A couple of days ago, I asked David Godman this question:

David, do you think these kinds of very specific heart/mind experiences such as Saradamma described (and the kind Papaji has described) always happen when Self-realisation takes place, and some people just never speak of them? When I first read that account in No Mind I am the Self, it struck me as so very precise and physiological that it almost seemed like if that is the doorway through which one ego makes its final exit, that would need to be the way they all go ... Yet Annamalai Swami, for example, does not mention anything like this (I don’t think), or speak of severed knots, and instead describes a more gradual process. I am thinking specifically of this exchange in Final Talks:

Question: I want to ask Swamiji about his own experience. Was his own experience a single event, an explosion of knowledge? Or did it happen more gradually, in a more subtle way?

Annamalai Swami: It was my experience that through continuous sadhana I gradually relaxed into the Self. It was a gradual process.

Question: So it is not necessarily something that happens with a big bang?

Annamalai Swami: It is not something new that suddenly comes. It is eternally there, but it is covered by so much. It has to be rediscovered.

I’d love to hear anything and everything that comes to you on this topic ... I have wondered a lot about this. Thanks!

David then gave this answer on his new blog http://sri-ramana-maharshi.blogspot.com/.

Only the quest "Who am I?" is necessary.

Maharshi: Moksha is to know that you were not born. "Be still and know that I am God." To be still is not to think. Know, and not think, is the word.

D.: There are said to be six organs of different colours in the chest , of which the heart is said to be two finger-breadths to the right of the middle line. But the Heart is also formless. Should we then imagine it to have a shape and meditate on it?

Maharshi: No. Only the quest "Who am I??" is necessary. What remains all through deep sleep and waking is the same. But in waking there is unhappiness and the effort to remove it. Asked who wakes up from sleep you say `I'. Now you are told to hold fast to this `I'. If it is done the eternal Being will reveal Itself. Investigation of `I' is the point and not meditation on the heart-centre. There is nothing like within or without. Both mean either the same thing or nothing. Of course there is also the practice of meditation on the heart- centre. It is only a practice and not investigation. Only the one who meditates on the heart can remain aware when the mind ceases to be active and remains still; whereas those who meditate on other centres cannot be so aware but infer that the mind was still only after it becomes again active.

from Talk 131, Talks with Ramana Maharshi http://talks-with-ramana-maharshi.blogspot.com/2007/08/talk-131.html

the true Heart

Bhagavan frequently told me [Annamalai Swami] that I should be aware of the Self while I was working.

He repeatedly told me, 'Don't forget your real nature. It is not necessary that you should sit and meditate. You should meditate all the time, even while you are working.'

In the beginning, when I first came to Bhagavan, I asked him for a mantra. In response he told me to repeat 'Siva Siva' continuously. Later, Bhagavan advised me to keep my attention in the Heart while I was working. I had read that Bhagavan had spoken of a place called the Heart-centre which he located in the right side of the chest. I had assumed that Bhagavan wanted me to concentrate on this particular centre. However, when I started to practise in this way, Bhagavan stopped me and corrected me.

'This right-side Heart-centre is not the true Heart," he said. 'The real Heart is not located anywhere. It is all-pervasive.'

'Stop meditating on the Heart-centre,' he continued. 'Find the source. That is the true Heart. Just as electricity comes not from the individual meter boxes in people's houses but from a single source, so too the whole world has a single source, which is the Self or the Heart. Seek and enquire into this source of limitless energy. If the centre of the Self were really located in the body, the Self would die when the body dies."

~ from Living by the Words of Bhagavan