Who Am I? (Part 1)

Rohan

11 June 2007, 10:32

Just as gold is shaped to form a beautiful ring, so consciousness shapes itself into all this variegated world. Reality is consciousness itself. The many forms cannot exist apart from it. Can the ring exist without gold?

Much of Advaita Vedanta is an exploration on what exactly the nature of out lives, our world, our bodies and the ‘true self’ are. One of the essential ideas behind it is always that the world we live in, where we each have mind, bodies, intellects and so on, and the things we see around ourselves, they are all an illusion, ‘maya’. Numerous sages, including Swami Chinmayananda have used the following analogy to describe maya.

Imagine you are walking into a dark room. Suddenly, you see a snake on the ground and you’re afraid. You run to the wall and turn the lights on, and then you sigh in relief, it was only some rope on the ground that looked menacing in the darkness.

That snake was real to you in the dark room, it existed and was capable of doing horrible things to you, there was a snake there. Until the lights came on. That snake, is maya. It’s there, it’s right there! Slithering around, ready to bite you, can’t you see it’s right there! Until the lights come on, that is.

The important bit of the whole analogy, besides understanding maya, is the process of ‘turning on of the lights’. This concept is commonly called ‘Self-Realisation’, and is the focal point of Vedanta. When those lights come on, you go beyond your mind, body and intellect, thoughts don’t exist any more, you become infinite, the true self, Brahman. You were a drop of water, that jumped out of the water in a splash, believed itself to be individual and separate from the ocean for a few lifetimes, and then fell right back into that ocean.

A large majority of Advait’s believe that nothing you ‘do’, nothing you ‘think’, no ‘effort’ on your part can let you reach Self-Realisation. It is the very body and mind, that constrains you, that sustains maya, and so using these will not get you anywhere on the path to Self-Realisation. In fact, there is no path, it’s a place that must be reached, but the journey is instantaneous. I repeat, there’s nothing you can do, to get there.

Which is very, very frustrating to people like me who are barely grasping the whole concept in the first place. We read through the Tatva Bodha, the Yoga Vashishta and the Bhagvad Gita, we labour to understand what ‘maya’ is, and what Brahman (The True Self) is, and so on. And then we find out, all you did was well useless. No effort on your part can get you to Brahman, you’re screwed.

But then, there’s always someone with a slightly different idea, someone who doesn’t go by the norm, someone who suggest something different. And in this case, that person (among others) is Sri Ramana Maharishi.

At the age of sixteen, the young Iyer Brahmin from Tiruchuzi in Tamil Nadu, had a life altering experience that led to a need, an urge to Self-Enquiry. The experience itself is quite interesting.

One day, Ramana suddenly felt a violent fear of death, with nothing around or in the immediate past having prompted it. So he started questioning the nature of death, and what happens after, in his thoughts. To gain a better understanding, he pretended to be dead, holding his body stiff as if in rigor mortis, holding his breath and his voice. And then he began enquiring.

With the death of the body, am I dead? Is the body I? It is silent and inert, but I feel the full force of my personality and even the voice of I within me, apart from it. So I am the Spirit transcending the body. The body dies but the spirit transcending it cannot be touched by death. That means I am the deathless Spirit. All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truths which I perceived directly almost without thought process. “I” was something real, the only real thing about my present state, and all the conscious activity connected with the body was centered on that “I”. From that moment onwards, the “I” or Self focussed attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death vanished once and for all. The ego was lost in the flood of Self-awareness. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time. Other thought might come and go like the various notes of music, but the “I” continued like the fundamental sruti [that which is heard] note which underlies and blends with all other notes”

You must understand, this is a young boy who hasn’t had any religious teaching. He had had no knowledge of Vedanta, knew nothing about Maya or Brahman, and in fact only found about the similarities between his own experiences and Hindu teachings much later.

Ramana, feeling the urge to enquire, and leave everything else aside, ran away from home, with just Rs. 3, and made his way to the Arunachala Hill, where remained for the rest of his life. He is widely recognised as one of India’s Great Sages, and his teachings have been documented in numerous books.

Now here’s where Ramana’s idea differs from general Advaitic theory. In his case, he believed that some sort of action can help you to achieve Brahman, Self Realisation. In fact, this course of action was necessary to quell the mind, and thereby achieve peace, moving away from all that is maya, away from the mind, body and intellect.

And this course of action, was enquiry, using three simple words, (two in tamil).

Who am I?

(Nan Yar?)

Read Part Two ofWho Am I?

Commenting is closed for this article.