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/.

what is this `I'?

What is this `I' that rises from within?
Only a thought that, like a bubble, floats
Up to the troubled surface of Awareness.
In sleep the sea is still, no bubble rises:
Then too you are.
You're not the `I' that rises and then sets,
You are the sole Awareness in the All,
The eternal, uncreated Light of Being.

~ Sri Muruganar, from 'Suttaruttal'

by steady and continuous investigation

By steady and continuous investigation into the nature of the mind, the mind is transformed into That to which `I' refers; and that is in fact the Self. The mind has necessarily to depend for its existence on something gross; it never subsists by itself. It is the mind that is otherwise called the subtle body, ego, jiva or soul.

That which arises in the physical body as `I' is the mind. If one enquires whence the `I'-thought arises in the body in the first instance, it will be found that it is from the hrdayam or the Heart. That is the source and stay of the mind. Or again, even
if one merely continuously repeats to oneself inwardly `I-I' with the entire mind fixed thereon, that also leads to the same source.

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, The Teachings of Bhagavan in His Own Words