my article

A friend recently sent me an email in which he asked: I had mentioned to you that in my view there appear to be three different approaches to self-investigation, i) self-enquiry, which involves asking who am I and going to the root of the I thought, ii) meditating on I am, excluding the arising of any thought, and concentrating on I am, and iii) trying to notice the gap between two thoughts, expanding the gap, and being without any thought, summa iru. You had replied that these are not three different approaches but constitute only one approach. Could you please elaborate your comment? This article is adapted from the reply that I wrote to him. Nāṉ Yār? paragraph 16: ātma-vicāra is only the practice of keeping one’s attention on oneself Our aim should be to destroy the illusion that we are this ego Upadēśa Undiyār verses 24 and 25: experiencing ourself without adjuncts is experiencing what we actually are To destroy our ego we must try to be attentively self-aware Being attentively ...

A friend recently asked me several questions about meditation and self-investigation, such as what difference there is between them, so this article is adapted (and the third and fourth sections are considerably expanded) from the reply that I wrote to him. Meditation on ourself is self-investigation ( ātma-vicāra ) We should not meditate on anything other than ourself Meditation on the idea ‘I am brahman ’ is not ātma-vicāra Meditation on ‘I am’ alone is ātma-vicāra Our ego is just ourself (‘I am’) seemingly mixed and confused with adjuncts We seem to be this ego only when we are experiencing anything other than ourself 1. Meditation on ourself is self-investigation ( ātma-vicāra ) The first question my friend asked was whether it would be correct to say that meditation and self-enquiry are ‘two different approaches or techniques’, because ‘in meditation you concentrate your attention on one single thought or image’ whereas in ‘in self-enquiry you investigate the ego’, in reply to whi...

A friend wrote to me recently asking, ‘Is there any way to ascertain whether the feeling of “I” is being attended to? Is it enough if the mind’s “power of attention” is brought to a standstill?’ He also quoted the following (inaccurate) translation of question 4 and Sri Ramana’s reply in the second chapter of Upadēśa Mañjari (‘A Bouquet of Teachings’, or ‘Spiritual Instructions’ as this English translation in The Collected Works of Sri Ramana Maharshi is called), and asked ‘How can remaining still be considered as intense activity? Is being still a state of effort or effortlessness? I am slightly confused’: 4. Is the state of ‘being still’ a state involving effort or effortlessness? It is not an effortless state of indolence. All mundane activities which are ordinarily called effort are performed with the aid of a portion of the mind and with frequent breaks. But the act of communion with the Self ( atma vyavahara ) or remaining still inwardly is intense activity which is performed w...

A few months ago a friend wrote to me asking about the practice of ātma-vicāra (self-investigation or self-enquiry) and whether his description of his practice indicated that he was practising it correctly, and he ended his email saying: I have tried the technique of diving into the heart exhaling your breath, explained in the small book The Technique of Maha Yoga published by Ramanashramam, [...] but this does not seem to work in my case. The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to him: Firstly The Technique of Maha Yoga [which was not written by K. Lakshmana Sarma, the author of Maha Yoga , but by another devotee called N.R. Narayana Aiyar] is a very misleading book, because the explanation that it gives about the practice of ātma-vicāra is completely wrong, so it is good that you found that it does not seem to work. Secondly, ‘the heart’ is a term that Sri Ramana used metaphorically to denote what we really are, because it is the core, centre or essence of all that we now...

Since I started my website one of my long-standing aims has been to include in it detailed and explanatory translations of all of Sri Ramana’s original Tamil writings, but amidst all my other work I have not yet had time to do so. Last month I decided to make a start by writing such a translation of Upadēśa Undiyār (உபதேச வுந்தியார்), but I have so far completed writing only an introduction and a detailed explanation for the first verse. Due to circumstances that now make it necessary for me spend much more of my time working to increase my currently inadequate income, I will not have time to complete this translation and explanation of Upadēśa Undiyār in the near future, so I have decided in the meanwhile to post here my translation and explanation of the first verse, and since it is a very long explanation, I will post it as two consecutive articles, this and the next one: Why did Sri Ramana teach a karma theory? Incidentally, I have recently been spending most of my time replyin...