not believing the rising thoughts

Every night during sleep you let go of your attachment to both the body and the mind, and the result is silence, peace, and an absence of duality. You can have this silence, this peace, and this absence of duality in the waking state by not believing the rising thoughts that create duality for you. Resist limiting thoughts. Replace them with thoughts such as "All is myself. Everybody is myself. All animals, all things are myself."

~ Annamalai Swami, Final Talks, edited by David Godman

his alone

"What is the problem for you? Just be!' Speaking in this way Padam ensured that there is not even a single activity for me.

'When I have taken on your responsibilities, what is lacking for you?' Speaking in this way, Padam embraces me in the Heart in eternal rejoicing.

Padam is the consciousness, the supreme, in which I have no responsibilities to think about since every responsibility is his alone.

Even as I suffered through the delusion of regarding myself as the actor, true Padam caused me to shine as the enduring stage.

Padam destroyed my sense of doership so that, through the peace of jnana, a life free from evil flourished within the Heart.

~ Padamalai, Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi recorded by Muruganar

[No post tomorrow, dear readers ... back on Sunday :-)]

How can I get peace?

D: How can I get peace? I do not seem to obtain it through vichara.

Sri Ramana Maharshi: Peace is your natural state. It is the mind that obstructs the natural state. Your vichara has been made only in the mind. Investigate what the mind is, and it will disappear. There is no such thing as mind apart from thought. Nevertheless, because of the emergence of thought, you surmise something from which it starts and term that the mind. When you probe to see what it is, you find there is really no such thing as mind. When the mind has thus vanished, you realise eternal peace.

~ from Maharshi's Gospel

How does one get rid of the hindrances to Self-realization?

The first western lady devotee to come to Sri Ramanasramam was M.A. Pigot, an English lady, who had read A Search in Secret India and had come to India to see the Maharshi.

Often she would be desperate because there would always be a crowd and Ramana was never alone. His hall was open to one and all at all times. But early one morning when she came into the hall she found him unattended, "emanating a wonderful stillness and peace." With his permission she put some questions and got his clarifications.

P: What are the hindrances to the realization of the true Self?

R: Memory chiefly, habits of thought, accumulated tendencies.

P: How does one get rid of these hindrances?

R: Seek for the Self through meditation in this manner, trace every thought back to its origin which is only the mind. Never allow thought to run on. If you do, it will be unending. Take it back to its starting place -- the mind -- again and again, and it and the mind will both die of inaction. The mind exists only when the attention of the subject or the individual is there. If this is forgotten and the fact that the Self is one, whole, is forgotten, no meditation can result in sustained, inherent, peace of mind."

At the time of the farewell his talk was most touching. He was so gentle and humane. He discussed the difficulties of everyday life and mundane problems. Ramana's parting message was, "Do what is right at a given moment and leave it behind."

~ from Timeless in Time by A.R. Natarajan

Dilip Kumar Roy meets the Maharshi

It happened in 1945, I think. I was still living as an inmate of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, even though I had come to feel a growing sense of isolation and begun to surmise that I was a misfit there. My sadness and sense of dereliction only deepened with time till what little peace I had left me completely and I felt all but stranded. But I need not go into the why and wherefore of it all; I would plunge straight into what keeps me company as one of the most unforgettable experiences I have ever had. It does, as it was a landmark in my life.

After having been for weeks in the grip of a deep gloom, I wrote straight to Sri Aurobindo. He wrote back at once giving me the needed permission, which I deeply appreciated.

I took the train to Tiruvannamalai where Ramana Maharshi lived. But as the train rolled on I felt a deep and growing malaise ... How could I win the needed peace at the feet of one who was not my Guru when I could not attain it at the feet of my revered Guru, Sri Aurobindo, whose wisdom and greatness my heart had never once questioned.

Well, I alighted at the station in a mixed frame of mind...

But it was too late then, for I was already at the gates of Ramanashram. How could I return now, after having crossed the Rubicon? Besides, I was driven by an irresistible urge to meet in the flesh the great Yogi who — unlike my own preceptor, Sri Aurobindo — was available to all at all hours. And, to crown all, I wanted to test the Maharshi for myself and see whether he, with his magic compassion, could lift me out of the deep slough I had landed in.

But he did, and against my worst prognostications at that, so that I could not possibly explain it away as a figment of autosuggestion. I mean — if there were any auto-suggestion here it could only be against and not in favour of my receiving the goods. But, as the Lord's ways are not ours, I won an experience I could never even have dreamed of. So listen with bated breath.

I can still recapture the thrill of the apocalyptic experience that came to me to charm away as it were the obstinate gloom which had settled on my chest like an incubus. But, alas, words seem so utterly pale and banal the moment you want to describe an authentic spiritual experience which is vivid, throbbing and intense. Still I must try.

I entered a trifle diffidently a big, bare hall where the Maharshi reclined morning and evening among his devotees and the visitors who happened to call. Accessible to all, the great saint sat on a divan looking straight in front at nothing at all. I was told he lived thus all the time, in sahaja samadhi, that is a constant super-conscious state. I was indeed fascinated by what I saw, but I will not even attempt to portray with words how overwhelmed I was (and why) by what met my eyes. For what is it after all that I saw? Just a thin, half-naked man, sitting silently, gazing with glazed eyes at the window. Yet there was something in him that spoke to me — an indefinable beauty of poise and a plenitude that cannot be limmed with words. I wrote afterwards a poem1 on him that may give a better idea, but I must not get ahead of my story.

I touched his feet and then, without a word, sat down near him on the floor and meditated, my heart aheave with a strange exaltation which deepened by and by into an ineffable peace which beggars description. My monthold gloom and misgivings, doubts and questionings, melted away like mist before sunrise, till I felt I was being cradled on the crest of a flawless peace in a vast ocean of felicity and light. I have to use superlatives here as I am trying to describe as best I can my experience of an ineffable bliss and peace which lasted for hours and hours. I can well remember how deep was the gratefulness I felt towards the Maharshi on that sleepless and restful night as I reclined, bathed in peace, in an easy chair under the stars at which I gazed and gazed in an ecstasy of tears. And I recalled a pregnant saying of his:

"Just be. All is in you. Only a veil stands between. You have only to rend the veil and then, well, just be."

I had found this favourite remark of his rather cryptic heretofore. But in that moment I understood for the first time and wrote a poem in homage to the Maharshi.

~ from The Mountain Path, October, 1964

For a poem by Dilip Kumar Roy, please visit J's blog: http://the-sage-of-arunachala.blogspot.com/