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   Masao Maki’s In Search of Brazil’s Quantum Surgeon: The Dr. Fritz Phenomenon (1998) is a nonfiction account making clear that encountering Rubens Faria was only the most blatant manifestation of an intermediary Superconsciousness in Maki’s life.  Maki described witnessing how Faria’s own personality would regularly be substituted by a consciousness identified in part as that of Dr. Adolph Fritz, the World War I German army surgeon who’d formerly been associated with Arigo and other Brazilian trance healers.  Faria would be unconscious as his body enabled 'Dr. Fritz' to regularly treat hundreds or even more than a thousand patients in a single day.  A graduate of the Institute of Military Engineering, Faria had previously worked as a computer engineer. Early in his account, Maki observed, "All this synchronicity meant something, I felt. I couldn’t simply dismiss these coincidences as flukes."  In Faria’s warehouse clinic in Rio de Janeiro, Maki found himself o

To a friend who wrote some remarks about experiencing the here-and-now by being aware of the ‘mind and its attachments and reactions to the world outside’, and also about the ego being a subtle form, I replied: Since the mind is constantly changing, it never stands still in the here and now, but is instead caught up in the constant flow of change, which is always moving from past to future. The only thing that always stands still in the here and now is ‘I am’, because it never changes. Therefore if we wish to stand in the here and now we must attend only to ‘I am’, because if we attend instead to the constant activity and reactivity of the mind, we will get caught in the every-changing flow of time from past to future. We never actually experience time as such, but only experience change (against the static background of the ever-present and unchanging ‘I am’), and our experience of change creates the appearance of time. Therefore so long as we experience change we will be entangled in

In answer to a friend who wrote, ‘...then why the realization is not happening suddenly? I feel like I am someone who is locked inside this body-mind mechanism’, I wrote: We can experience ourself as we really are at any moment, provided that we really want to, so if we do not experience this now, it is because we do not yet want it enough. Now we experience ourself as a body and mind, but this experience is illusory, so when we do experience ourself as we really are, this illusory experience that we are a body and mind will be destroyed. Since everything else that we experience through this body and mind is an illusion based on our primary illusion ‘I am so-and-so, a person composed of body and mind’, when this primary illusion is destroyed by clear self-experience (so-called ‘realisation’) the illusion that we experience anything else will also be destroyed. As Sri Ramana says in verse 26 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu : அகந்தையுண் டாயி னனைத்துமுண் டாகு மகந்தையின் றேலின் றனைத்து — மகந்தையே யாவுமா

In a comment on my recent article, Investigating ‘I’ is the most radical scientific research , R Viswanathan quoted Nochur Venkataraman as saying: ‘a great philosopher stated I think and so I am, but it should be I am and so I think’, and he also referred to this in an email, to which I replied: A comment that Bhagavan Sri Ramana made about this famous conclusion of Descartes, ‘ Cogito ergo sum ’ (I think, therefore I am), was recorded by Lakshmana Sarma in verse 166 of Sri Ramana Paravidyopanishad : The existence of their own self is inferred by some from mental functioning, by the reasoning, ‘I think, therefore I am’. These men are like those dull-witted ones who ignore the elephant when it goes past, and become convinced afterwards by looking at the footprints! ‘I am’ is self-evident — in fact, it is the only thing that is entirely self-evident, because it is evident to itself rather than to anything else, whereas all other supposedly self-evident things are evident only to the min

In continuation of an ongoing correspondence between us, a research psychologist wrote to me, ‘Ramana was a great man, now it’s time to go further, we are in 2013, so, why not abandon the old ways and embrace the new, taking further their paradigm, not getting stuck in theirs?’, to which I replied: Doubt and uncertainty are the basis of any research we may undertake, but most research is narrow in scope because it focuses on a small area of doubt set against a background of beliefs that are assumed to be true. For example, in quantum mechanics a researcher will focus on a particular area of doubt, but such doubt will be set against the background of quantum theory and the entire set of generally accepted sub-theories that are related to it and entail it. Such theories, which form the paradigm upon which all research in that field is conducted, are all beliefs that most researchers in that field will take for granted. This is the nature of scientific research, and it is not wrong in tha

    Frank Romano's memoir Love and Terror in the Middle East (2012) chronicles his quest for spiritual meaning and his work in the interfaith peace movement. The Introduction begins with the statement: "This book recounts the fulfillment of a 30-year-old vision that I would someday work for peace in the Middle East."  He observed: My search led me to the most contested areas in the West Bank, such as the Jenin Refugee Camp and the Old City in Hebron, to especially work with extremists.  My life became quickly tangled with the people there, some still living in the shadow of the Intifada, others motivated by hate, fear and illusions.   The book begins with remembrances of his earlier life and relationships.  A fter passing the California Bar and opening his own law firm in downtown San Francisco, he wanted to extend his practice to the international sphere and was accepted for a graduate fellowship in an international law masters program at the University of Paris in Fra

A new friend wrote to me recently saying that he thinks he has understood the concept of time but that he has not yet grasped the concept of space. In my reply I wrote: The concept of space is just that: a concept or idea, and as such it is a mental construction. Time and space are the two interlocked conceptual frameworks within which we organise all our other ideas about a physical world. Without space, there would be no place for more than one thing to seem to exist (because each thing requires a separate place in which to exist, since two things cannot simultaneously occupy the same place), so space is the conceptual framework that allows for the appearance of multiplicity. Likewise, without time, there would be no scope for any change to seem to take place, so time is the conceptual framework that allows for the appearance of change, which seems to be constantly occurring within this appearance of multiplicity. Therefore, to know ‘I’, which is one and unchanging, neither space nor