my article

A friend wrote to me recently asking me to further clarify what I had written in Chapter 2 of Happiness and the Art of Being about sleep being a state in which we are still conscious or aware that we exist, and after I replied to him he wrote again saying that though he would like to be convinced that he is aware in sleep, he is still not entirely sure that this is the case. The following is adapted from the replies that I wrote to his two emails. First reply: When you say, ‘I fall asleep and I’m not aware of anything’, what exactly do you mean by saying ‘I’m not aware of anything’? Do you mean that you are not aware at all, or that you are aware of nothing? Please do not rush to answer this question to yourself, but think about it carefully. Consider the difference between the experience of a totally blind person (B) and a normally sighted person (S) when they are both in a completely dark room. B does not see anything because he does not see at all, so he does not know that the roo...

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...

A friend recently wrote to me as follows: I have been reading chapter 9 (Self-Investigation) of your book Happiness and the Art of Being . What you describe regarding the practice of atma-vichara as advocated by Ramana Maharishi, I interpret as being very similar to the practice of choice-less awareness, or shikantaza , as it is commonly referred to by Zen practitioners. The significant difference between the two techniques is that I, as a Zen practitioner, am trained to use the power of attention in order to step back from ‘I’ thoughts and ‘I’ feelings. And thereby effectively return to the abiding silence. The self-investigation technique in contrast uses the question, who?, whose?, where? etc in order to disentangle from ‘I’ thoughts and ‘I’ feelings, effectively returning to the abiding silence (and yes, I understand that you prefer to define self-investigation as the practice of being nothing other than oneself and not a process of mental questioning). Some ‘I’ thoughts and feeli...