, relating the problems of

    the external world to inner belief and understanding. In an age when the climate of thought is

    overcast with doubt and dissension, the insistence on inner personal experience as the

    measure of all things is authentic, and its relevance to the spiritual liberation of individuals as

    well as nations is obvious.

    Sri Anantanarayanan's Introduction, English Translation and Notes bring out not only his

    devotion to the life and teaching of Sri Ramana, but also his knowledge of Westernmysticism and literature, which make his comments often illuminating and always

    interesting.

    New Delhi S. Radhakris

    16th May, 1955.

    I

    Those who have tried to communicate an experience, unusual either in quality or intensity,

    must have felt the difficulty of words. To be a poet is a prerogative, but it does not

    necessarily absolve the man in this situation. There is considerable justification for believing,

    for instance, that Wordsworth was really trying, throughout his life, to communicate a

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    mystical experience. It is clear that he succeeded only imperfectly. But those areas of success

    constitute the most vital and poetic part of his work. We might ponder over a passage such as

    this, in his well-worn Ode :--

    "Blank misgivings of a creatureMoving about in worlds not realised;

    High instincts, before which our mortal nature

    Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised".

    What is the significance that he is trying to convey? The words are authentic, but power and

    light seem to have failed. I remember reading somewhere that Wordsworth stressed these

    very lines, as expressive of his deepest communion with Truth. The difficulty with words is

    not to be denied.

    The difficulty with Faith is even more insuperable. Some deny the Throne; some glimpse it,

    but affirm that it is vacant. Some speak, with bated breath, of the Majesty seated there. The

    moral of mysticism would appear to be that of The Emperor's New Clothes.

    Nevertheless, we must penetrate beyond appearances, if we are to discover. To every man

    there comes, at some time or another, the surfeit of mental riches. Mind can create belief,

    dogma, speculation without end. Mind can forge gods or a god, but it cannot unveil Reality.

    Faith, except in a rare sense, is itself but a mood of the mind. But nothing dawns in this

    mood, because mind is still projecting beliefs and hopes. You cannot have faith in nothing.

    But whatever you have faith in, is still the work of the mind. Mind can create, but its creation

    is dust and ashes.

    So religion fails us, as do dogma, belief or ritual. The clinging to an individual we term the

    Guru, frequently proves equally a betrayal. In this mood of negativeness, of emptiness, we

    are inheritors of The Waste Land. The work itself is a symbol, not merely of an epoch, but ofa purgative stage in the progress of the soul. We seem confronted here with liberties of

    choice. We can escape into denial, into Humanism or Agnosticism. We can fly back into the

    track between the rocks, those rocks upon which the Churches of men's creeds are built; or

    we can outface the emptiness, attempt to penetrate deeper into negation itself.

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    This little work is likely to appeal to those in this stage of the soul's progress. Whether that

    stage is less or more advanced than the state of those who still cling, or cling anew, to forms

    of faith, I do not propose to discuss. A Hindu mystical treatise, the Ashtavakra Samhita, says

    that the paths of those who have realised the Truth, are like the tracks left by birds in their

    flight across the sky. Who shall map the journey of the soul between the poles of the Unreal

    and the Real?

    II

    I think that minds in the West will turn more and more to the record of mysticism, as

    enshrining like a jewel, even in its dusk, the saving hope of mankind. For here is supra-

    rational experience possessed by men in different ages, with dissimilar legacies, biological

    and cultural. Of all that the speculative intellect can teach us, we have explored, and we can

    go no further than the circle of our egoism. In Philosophy, as in Nuclear Physics, we are

    confronted, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable.

    The subtleties of Epistemology do not break the door that guards the reality of our innermost

    being, and of world-experience. We have laughed too easily at the materialistic fallacies of

    Herbert Spencer. Perhaps that enfant terrible (for was he not passionless and immature as a

    personality?) would be enthroned again in one of Time's cyclical revenges, and we may still

    feel that we cannot hope to penetrate beyond his First Principles:- "Thinking being relating,

    no thought can express more than relations.... Intellect, being framed simply by, and for,

    converse with phenomena, involves us in nonsense when we try to use it for anything beyond

    phenomena". (First Principles - New York - 1910 p. 56.)

    In the East - if I may use that word to denote nothing geographical, but rather a way of life, a

    certain attitude to the ultimate problems of the knower and the known, - it is too easily

    assumed that the most defensible theory of Epistemology destroys the objective reality of

    world-experience, and points to a state of Pure Being, which is the support and substance, inthe sense in which Spinoza employed that word, of the phenomenal flux. That is not so. We

    must not forget that Kant, for instance, never doubted or denied the objective truth of the

    Noumenon - the ' thing-in-itself', though he affirmed that our experience of it is always

    mental. There are grave difficulties in any theory of Illusionist, not the least of them being a

    lack of integrity; a radical theoretical basis, which we are constantly compelled to betray and

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    deny in our commerce with the world, which leaves us divided and inertly at strife. It is not

    the materialist who warns us of the rocks ahead, but the seasoned philosopher.

    In his brilliant essay, "The Philosophy of Dependent Emergence", Prof. Das Gupta says : -

    "The belief that Reality is something behind the phenomena, behind the experience, and

    behind the relational outlook of things, seems to me to be a positive superstition". So much

    for those who argue that a disinterested love of Truth, and dedication of the intellect to the

    exploration of Reality, leads to an a priori concept of Pure Being, or to an intuition of it!

    Philosophers so diverse in their outlook as Santayana and Radhakrishnan have felt the

    difficulty that those who deny the reality of the world-experience must, to be not merely

    consistent, but votaries of the wisdom they profess, behave like automata or like the insane.

    The true indictment of Illusionism is that it must ever lack the depth of a life lived in its

    wisdom. So Santayana says: "We are not asked to abolish our conception of the natural

    world, nor even, in our daily life, to cease to believe in it; we are to be idealists only north-

    north-west, or transcendentally; when the wind is southerly, we are to remain realists... .I

    should be ashamed to countenance opinions which, when not arguing, I did not believe" .

    Nor is Dr. Radhakrishnan less emphatic. "It is one thing to say that the secret of existence,

    how the Unchangeable Reality expresses itself in the changing universe without forgetting its

    nature, is a mystery, and another to dismiss the whole changing universe as a mirage.... If we

    have to play the game of life, we cannot do so with the conviction that the play is a show, and

    all the prizes in it are mere blanks. No philosophy can consistently hold such a theory, and be

    at rest with itself".

    Before proceeding to the record of mysticism, I may say that to a mystic, whether he be so

    early as Plotinus or as late as Sri Ramana, whether he is Christian like Eckhart or Sufi like Al

    Hallaj, there is really no difficulty. The mystic is not concerned with ideas or metaphysics.

    He is concerned with attainable states of consciousness. He may employ ideas, or even a

    system, as a commentary on his experience. But the experience is the Pole Star of his life.

    Different constructions of thought, all opposed, might appear to him to be equally valid. Are

    they not like the maps of geographers, upon differing scales of projection, but all pictures of

    the firm realities of land and sea? So Sri Ramana always held that the world-experience was

    real, but not real-in-itself. Its reality was relative and subordinate: it was the expression of

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    Being, which was, to him, ever present as Truth, Bliss and Consciousness, in all the embraces

    of living. That was literally so for him, every breathing moment of his life. He would have

    been amused, for he had a keen sense of humour, at the idea of a life determinedly lived

    under the shadow of an intellectual theory of Illusionism. Nor did he ever cease to affirm that

    substance was no concept, but the attainable Real, indeed not to be attained in a time process,

    but known here and now. Again, he said, with the truth of paradox of which the mystic alone

    is capable, that to know the Real is to inhere in Reality-Bliss-Consciousness, free of the false

    thinker and his clouding thought. For knowledge can only be of objects which are not real-in-

    themselves: and there is no knowledge, separate from the Real, to make it known.

    Thus the authority of the mystic is different. Ideas, to him, are like tiny mirrors reflecting the

    sun of his experience. We cannot judge the mystic, or even hope to understand him

    fragmentarily, without equipping ourselves with new and delicate sensibilities. But we can

    examine the record of mysticism, with even our frail reason, and derive substance for our

    hopes. For otherwise, we seem to be at an end of the exploration into Truth, if there is a Truth

    beyond appearances. In Nuclear Physics, the wall of the unknowable confronts the explorer

    into the reality of matter. For the very act of observation modifies the observed ultimate unit

    of behaviour; or the identity of the particle in Time is lost. Even so, thought can only unveil

    the complexity of relational processes; but never the Absolute, which must include thought

    itself, and to which those processes are relative.

    It needs only some degree of study to convince all, except those whose lack of receptivity is a

    form of mind-forged security, that the record of mysticism is not explicable in the light of any

    known scientific hypothesis. Suggestion, auto-suggestion, abnormal psychology,

    endocrinology, and plain dissimulation, are all of them crude and inadequate. For the record

    spans the centuries in one dimension, and the earth in another. It cannot be that such

    phenomena, themselves the accompaniment of a rare and lovely psychic transformation,

    should recur with startling parallelisms, not in the lives of mere neurotics, but the sanest and

    most resolute of individuals, without roots deep in Truth. The more we ponder upon the

    contrasts of learning and ignorance, of cultural and biological inheritance, in the lives of

    mystics, and view them in the light of the inner order of mystic phenomena, which is as

    though a terra incognita were to be illumined step by step in the Soul's dark progress, the less

    we shall be ready to judge or to dismiss.

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    There are sufficiently impressive collections of mystical experience, already in existence.

    William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience", Evelyn Underhill's "Mysticism", and

    Aldous Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy" are instances among many similar works. A

    detailed analysis of such a record may require several volumes, and is altogether beyond our

    scope. Nor does the record itself exorcise all our difficulties. We may feel that this is treasure,

    but we do not possess the key. These experiences are but, as yet, 'huge cloudy symbols of a

    high romance'. Even if we had them ourselves, they would still need interpretation; and they

    are, alas, for us second hand, the echoes of the inspired hour. To seek answers from the

    sibyl's record may be to create replies in the semblance of our hopes.

    But still the fascination, the faint glimmer of something vast and real, remains. That is the

    true justification for this little work, the rendering into English of the commentary of a

    mystic, the ground of which was his perennial experience.

    III

    The life and thought of Sri Ramana were inextricably intertwined. For he was no

    metaphysician, but a practical mystic, a man who hungered to share with others the Ecstasy

    which was the undertone of his life. That had been so since a certain experience of boyhood,

    which filched him from the divided world of the Mind, and took him into the bosom of the

    Silence of Being.

    He was born on the 31st of December, 1879, in a village near Madura (South India), in a

    Brahmin family, highly respected in that locality, but by no means rich. His father was a

    'pleader', a practitioner of Law, qualified somewhat like a solicitor, but permitted to appear in

    Courts. As a boy he was not distinguished for application to the tasks of the school-room, or

    for premonitions of scholastic success. On the contrary, he was athletic and loved games, no

    doubt to the disgust of his elders. For, in a poor Brahmin family of those days, cerebral

    prowess was the one asset prized. It was the key to that door of opulence and power,Governmental service. He also seems to have possessed a healthy addiction to sleep.

    Occasionally, it was of such unshakable depth that his playmates could buffet him, play

    pranks with him, and put him to bed, without his waking up one whit the wiser.

    One day, when he was alone, he went through an experience of 'death', so literal in its

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    intensity, in spite of the fact that he was then physically in perfect health, that he laid himself

    down, closed his eyes, and felt himself dissociated from the inert, lifeless body. But,

    strangely enough, he seems to have realised that he was not the thinker as well. For the 'I'

    thought is merely the first of all thoughts, and issues from the Silence of Being, which is our

    true home and life, as the root of the worlds of Mind. These are not here expressed as

    metaphysical ideas, though at least one marvellous construction of the human intellect, the

    Advaita Vedanta, has made them essential units of its structure. These were realisations,

    spontaneous, timeless, revealing, which flashed through the mind of the boy, unschooled in

    abstract thought, virgin of philosophy. At that moment, the boy was taken up into the Silence,

    the Ecstasy of Being, which is beyond words, but of which words have held tiny glimpses,

    the compassionate speech of mystics and seers. For otherwise, we should have possessed

    total darkness, and not the half-light of wisdom.

    That experience changed his whole life. It led him into moods of abstraction, where the

    vividness of the Time-Space continuum which fetters us, began to fade. There is a story that

    the elder brother, finding the younger plunged into meditation, instead of the practically

    valuable textbook, rebuked him by an appeal to his ethical sense - "For one who is thus, why

    all this?" His meaning was plain. When you are in the world, you must be of the world. You

    cannot have a leg up in Heaven, wherever that may be, and continue worldly pursuits. No

    doubt, the admonisher thought that the boy would be shamed back into conscientious study.

    But to the boy, who had inherited the wealth of Godhead, who was immersed in God,

    unknown to those who saw with the eyes of flesh, the remonstrance was a call. What part or

    lot had he, truly, in the world of effort and success, and why should he not have done with it?

    So, it happened that young Ramana, who had heard by accident of Arunachala

    (Tiruvannamalai) and felt a deep inner thrill, as though the physical home where the rest of

    his life was to be spent was itself the outer expression of his ecstatic experience, left home

    and kindred in his seventeenth year. He took nothing but a tiny sum for the train fare, and

    plunged into unknown time and space, with perfect trust in the Godhead that was his silent

    accompaniment. A brief letter that he left has many symptoms to the discerning mind. In

    spite of resolution, there is sensitiveness to suffering. The writer will not declare his

    destination, but affirms that he has left home "in search of my Father, and in obedience to His

    command". He tells the elder brother in a postcript that the school-fees have not been paid

    with the sum delivered to him. He has taken a part of the money, and a particular balance is

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    left. There should be no dissimulation in a pure cause. There is also an exhortation not to seek

    him out, or to incur expense on the exploration, for he had "but entered on a worthy

    undertaking". Above all, the personality of the writer seems but dimly existent, as though the

    ego had vanished. The first person singular is hardly employed, and the signature consists of

    a few dashes.

    How this boy came to Tiruvannamalai alone, friendless and penniless; how he took up

    residence in an inner courtyard of the great temple, trusting to the power that had guided him,

    for food; how a priest of the temple fed him with oblations of milk and fruit; and how, much

    later, he was sought out and removed, silent, immersed in ecstasy, from the dark verminous

    hole in which he had secluded himself, is one of the romances of hagiology. It is said that

    when he was so removed, the inner sides of the boy's thighs were a mass of ulcers, as ants,

    spiders and other vermin had worked their will on him where he sat, shattered by ecstasy,

    unconscious of the body. No mere concentration, no process of addiction to thought, however

    intense, could have produced the effects of such a death-in-life.

    But abnormal psychology must also be silent, or this was no exhibition of decadence,

    deteriorating coma or imbecility. The powers of mind, on the contrary, were quickened and

    vivified by the interior illumination. Sri Ramana understood the subtleties of metaphysics as

    commentaries on the experience that was earlier his. His intellect was a tool, precise,

    powerful, and massive in its operations. He seems to have mastered languages with ease, or

    any subject upon which he chose to focus his thought. That the absorption of those years was

    far from any discipline, any effort, is revealed by one of his rare autobiographical fragments:

    "I then did not speak, and they called me a Mouni (one who is under a vow of silence). I did

    not eat, and they said that I was fasting."

    From those years until he died of a neuro-sarcoma, on the 14th of April, 1950, Sri Ramana

    never left the township of Tiruvannamalai that was his spiritual home. He stayed in his

    Ashram by the holy hill, and thousands of persons visited him. No doubt they interpreted him

    diversely, and not all found what they sought, consolation temporal or spiritual. But, almost

    to the moment of his death, he was alert, lambent in his humour, patient and gracious. He

    lived with the doors of his room open to every comer, man, woman, or child. He had no trace

    of that inverted snobbery which sometimes afflicts the saint who is imperfectly at peace with

    the powers of the world. The high official or the man with abundant possessions was also

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    welcomed with the friendliest of smiles, and treated upon a footing of equality with the lowly

    poor. The Master never underrated the pitiableness of the rich.

    His life was a play upon the surface, peace and joy in its depths. It was uneventful, meanly

    restricted from the point of view of outer stimuli. We who live by the richness of sensation,

    can hardly hope to understand such self-sufficiency in Being. He had truly no possessions.

    The Ashram grew around him, for people who could not tear themselves away from the

    Master, made here a cluster of homes and buildings. But he was not merely detached, he was

    joyously indifferent. It was the paradox of "passionate dispassion." He lived with Spartan

    simplicity, which is not so difficult as people sometimes imagine, particularly in a tropical

    climate. But he had no resentment towards luxuries, which, for a Spartan, is difficult indeed.

    He had very little of moral censure or judgment. He was most patient with human

    weaknesses. Actually he resembled Spinoza in thinking of them, rather, as "inadequate

    ideas," the inability to hold on to Godhead, which is our birthright, being the source and

    mother of such evils. But he himself lived a life of effortless purity.

    His works are few. They are terse and epigrammatic, expressive of his ecstatic experience,

    and the way to it, which was his philosophy. He did not design them as literary creations, and

    they were not planned and executed as unities. Mainly they are fragments, in each case

    collected later into an opus by devotees. But they are vital for an understanding of his

    thought. Sri Ramana was a philosopher as well. But like all true mystics, he derived his

    metaphysics from his experience.

    Unlike other saints, he worked no miracles; he never claimed to possess occult powers. He

    once said that the emergence of a philosopher or a cricketer, from the undifferentiated human

    foetus, was a miracle greater than the reputed marvels of saints. His wit could be a lightning

    flash, but it never injured. Many years ago, when robbers broke into his forest Ashram at

    midnight, he was not merely unruffled, but invited them to take whatever the place offered.

    Disappointed at finding no treasure, as they had been led to expect, the robbers vented their

    spleen by assaulting the inmates, Sri Ramana himself not being excluded. After they left, a

    devotee , who was unaware that the Master had been beaten, timidly inquired - "What of

    Bhagavan (Master)"? "Oh, Bhagavan is all right," replied Sri Ramana, "Puja has been

    adequately performed for him." That is untranslatable in its irony, but the reader must

    recollect that the Sanskrit word Puja, signifying ritualistic worship of deities or holy men, is

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    used in colloquial Tamil as the equivalent of a sound drubbing. When some very intense

    person asked him why God did not fulfil his heartfelt prayers, Sri Ramana replied, with a

    twinkle, "Because you would cease to pray if He did". A man pre-occupied with the

    Theosophical doctrine of the occult hierarchy, asked him if he saw the invisible Masters. "If

    they are invisible", replied Sri Ramana laughing, "how can you see them"? The discomfited

    questioner stammered, "in Awareness". "In Awareness", came the instant rejoinder, is like a

    shaft of sunlight, "the other does not exist".

    The prolonged martyrdom which was his death, left untouched the ever-bubbling springs of

    his joy, peace and wit. It was something quite different from stoicism on the part of the

    patient, which moved the eminent surgeon who attended on him to awe. He himself explained

    that he felt each shade of pain, and even its vastness, but that it was like the pain of a dream

    in which the dreamer knows that he is dreaming. The muscles of his face were never

    contorted with pain, even involuntarily. The smile was not fixed: it was born each moment, in

    the midst of great physical suffering. "How can I carry this body unaided, which four men

    must carry?" he asked, - a literal reference to the transport of the corpse on its bier: But the

    jest was not grim, as it would have been in Shakespeare. It was the light-hearted repartee of a

    man, who had knowledge beyond the fear of Death.

    IV

    Philosophical expositions of Sri Ramana's thought are apt to be colourless or misleading.

    Radical simplicity ought not to be elaborated. It is not the text, springing from a perennial

    experience, which is "crabbed", but "the comment". The best way of all is to study the works

    of the Master in the light of his recorded replies, which are spontaneous and unrehearsed. The

    Master has the assurance of his dwelling in the Reality. His words are simple and few, a

    dagger to "stab awake" the intuitive perception of Truth. The pupil, on the contrary, is too

    often both laboured and dogmatic. The epistemological bias in favour of a strict subjective

    idealism is undisguised. It is forgotten that the Master, when taxed with Illusionism, defendedhimself, by saying that neither Sankara, nor the Advaita Vedanta, assert that world experience

    is utterly illusory. On the contrary, they affirm that it is relatively real, but that Reality

    includes and transcends it. Analogies, such as those of the dream and the mirage, are neither

    proofs nor precise parallels. They are aids to clarity of vision, and that is all. The experience

    of reality being indescribable, no anticipatory construction of the intellect is valid.

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    The apology for adding yet another exposition of the Master's teaching is manifest. It

    prefaces an English rendering of one of the Master's works, the work which bears most

    deeply the stamp of unity, and a central revelation of the teaching. Together with the

    commentary, this introduction is designed to serve as a preparatory enlightenment of first

    principles. The unprepared student of Sri Ramana, particularly if he be an intellectual from

    the West, is apt to find himself in strange country, and to beat too hasty a retreat from the

    unfamiliar landscape.

    The basis of this thought is an enquiry into the truth of the Thinker. We might say with Kant,

    that we, each experience a world of mind, and cannot experience anything else: but who are

    'we'? The stimuli that we receive from other individuals are as those that we receive from

    tree, rock, and stream. Our knowledge is derived from our perceptions, and here our

    assumption of other 'minds' is derivative and inferential. This is not for the purpose of a

    barren solipsism. It is to lead us, step by step, to a revelation which is initially intellectual.

    The thinker has assumed his own existence; from him, from this basic thought 'I', which is a

    mere identification with a locus, the body, as much a bundle of perceptions as any other, the

    entire universe of perceptions has sprung up.

    Who is this "I"? Is 'I' anything but a seed thought of the thought process? Is not this seed

    thought implicit in perceptions so that the most subtle movements of mind are founded upon

    it, even when it is unexpressed? Without the thinker, can there be thought: are there 'others'?

    Note the Sri Ramana does not declare that subjective idealism alone is true, that world-

    experience is unreal, or that other "minds" do not exist. His point always was that the truth of

    such metaphysical problems cannot be known, apart from the enquiry into the truth of the

    thinker, and the tracing of this thought "I" to its source in Creative Being, which to him was

    sole Godhead.

    For mind is capable of a self-protective subtlety, which makes the pursuit into Truth the most

    arduous of all exercises to which man can consecrate his energies. The deepest of human

    problems, when stated, is deceptive in its simplicity, its seeming lack of intricacy. To the

    physiologist the "I" might be a centre located in the 'body image' area of the cerebral cortex.

    But he would be nonplussed when confronted with epistemological problem, which is outside

    his special field. Philosophers might respond variously. But all the answers would be false,

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    for even to approach the answer we must proceed by way of negation, the elimination of

    concepts themselves founded upon a false identity. Truly, negative comprehension is the

    most dynamic form of thought.

    It is the thinker who coordinates impressions, who is active in creating the order which is

    world-experience for each of us. Analysis of that order is endless and unfruitful. We must

    doubt the 'doubter'; we must seek the source of ourselves, first and last. Truly, we are not the

    body which is a bundle of perceptions non-existent in the depths of sleep. We are not name

    and form, memory or any thought. When every other thought is so eliminated, and the naked

    'I' alone remains, it is realised as the seed and essence of the thought process. This intense

    consciousness of self, unidentified with any other perception including that of the body, is the

    beginning of wisdom. For it then flashes as an intuition upon us, as it came to Sri Ramana as

    a boy, that the 'I' itself is but a thought founded upon pure consciousness. This Awareness is

    the deepest truth of ourselves. It is not finite, and hence it is ever stainless, blissful, ever

    present in the touches of pain and joy. It is both Godhead, and the Kingdom of Heaven.

    These are words, and words are only the outer garb of thoughts. Thought cannot uncover

    reality, because it is mere relationing. Mind is only an abstract symbol for an active process,

    which must ever cloud the truth. The word 'God' is not God. So, to Sri Ramana, reality cannot

    be known as an object of experience. Being is. Thought, time and space have no existence

    separate from it. But the gist of the teaching is a mystical experience, which is not an act of

    knowledge. That experience is ever-present, not an achievement in time, as it is our intrinsic

    nature, our inalienable sovereignty. The denial of it, in every moment of time, in each

    movement of the structural personality, which is finite and composite, is the sole untruth.

    So surgical a metaphysic might seem more impossible than any Illusionism. But the fault is

    with us, for we have forgotten the practical mystic in the philosopher. To Sri Ramana,

    acceptance of the philosophy of the Advaita Vedanta, which is largely his thought, was quite

    unessential. He recognised that minds might be constituted quite differently; that they might,

    with integrity of intellect, challenge not merely his conclusions, but his very premises. He

    had only one word - which was at once an injunction and exhortation, an entreaty, and a

    suggestion - 'seek to know Who am I?' He might well have said, echoing the Christ, "And all

    other things will be added unto you."

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    The mystic is multi-planal, to use an ugly, but expressive wold. To him to whom the Divine

    Ground is ever present, it is the sanction of his thinking, not rational consistency. Paradox can

    be Truth. Sri Ramana ever sought to bring his questioners to the direct, simple truth of

    Awareness. His concern was to awaken enquiry, that dynamic and ceaseless introspection

    which could take the seeker beyond speculation into Nirvana. But as to methods, he was a

    pragmatist. He recognised that to a certain kind of mind, the enquiry (Vichara) might seem

    lifeless and cold. Truly the critic might retort, we have been robbed of bread, the bread of

    faith, prayer, grace, tears in the Sanctum, and offered a stone, though it be a diamond blazing

    in darkness. We cannot turn away from the business of living, which ever assumes the

    existence of the thinker, to stab ourselves repeatedly with this doubt. The impulse to this

    suicidal introspection can only be fitful.

    The Master's reply teemed with wisdom. In a certain sense minds are also organisms, they

    grow and spread leaves in the sunshine of Truth by differing nutriment. To a certain rare type

    of mind, the epistemological problem is itself the flame of enquiry, the abstract pursuit a

    deeper passion than any lust of the flesh, than any imagination of the heart. Such a mind is

    ripe for the enquiry, because it has outgrown self-projection, which still comforts the weaker

    temperaments. He was very clear that the search Who am I? was important, not any

    conclusion that the intellect formulates as a reply. For the true answer is a state of Awareness,

    which dawns as thoughts are reduced to the seed thought 'I', and that itself melts in the

    unmeasured Being from which it first arose. But the Master admitted every ledge of support

    to the weaker explorer. There was hardly any form of devotion, of the projection of faith,

    which he did not admit as good and true in the individual case. Only, he exhorted the seeker

    ever forward, to surrender beyond supplicatory prayer, to what Brother Lawrence would have

    termed the practice of the Divine Presence, beyond 'ritual, act of adoration, or any other

    affirmation of our petty selves'. However achieved, the essential thing was that the mind must

    fall silent.

    Naturally enough, this kind of catholicity seems doubtful coinage to a certain orderly

    intellect. Did Sri Ramana accept a personal God (Iswara)? If so, how did he reconcile this

    strange concession to human hunger and anthropomorphism, with his concept of a Creative

    Silence of Being as the sole Truth? Did Sri Ramana accept the objective reality of world-

    experience, or deny it? If he accepted it, no inner transformation can be all-sufficing by itself.

    An improvement of the external world order by a community of service would have to be

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    accepted as a valid term of the metaphysic. If he denied it, then he suffered from the

    infirmities of Illusionist (Mayavadin).

    Again, does not this thought lead to a barren, unfertilising, almost anti-social exclusiveness of

    concentration on oneself? Where is there in it room for the richness of social mingling, for

    the excellences of gregarious virtue? A pretty indictment could be drawn up, not only against

    Sri Ramana, but against Sankara, the Buddha, and all whom we might term the Gnostic

    Seers.

    Every problem, and each doubt, is met by the mystic only to be taken up into the plane of his

    habitual perceptions, for the problem itself melts away in Truth. Sri Ramana never denied the

    existence of a personal God (Iswara), for a profound reason , which springs from the heart of

    his metaphysic. Thought is a creative force of Being, and the true parent of our world-

    experience and world order. That is why he always stressed that world-experience is real, but

    relative and subordinate to ever present, blissful Being; not apart from it. Personal God too is

    a creature of thought, but that idea ought not to be misunderstood. It is not that we have

    created God in our own likeness, but that the false self, an apparently objective world-

    experience, and a personal God, all spring simultaneously in Pure Being, by reason of a

    creative force not distinct from it. When Being is realised, the personal God disappears, along

    with the false 'I', and a fettering, external world order. But, he would have added, God was

    real enough; as real as our vivid griefs and pleasures.

    Similarly, Sri Ramana gave significant answer to the centuried posers of free will in polar

    opposition to destiny, and of the existence of evil. But the significance might appear

    perilously like evasion, until Truth is realised. Free will and destiny both play upon the

    individual self, and constitute a problem of that self. But who is he that feels the problem,

    who is conditioned by memory and growth, or free to initiate, to live creatively? Until this

    truth is known, the antinomy will persist unsolved. Evil is always in Meaning, and hence a

    creation of the limited self. But suffering cannot survive beyond the dualities which we have

    ourselves brought into illusory existence. In Pure Being, there is neither duality nor suffering.

    When it came to talk of service, he was more incisive, his irony could be a corrosive acid to

    melt away impurities. To him it was self-deception of the worst kind to hunger for power for

    service, without an individual transformation. And it seems that he was right. It is a childish

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    intellect that presumes that men are good or bad as they profess virtue or otherwise, that the

    adoption of beliefs can lead to regeneration, or that we shall arrive at peace by a tension of

    the energies of war. Apparently, the pursuit of virtue can lead to Hiroshima and the hydrogen

    bomb. Men can kill as easily in the name of truth and freedom, as in any other. We crave for

    Peace, but will not make an end of war. We convene conferences to limit the degree of

    cruelty that we will permit to nations, when engaged in mutual destruction. In ourselves we

    are greedy, violent and lustful, though glib enough in citing the scriptures. The inner ever

    modifies and controls the outer, and hence our living is an expression of the chaos within.

    Until we achieve peace in ourselves, we shall not shed light on any path, ours or that of

    another. The vengeance of Truth is that Mercy, Pity and Peace, cultivated as qualities without

    the inner transformation, become, as Blake sang, but "Misery's increase ". "He whose face

    gives no light, shall never become a star".

    The Enquiry (Vichara) is not mere introspection. Persisted in, it is no more a focussing of

    thought, an exclusion of other thoughts. It grows into the embrace of a stainless Peace. It is

    "off the thought waves". The holding on to Being becomes the only spiritual effort, the

    constant adventure. To one who asked him about partiality of the heart for children, which

    had survived other attachments in his case, Sri Ramana replied "Hold on to the Self. Why

    think of children, or of your attitude to them? ". The exhortation could sometimes be quaintly

    phrased, paradox always hovering near. To the neophyte intent on rendering national service,

    in the days of British rule, Sri Ramana affirmed, when asked if power could not be sought

    through spiritual life for the country's sake - "Your duty is not to be a patriot. It is to be".

    Naturally, the most marvellous creations of the intellect failed to hold him, or to command

    anything but a momentary admiration. Being childlike in his temperament, he was delighted

    with them, as with a new toy, but his delight was short-lived. It is not that he did not admire

    the materialistic achievements of science, but that he felt them to be merely peripheral, and

    even a source of misery until man had found his true Self and home. He said - "To try to

    know the forms that exist in time and space, would be as nonsensical as for a man, who has

    just been shaved, or has had his hair cut, to brood over the fate of each of those hairs ".

    When a seeker who had made a careful study of Einstein's theory of Relativity, drew his

    attention to its concepts of time, space and the observer, he put the finger unerringly on the

    epistemological tangle which it had not attempted to solve. The theory assumed a multiplicity

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    of observers, each with a distinct time-space reference. But the extraordinary truth was that

    other observers also merely existed in the perceptions of oneself, and were hence relative to

    them. This was not for the denial of the existence of 'others', but to stress that in the

    realisation of Being alone could the tangle be ever solved.

    Of the doctrine of the Heart Centre, its location in the body and the means of reaching it,

    nothing will be said here. That is a special study for the interested, of little importance in a

    broad exposition of Sri Ramana's thought. It is sufficient to note that, for him, Heart was

    again another word for Being, the sole Reality. Because we are unaware of the ever luminous

    Heart, we have given importance to the triad of the knower, the act of knowledge and the

    object known. They are but divisions of segregated thought. In Awareness, which is blissful,

    mental living is but the palest shadow. So it is said in the Ramana Gita :-

    "The world is not other than the mind;

    and the mind is not other than the Heart;

    that is the whole truth." (5-12).

    "The mortal is aware of the mind, only when

    the Heart has not blossomed, just as the

    moon is seen only when the Sun has not

    appeared." (5-15).

    His description of the Ego as a blend of the light of Pure Consciousness with the inert body,

    and hence a knot (Granthi), must again be taken as an aid to clarity, not as metaphysics in

    itself. He would have been the first to acknowledge that there was in truth no 'inert' body

    (jada), for the reason that Pure Being was the sole Reality. But we not merely perceive our

    bodies, but falsely identify ourselves with them. The ego is cunning and persistent. The

    Thinker seems to possess the plenary freedom of consciousness, but is at every moment

    conditioned by the locus from which he springs into existence. "So," said Ramana, "as pearl-

    divers fish for pearls, we must plunge into ourselves restraining speech and breath, todiscover the pearl of our inheritance in Being ".

    V

    The original Tamil text of this work consists of thirty verses, of but three lines each. The

    work is styled 'The Quintessence of Wisdom' - or of 'The Teaching' - and was not composed

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    as a formal work of art, or even as a philosophical treatise. It was quickly put together by the

    Master, in response to the request of a devotee, who wished to embed this instruction in a

    Tamil poem that he was composing, where an appropriate context had sprung up. It is clear

    and brief. Nevertheless, the task of rendering the work into English has taxed the translator's

    powers of perception and expression to the utmost.

    The grounds for this are not far to seek. Tamil is a language with a peculiar genius. It shares

    with Sanskrit a power of compression which could be the despair of a translator. Its nuances

    can be evoked only with difficulty in a language so different in its content of literature as

    English. There is, in fact, no English work corresponding to the Thirty Verses. Mystical

    works like the 'Cloud of Unknowing' cannot be compared, because they are not creations of

    art as well. They suffer from diffusion and description. Here, though conscious art was not

    employed, these Gnostic Epigrams achieve a power of paradox which recall to mind the

    proverbs in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It must be further realised that shades of

    meaning in depth, distinct yet related, are often achieved in languages like Tamil and

    Sanskrit, which were the languages of courts and courtly rhetoric. Modem English has been

    emasculated of these powers. We have to proceed to the lesser known religious poetry of

    Herbert or Crashaw, or to certain phrases of Donne, to find analogies.

    What is it in us that perceives the truth of poetry? That Truth is supra-rational, even as

    mystical Experience. The Hindu would use a simple term, the buddhi, but simplicity in

    Sanskrit resolves no knot in English expression. The buddhi is not mere intuition. It is rather

    that consciousness which uses intuition as its characteristic mode of apprehension.

    When Blake says :-

    "Each outcry of the hunted hare,

    A fibre from the brain doth tear."

    Or

    "The road of Excess leads to the palace of Wisdom,"

    what is it in us which sees, without the intervention of time, the truth of these suprarational

    and irrational statements? Reason is violated, but we have raised no cry. Rather, our eyes are

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    held by a greater light. It is in that mood of sensitive intuition that the Thirty Verses should

    be studied.

    The strength to pierce the guarded wit, is largely derived from compression, an unconscious

    process in the mind of the creative artist. Shakespeare has many instances. Simplicity is the

    culmination of a process of great delicacy and complexity. Chemical metaphors alone seem

    adequate here. But we can all recognise.

    "Men must endure

    Their going hence, even as their coming hither.

    Ripeness is all."

    Or

    as Gratiano towards the end of 'Othello' -

    "All that's spoke is marred"

    Or

    "Nothing of him that doth fade,

    But doth suffer a seachangeInto something rich and strange."

    Alas, the English rendering destroys this potent compression, and inevitably so. The original

    verses have the power of a mantra - but a literal version would have merely achieved the

    obscurity of Cimmerian darkness. The author hopes, however, that even in the English

    rendering, there are fleeting glimpses of the profound terseness of this great mystical work.

    Om Shanti.

    The Thirty Verses of Sri Ramana

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    Freely Rendered Into English

    With A Commentary

    I

    Karma is not living Truth,

    for it is but the unfoldment of law

    empowered by the Divine Will.

    The worship of Fate is idolatrous,

    and frees no serfdom of the Mind.

    The work begins with the word Karma, which I have retained, instead of attempting a

    paraphrase. A precise English equivalent cannot be found. The only other Sanskrit word

    which occurs in the English rendering is Yoga, which is a like case. An added justification is

    that these words have passed into current English usage, the language thus exhibiting another

    of the numberless instances of its genius for assimilation. Etymologically, Karma is derived

    from a Sanskrit verb, the meaning of which is 'to act'. But Karma is far more than Action. It

    is, at any given moment in the life of an individual, the momentum of past forces, working

    upon his life and determining its outer events, and also the potential of impulses towards

    action generated by his past. No part of the characteristic thought of India has been more

    misunderstood than this concept, and not merely by foreign Savants. It is a pervasive concept

    and hence there are many degenerate forms of it in consciousness of the people. We can only

    briefly note here that it is not fatalism engendered by the languors of a tropical climate. On

    the contrary, the complexion of this doctrine is optimistic. No responsible Hindu

    metaphysician has ever taught that Karma implies neglect of duties (inaction), or a pattern of

    Behaviourism.

    Naturally, such a basic idea has itself given rise to schools of metaphysics. The Mimamsikas

    held, for instance, that Karma was all-sufficient, since the Present could create the Future,

    and action based upon knowledge of the ethical law, could win for man the Heavens of

    Felicity.

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    Sri Ramana commences his work with the repudiation of this idolatry, of action based upon

    gratification, whether crude or subtle. In this first verse, two strands of thought are

    interwoven. Karma is not living Truth, because it cannot liberate man, bound by the miseries

    of conceptual thought, of finite experience. Action motivated by the desire for gratification,

    which is the worship of Karma, may certainly lead to results. It may win for man prolonged

    states of pleasure, depending on the intensity of the effort involved. But all such paradises are

    creations in Time, which must come to an end, and plunge the soul further into embodiment

    and its anguish. Nowhere is the mystic more clearly marked from the mere believer, the

    preacher or the reformer, than in his insistence upon Freedom as the first condition of the

    Soul's health and joy. The cry of the Godhead in us is for instant union, immediately

    enfranchising the self, seemingly bound. "Find Me, and turn thy back on Heaven", as

    Emerson sang.

    Again, the worship of Karma is idolatrous, because we have no concern with Karma, the

    mechanism, being children of the Lord of Karma (the Divine). Karma is insentient (Jada): it

    is empowered by the sanction of the Divine Will. This does not mean that our true

    relationship with the Divine is one of supplicatory prayer. Sri Ramana's vision is the far

    loftier one of a loving surrender, in which prayer ceases in the silence of acceptance, and at

    last separation from the Divine is itself abrogated, as the later verses will show.

    II

    As thought, as word and act,

    the threefold Ignorance moves,

    and unceasingly begets

    its own dark future:

    its profits and losses time-defaced,

    Its seed, the increase of night.

    How can Light spring from Darkness,how can Freedom arise

    from multiplied fetters?

    The same idea is continued in this verse, but it is a key to much that follows, and hence rich

    in its significance. Here also the mystic is separated from the reformer or idealist, as though

    by another dimension. The thinking mind is itself the fetter or the ego. Identified with a locus,

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    body, it can only pursue its separate interests, can create darkness by the law of its being. To

    the mystic, the pursuit of virtue is not freedom. Unselfish and selfish acts are both degrees in

    ignorance. Action springing from ignorance, being bound and dark, cannot create its contrary,

    Light or Freedom. It is also most tersely suggested that profits and losses of such action

    (Karma) are time-bound and finite; its seed is further bondage, the impetus to perpetuation of

    itself. Those who desire to help the world, without an inner transformation, suffer from a

    grave delusion. They do not realise that the first condition of helpful action, is the possession

    of Truth, as the Illuminati have ever held.

    III

    When life itself is offered service

    to the inmost Lord,

    and hope, fear and desire, fall away

    from such consecrated day and night,

    this is the purification of the heart.

    It is the shaft of light piercing the Abyss.

    The second verse implied a vicious circle, which does correspond to a vital truth. Action

    springing from ignorance, intensifies it. This, in turn, leads to further enchaining act. Time,

    and this multiplication of fetters (Samsara) appear to be endless: creatures are caught in this,

    as in a net. But 'There is Hope'. [This is one of the very early recorded sayings of Sri Ramana,

    in English, to the agonised question of a devotee, in the days of his silence and self-

    absorption at Tiruvannamalai.] The vicious circles of logic are not the last truths of life. The

    verse states the essential teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, in a few words, in the most

    appropriate context. It is possible to consecrate everything to the Lord: to think, speak and

    act, for His sake. Such a devotee is freed from fear, the hardest fetter, and from hope and

    desire, which are realised as the obverses of his fear, the lack of inner sufficiency. A great

    peace descends upon him, irrespective of the outer whirl. This is "the purification of the

    heart". It points the way to liberation, though in itself the discipline may still be stained with

    elements of ignorance.

    IV

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    And body's service is ritual,

    the wealth of its adoration

    And the service of speech is prayer and praise,

    clinging to the word that redeems.

    And the service of mind is meditation.

    So is each excellent above the other.

    As the previous verse states, in the ignorance we have but one choice, the consecration of all

    energies of heart and will to the Lord. All other pursuit of ideal or reformation is false, for

    there is thus no possibility of transforming the dark centre of action, which is the ego. The

    body serves the Lord by adoration, which is no mere conformity to a liturgy, as will be

    presently seen: Speech becomes the service of the Lord, when this power itself is offered up

    to the divine name, when the function of speech is wholly absorbed in the Lord's praise. Theservice of mind is meditation. This is also a ladder of excellence, for the body's adoration

    comes first, higher is the consecration of speech to the divine, and highest, is the mind's

    meditation. This is inevitably so, since we are mental beings in essence. The further verses

    describe the true and highest form of each service; of the body, of speech, and of mind.

    V

    And the ritual the Lord loves,

    the adoration that he takes unto Himself,

    is the service of all created forms

    as, verily, forms of the Lord.

    This is the best adoration.

    "He prayeth best who loveth best, all things both great and small". How the mystic

    disappoints the ritualist and the ceremonialist! For the outer trappings cannot detain him, who

    is already seated at the heart of things. Further, there is grave danger of disintegration, where

    a spiritual discipline is practised in, together with an arrogant neglect of the forms of creation.

    Thus the ego is strengthened, social obligations warped, and the abuses of the solitary life

    multiplied. Hence the excellence here enshrined is no liturgy, however enticing, but a

    constant attitude of worship to the meanest created form, as a messenger of the Lord. Even if

    this wisdom is taken literally, it does great good and no harm: Saints have literally saluted the

    worm and the clod. They have accepted, with bliss, the sting of the deadly cobra, as "the

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    envoy of the Beloved." But, of course, the attitude must not be forced. It must spring from

    feeling, and be sustained by (the heart, not the will.

    VI

    And the service of speech is clinging

    to the redeeming word.

    Not verbal praise, but so unceasingly

    pronounced in the heart

    that tongue has no need of utterance;

    that is the consecration of speech, itself a meditation.

    Praise of the Lord can easily become a cunning self-gratification. We must grow less and

    cease to be, that the Light may increase in us. The Lord has no need of our praise, for He is

    immanent as well as transcendent, and is not apart from our inmost being. Many words merge

    in the redeeming word, to which the tongue clings. But even external expression is far less

    than the unceasing inward pronouncement, which is a vital purification. There is a vast

    mystical literature upon the efficacy of the divine name, but the true secret is simple. As the

    chaotic iron filings pattern themselves spontaneously in the mere presence of the magnet, the

    divine name becomes a constant inward speech, until it conquers the heart. To Sri Ramana,

    this itself is the meditation of being, or at least the other courtyard of the shrine. He was,

    however, against any "sad, mechanical exercise ". He stressed that the Name must be taken

    with feeling, and must be constantly with the man, tingeing his days and nights.

    VII

    As the unbroken stream of fragrant oil,

    as the river flows ceaselessly into the breast of the sea -

    not fugitive thought,

    nor fitful preoccupation,this is the excellence of meditation.

    Meditation is rarely understood. In its native, characteristic form, it is not thought, nor any

    kind of thought-process. It is the silence and peace of the mind-stuff, in which the Real is

    effortlessly mirrored. But, of course, its earliest stage is a kind of focussing of thought either

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    upon a single concept, or a range of concepts, sustained by a deep interest. Where the effort

    to exclude other thoughts is more marked, where the concentrator is separating himself from

    thought, and using violence in its direction, true meditation has hardly begun. Sri Ramana

    affirms that the excellence of meditation is that it must be a constant sustained, deep interest.

    It must become the life, not an exercise for an hour of the day. Ultimately, other thoughts

    cease to distract, all other interests but the quest fall away from the seeker. Instead of a forced

    calmness, the mind becomes but a single vast thought, not a positive projection which is

    unreal, but the search 'Who am I?', the mode of negative comprehension.

    VIII

    To cease from imagining the Lord,

    to cease from all projections of Him

    which are unreal,

    no longer to dream that we are separate,

    but, in truth, to abandon

    all forms of creaturely striving,

    and to be surrendered unto His Being -

    That is the meditation of Truth.

    The inward reason why men have everywhere turned away from formal faiths, why even

    when nature borrows the cry of faith in bitter need, the next moment they are unable to revive

    that quickened acceptance, is that all form, all belief, is but self-projection. Idols, whether

    mental or made with hands, are not Truth. All imagination of the Real is false, and the most

    fervent supplicatory prayer is far less than surrender. Because we have moved away from

    Him, in the false revolt of an imagined self-will, we have created the distance between Him

    and ourselves, which prayer seeks vainly to bridge. When we are utterly surrendered unto

    Him, each assertion of creaturely nature grows less, and He alone shines forth. This is the

    true significance of the 'great utterance' [Mahavakya], Tat Twam Asi - 'That Thou art'.

    IX

    By the very Dynamics of surrender,

    to be one with the Essence,

    which is naked Being,

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    beyond thought and dream

    that is the core of devotion:

    For all imaginations fall from Him.

    The state is indescribable. It has to be realised, and it can be realised by all men, for it is theinheritance, the inalienable birth-right: "A presence that is not to be put by". Even in our

    false, divided, shadowed lives we have all had moments and glimpses of it, when there was

    only the bliss of self-forgetting consciousness, When separate thought had ceased to exist. Sri

    Ramana was marvellous in the uncompromising clarity of his vision of the Divine [the Self or

    Atman]. "Realisation" itself was false, for the Real cannot be made real! We have only

    seemingly lost ourselves; being incorruptible, we do not truly stain or fetter our essence: all

    that is needed is to cease to project. Or, as he said playfully, we have but to disrealise.

    X

    And this is the way of works,

    and this is the way of devotion,

    and this is the way of knowledge,

    and the way of striving or Yoga,

    that Mind is gathered into its source.

    That thought turns back in tireless pursuit

    of the birth of the thinker,

    who has assumed his own truth,

    and created the kingdoms of separation.

    'Thought gathered into its source' is the crux of Sri Ramana's mystical experience. All

    thoughts presuppose, and proceed from, the thinker, who is a self-projection in

    consciousness. When this introspection is constant and intense, the mind becomes the flame

    of enquiry. When the thinker dissolves, 'the kingdoms of separation ' do not exist, and Being

    is the sole reality, though the outer embraces of event may continue. For this reason, this way

    is for Sri Ramana, the path of works, devotion, knowledge and striving or Yoga - Every other

    conception of paths assumes the truth of the thinker, and becomes false, like a thief

    transformed into a policeman, masquerading to apprehend himself.

    XI

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    When spreading thought defies

    the controller's grasp,

    and its speed of images

    renders stillness impossible,

    then gently still and even the breath.

    For with inward, tranquil breathing,

    Thought sinks into peace.

    By this net, the elusive bird is caught.

    The compassion of the mystic is that he is always at a tension between poles: impatience to

    bring others to the Divine Ground, for him so simple, evident, inalienable: pity and

    acceptance for every ledge that weakness clamours for. This, and the following three verses,

    prove that Sri Ramana accepted even a physical discipline as a true, though temporary, aid -Pranayama or the Yoga of controlled breath. For the process of respiration is the outward

    working of an inner energy, which is also the power that animates the thinking brain. Breath

    is refined, tranquil and almost imperceptible, as thoughts decrease in frequency, as the image-

    making power weakens: and vice versa. Hence, for him to whom peace of mind is

    inconceivable, Sri Ramana taught the slow, careful subdual of breath, as the means of a

    temporary inner calm.

    There must be no straining, no effort, to achieve this calmness, and ultimate cessation of

    breathing (Kevala Kumbhaka). All violence is dangerous. Constant awareness of the

    movement of breath, without any effort to hold or retain, is the safe path of "the Yoga of

    tranquil breath".

    XII

    For thought and breath,

    as with knowledge and act,

    are twin branches

    of a single stem, the root.

    And the Yoga of tranquil breath

    thus safely leads

    to still, self-gathered thought -

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    the delectable path

    to passion-torn minds.

    The idea has been already explained. Thought, with its characteristic function of knowledge,

    and breath, with its function of sustaining all bodily action, are expressions of a single, primalenergy. For this reason, it is possible to attain an utter, though temporary, calmness of

    thought, by the Yoga of breath. It is curious that Shelley, with a poet's intuition, should have

    sung, in Prometheus Unbound, of

    "Love, thought and breath,

    the powers that quell death."

    XIII

    But ordered silence is not the peace

    that passeth understanding.

    From silence, thought re-emerges,

    and the breath trembles into movement.

    But who has melted his separate self

    in the seas of Being,

    for him thought has no return:

    For he has come into his own:

    Truth that is peace and bliss.

    'Like a salt doll that dived into the sea to measure its depth' - to use one of Sri Ramana's

    favourite images. 'Ordered silence' is sustained by effort: it must inevitably dissolve. Thought

    and breath re-awaken together. But when the separate personality is lost in the realisation of

    Being, there is no return to divided life.

    XIV

    In the hour of silence that is your own,

    through the Yoga of tranquil breath,

    seek the source of the thinker,

    and thought, which is the Thinker,

    dissolves itself.

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    In the original text it is implied that not merely by search of the source of the Thinker, but by

    any Meditation through which thought becomes a single, integral form which ultimately

    dissolves, the truth is realised. But, I feel certain that Sri Ramana would have approved of the

    English rendering, as it expresses the unique contribution of his direct path. As he said finely,

    some seek Attainment, but others seek the self that seeks to attain. These latter quickly arrive

    at the heart of things.

    XV

    When the form of thought dissolves,

    the Yogi is no more the truth-seeker,

    but the Truth,

    There is no more for him to achieve,

    gathered into the native silence of Being.

    I do not comment upon this verse. The awakened intuition alone can glimpse the light of

    which it is a hint.

    XVI

    True feeling is not the love of created things,

    Or the recoil from them,for they are set in a world

    exterior to the soul.

    But true feeling is

    the ceaseless awareness

    of the bright, stainless form

    of thought itself.

    So long as we have traffic with the known, with senses, events, experience: so long, we do

    not truly know ourselves. The true wisdom is to turn inward, to the centre of action which is

    the Knower. Thought thus turned inward, can realise its effulgence, which is not different

    from Being.

    XVII

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    And mind turned inward

    in unrelenting search,

    dissolves its abstract, unreal form.

    For there is no mind,

    there are only thoughts,

    To philosopher and idiot alike,

    truth proves itself.

    There is no mind, verily :

    there are only thoughts.

    'Mind' exists when the thinker has not turned back thought, as a focussed beam, upon his

    own, intrinsic truth. It is a symbol, an organisation, a destructive force that we imperfectly

    control, what you will. But when we proceed deeper into the truth of ourselves, there is noMind, there are only thoughts. They proceed from the seed-thought 'I', and sink into it.

    XVIII

    And thoughts appear infinite

    as the waves of the sea,

    as cloudlets in the Indian sky.

    But thoughts are finite,

    and thoughts resolve

    into the seed-thought 'I.'

    From 'I' subtly arises

    the seeming movement, however swift.

    Mind itself is but 'I.'

    'Thoughts are finite'. 'Time must have a stop'. It is this intense sense of self, or consciousness,

    unrelated to the body or to externalised thinking, which overwhelmed Sri Ramana as a boy,

    and was the forerunner of his mystical experience.

    XIX

    And the innermost shrine

    is the shrine of 'I.'

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    And when the Truth-seeker

    storms this citadel,

    bearing the sword of Truth,

    he slays himself:

    his head bows and falls.

    'The Ego bows his head and falls' is a translation that has occurred elsewhere. I prefer to

    express it thus, for thought is so subtle that we can separate ourselves from 'the Ego' also, and

    perpetuate finitude!

    XX

    Another emerges,

    triumphant, joyous, free.

    Not self, but Being -

    the tremulous Awareness

    'I' - 'I' - -

    not the historical personality,

    but the creative movement of silence.

    Comment on this verse is impossible, for Awareness is to be experienced, not described. But

    it is a profound thought that Truth or Reality is discontinuous, because it is spontaneous, born

    each moment, and creative, because timeless. Continuity and memory mark our mental

    living, full of pain and decay.

    XXI

    And Being alone is ever true,

    not the false, continuous self

    whose dreams are pleasure and pain,

    the sad texture of our lives.

    We are verily Being,

    since we know ourselves existent

    even in the depths of dreamless slumber,

    where there is no conscious self.

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    The separate personality, the thinker, is part of the thought-process. If 'I' were merely this, I

    should dread sleep as death itself, for I cease to exist therein. But I am all-blissful Being, in

    essence, and all the frenzied torture of personality, oblivion and renewals of thought, do not

    stain Being. According to Sri Ramana, physiological explanations of dreamless sleep are

    unmetaphysical, and beg the question. The true, inward reason why a man says - 'I slept

    blissfully', though he (the ego) was no witness of dream-less sleep, is that our Being, of

    which the separate personality is but a subordinate term, includes and transcends the states of

    waking or thought externalised, dream, and dreamless sleep.

    XXII

    As I am Being,

    the Illumination of all forms,

    I am not the vesture,

    Body, the outer sheath.

    I am not the senses

    moving in their orbits.

    I am not life,

    the inwardness of breath

    that kindles the body's form.

    I am not the night of sleep

    I am not even mind,

    which is but the procession of thoughts.

    They are but mechanical,

    empowered by deathless Me,

    who am the Bread of Life.

    The mode of negative comprehension is dynamic, but it cannot be merely verbal, it must be a

    realisation at each stage, an actual, felt severance from that which is not essentially oneself, a

    true 'aloneness'. When this severance from even the thinker and his thought occurs, not as an

    analysis but a realised truth, the flame of Pure Consciousness, the Godhead, is alone left.

    XXIII

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    Since there is no separate knowledge

    to know Being, the Real,

    Being cannot be known.

    That is a hard saying,

    because delusion is ancient and fixed,

    and we seek to know the Lord

    in the kingdoms of division.

    But there is no separate self,

    separate Knower and knowledge.

    How can the Real be twain?

    We are the Real ourselves.

    A key verse, the terse significance of which can awaken the intuition, as a flash of lightningreveals what night has shrouded, when truly meditated upon. The desire to know the Real is

    false, for there is no knowledge separate from the Real, to make it known. Nor are we

    separate. What then? There is nothing except the negative way of dying to our false selves of

    thought, which is to "fall into the hands of the Living God".

    XXIV

    As we are the Real,

    and the Lord is the Real,

    in the depths of the Real

    we are one with the Lord.

    Knowledge of fetter alone

    marks the distinction

    of the creature and its Lord.

    We know the seeming fetters

    of body and thought.

    And the Lord is immanent

    in His form, the universe.

    The idea of the universe as a "fetter" (Upadhi) of the Lord, is, of course, merely a playful

    metaphor, for the sake of completeness of the paralleled concept. It is purely implicit in the

    original.

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    XXV

    Thus, to know the Lord is

    to know our Being,

    free of the seeming fettersof body and thought.

    XXVI

    And to know Being

    is nakedly to be,

    since no other knowledge is possible

    which is not external and false.

    This is the meditation of Being itself.

    These two verses complete the idea of Verse XXIII. We are one in essence with the Lord. We

    are one in the actuality of living also, and in expression, when we dwell in the heart of His

    Being, unaware of the "seeming fetters of body and thought", Apart from such inherence in

    His Being, which is the crux of the mystical experience, there can be no 'knowledge' of the

    Lord or the Real.

    XXVII

    And the truth of knowledge

    is Being, which is knowledge,

    beyond the fragmented knowings and unknowings

    that we prize as the mind's riches,

    or deem its ignorance.

    In truth, there is nothing to be known.

    "There is nothing to be known", which is separate or external, in truth. Truth is not an

    achievement, nor an act of knowledge, but is the simple awareness of Being. All our mind's

    riches of the known, our contrasts of the learned or unlettered, are to the mystic but the minor

    degrees of Ignorance.

    XXVIII

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    When Being is realized,

    and the Knower is Awareness itself,

    Vision is no more separate,

    but the endless ecstasy of Being

    in all forms,

    all embraces of experience.

    Life is the deathless honey

    of consciousness.

    XXIX

    This State, this movement in Silence,

    is the surrender to the Lord

    which is His dwelling in the soul,

    the rapturous growing into Him.

    It is the bliss transcending the concepts

    both of fetter and freedom.

    XXX

    And this is the true Penance,

    and the culmination of Yoga,

    to live and move in the silence,

    utterly free of the false 'I',

    the root of mind in serfdom.

    So spake Ramana,

    who moves not apart from the Lord.

    As the work draws to a close, unveiling the state of the Real as far as words could possess

    power to do so, in terse Gnostic Epigrams, comment becomes more and more difficult,perhaps misleading. Those who met the Master in life, and were sensitive enough to be aware

    that though he lived, moved and laughed as a man amongst men, he was somehow different,

    that his personality was but the thinnest veil over an impersonal incandescence, would find a

    recognition in these verses. But it is as a mirror distorting the reflection of the shadow of a

    splendour. It is noteworthy that, to Sri Ramana, Truth transcended the concepts "both of fetter

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    and freedom". He who thinks that he is free, and others still fettered, is not yet in possession

    of the plenitude of Truth. Being is not true in Realization, and untrue in Bondage. It alone

    ever exists.

    Om Shanti.