my article

In a comment on my previous article, How to avoid creating fresh karma ( āgāmya )? , an anonymous friend quoted the following passage from Lucy Cornelssen’s book Hunting the ‘I’ (5th edition, 2003, pp. 20-21): There are other opportunities, when we could experience this pure ‘I’ consciously. One such is during the tiny gap between two thoughts, when the attention has given up its hold on one thought and not yet caught the next one. But since we never tried our attention is not trained this way, and we will hardly succeed in the attempt. There is a better chance to catch it between sleeping and awaking. It is very important to try it, if you are serious in your hunting the ‘I’. Take care of a few conditions: Try at night just before you fall asleep to keep as the last thought your intention to catch as the first thing of all on waking in the morning the experience of your true ‘I’. What Lucy describes here as the pure ‘I’ or true ‘I’ is simply the one and only ‘I’ as it really is — i...

In a reply that I wrote to one of the comments on my previous article, Second and third person objects , I wrote: Whatever we experience in either waking or dream is determined by our destiny ( prārabdha ), so we have no power to alter any of it. However, though we cannot change what we are destined to experience, we can desire and make effort to change it, and by doing so we create fresh karma ( āgāmya ). Since all such desire and effort to change what we are destined to experience is futile and counterproductive, we should refrain from all such extroverted desire and effort, and should make effort only to subside within by focusing our entire attention upon ourself (the first person, the experiencing subject, ‘I’) and thereby withdrawing it from everything else (every second or third person object). By making such selfward-directed effort, we will not alter what the mind is destined to experienced, but will remove the illusion that we are this experiencing mind. This is what Sri Ra...

Three significant Tamil words that Sri Ramana often used in his own writings and in his oral teachings are தன்மை ( taṉmai ), which literally means ‘self-ness’ ( taṉ-mai ) or ‘selfhood’ and which is used in Tamil grammar to mean ‘the first person’, முன்னிலை ( muṉṉilai ), which etymologically means ‘that which stands in front’ and which is used in Tamil grammar to mean ‘the second person’, and படர்க்கை ( paḍarkkai ), which etymologically means ‘that which has spread out’ and which is used in Tamil grammar to mean ‘the third person’. Of these three words, the most significant is of course தன்மை ( taṉmai ), the first person, the subject ‘I’, but in this article I will focus more on the other two words in order to clarify their meaning in the context of Sri Ramana’s teachings. Though these words are all grammatical terms, in his teachings Sri Ramana did not use them in their usual grammatical sense but in an epistemological sense. That is, தன்மை ( taṉmai ), the first person, is the epis...