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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.
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