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In a comment on one of my recent articles, Can we experience what we actually are by following the path of devotion ( bhakti mārga )? , an anonymous friend quoted a translation of verses 8 and 9 from Ātma-Vicāra Patikam (a song of eleven verses composed by Sri Sadhu Om about self-investigation, which is the first appendix in Sādhanai Sāram ). What he wrote in verse 9 is: நானெதென் றாய வஃது நலிவதற் கேதே தென்றால் நானெனு மக விருத்தி ஞானத்தின் கிரண மாகும் நானெனுங் கிரணத் தோடே நாட்டமுட் செல்லச் செல்ல நானெனுங் கிரண நீள நசித்துநான் ஞான மாமே. nāṉedeṉ ḏṟāya vaḵdu nalivadaṟ kēdē deṉḏṟāl nāṉeṉu maha virutti ñāṉattiṉ kiraṇa māhum nāṉeṉuṅ kiraṇat tōḍē nāṭṭamuṭ cellac cella nāṉeṉuṅ kiraṇa nīḷa naśittunāṉ ñāṉa māmē . பதச்சேதம்: நான் எது என்று ஆய அஃது நலிவதற்கு ஏது ஏது என்றால், நான் எனும் அக விருத்தி ஞானத்தின் கிரணம் ஆகும். நான் எனும் கிரணத்தோடே நாட்டம் உள் செல்ல செல்ல, நான் எனும் கிரண நீளம் நசித்து நான் ஞானம் ஆமே. Padacchēdam (word-separation): nāṉ edu eṉḏṟu āya aḵdu nalivadaṟku ēdu ēdu eṉḏṟāl, nā...

In one of my recent articles, All phenomena are just a dream, and the only way to wake up is to investigate who is dreaming , I wrote: Moreover, since we experience ourself existing in sleep, when we do not experience anything else, the fact that we exist independent of whatever else we may experience in waking or dream is self-evident. Therefore we need not doubt this fact, or suppose that our existence could depend upon the existence of our body or any other thing, as is wrongly supposed by most present-day philosophers and scientists. Quoting this passage, a friend called Sivanarul wrote a comment in which he said: With regards to Michael’s writing above, it is quite a challenge to remove this doubt even as a working hypothesis. There are two powerful opposing forces. First is the very strongly rooted “I am the body” idea. Second is scientific materialism that powerfully reinforces “I am the body” idea. Our lives are pretty much run by technology these days and technology is the hu...

A friend recently sent me a PDF copy of The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and referring to the sixth chapter of it, ‘The Inner Body’, he wrote: The chapter that talks on the inner body is quite remarkable, by taking the attention away from thoughts/body/sense perceptions and into the energy field of the body, there is the clear and vibrantly alive feeling “I Am” and nothing else. Going deeper into it, the feeling of inside and out dissolves, subject and object dissolve, and there is this sense of unlimited, unbound (by the limits of the body) and unchanging beingness or I Amness. Can this be likened to self-attention? Or more clearly, is this the same practice? Because in both we are removing attention from everything except the feeling “I Am” and focussing it on the feeling. Could it be that only the description is different? Where you describe it as focussing the attention on the consciousness “I Am” Eckhart describes it as focussing the attention on the aliveness/consciousness th...

A friend wrote to me recently saying that in a German book on Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu called Über das Selbst (‘About the Self’) the author has written that the absolute consciousness is connected through our navel, and asked me to comment on this. The following is adapted from the reply I wrote: I assume that what is meant here by the term ‘consciousness’ is what is conscious, which is the sense in which it is generally used in the context of the teachings of Sri Ramana or any other form of advaita philosophy. It is important to clarify this, because ‘consciousness’ is used in a variety of different senses, so its exact meaning is generally determined by the context in which it happens to be used. In this sense, the term ‘absolute consciousness’ likewise means what is conscious, but the adjective ‘absolute’ distinguishes it from any form of relative consciousness. Since any form of consciousness that experiences anything other than itself exists relative to whatever it experiences, it is not...

In my previous article, We must experience what is, not what merely seems to be , I wrote: ‘I’ definitely does exist, because ‘I’ is what experiences both itself and all other things, so even if all other things merely seem to exist, their seeming existence could not be experienced if ‘I’ did not actually exist to experience it. The existence of ‘I’ is therefore necessarily true, whereas the existence of anything else is not necessarily true, because nothing else experiences either its own existence or the existence of anything else, so though things other than ‘I’ do seem to exist, it is possible that they do not exist except in the experience of ‘I’. Referring to this paragraph, a friend called Sanjay asked in a comment : You say here: ‘The existence of ‘I’ is therefore necessarily true…’, but you have also said earlier that: ‘…because ‘I’ is what experiences both itself and all other things…’. Therefore if ‘I’ experiences both itself and all other things then it is our mind, our lim...