The crucial secret revealed by Sri Ramana: the only means to subdue our mind permanently

A friend wrote to me recently asking in Tamil:

பகவான் அருளியபடி ஆத்ம விசாரம் செய்ய நாம் ‘நான்’ என்னும் எண்ணத்தின் மீது கவனம் செலுத்த வேண்டும் என பல புத்தகங்களில் கூறப்படுகிறது. ஆனால் ‘நான் யார்?’ என்ற கட்டுரையிலோ, மனம் எப்போதும் ஓர் ஸ்தூலத்தையே பற்றி இருக்கும் எனவும், மனமென்பது ‘நான்’ என்னும் எண்ணமே எனவும் குறிப்பிடப்பட்டிருக்கிறது. இது உண்மை எனில், அந்த எண்ணத்தை ஸ்தூலத்திலிருந்து எவ்வாறு தனியே பிரித்து அதன் மீது கவனம் செலுத்துதல் ஸாத்தியம் ஆகும்? இது அஸாத்தியம் என்பதால் ‘எண்ணங்கள் தோன்றும் இடம் எது?’ என கூர்ந்து கவனித்தலே விசார வழி என நான் நினைக்கிறேன்; பின்பற்றியும் வருகிறேன். இது சரியா?

which means:

In many books it is said that to do self-investigation (ātma-vicāra) as taught by Bhagavan we must direct our attention on the thought called ‘I’. But in the essay Nāṉ Yār? it is said that the mind exists by always clinging to a sthūlam [something gross], and that what is called mind is only the thought called ‘I’. If this is true, is it possible to separate that thought in any way from the sthūlam and to direct attention towards it [that thought]? Since this is impossible, I think that keenly observing ‘what is the place where thoughts rise?’ alone is the path of vicāra; I am also following [this]. Is this correct?

The following is adapted from the reply I wrote (partly in Tamil but mostly in English):

The featurelessness of self-attentiveness

The friend who had asked the questions that I answered in What do we actually experience in sleep? wrote another email to me in which he asked whether timelessness is also one of the ‘features’ of our featureless experience in sleep, and which he concluded by asking: ‘Do you have a favorite practice that makes sense to share? (I’m still angling for a goodie ;-))’. The following is adapted from my reply to him:

Time and duration are features that we experience in waking and dream, but not in the featureless state of sleep. However, even to say that we experience time and duration in waking and dream requires some clarification: what we actually experience is change, both in our mind and in our body and the physical world around us, and this constant flow of change creates the illusion that we call ‘time’. Therefore since no change occurs in our experience during sleep, the illusion of time is absent there.

Since we do not experience any time in sleep, we do not think either ‘I was’ or ‘I will be’, but only experience ‘I am’ — our own being or existence in the ever-present present moment.

Establishing that I am and analysing what I am

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 limited or reflected consciousness, then how can ‘I’ be necessarily true, as you have said earlier in this above paragraph. Should we not consider this ‘I’ to be our imagination, though it is our first imagination – that is, our thought-‘I’?

The aim of this paragraph that Sanjay referred to was only to establish the fact that I am, and was not to analyse what I am. It is of course necessary for us to analyse what I am, because we need to distinguish what I actually am from what I merely seem to be, but the arguments that are used to analyse what I am are different to the arguments that are used simply to establish that I am, whatever I may be. That is, the latter arguments simply establish that something that we experience as ‘I’, ourself, does definitely exist, even though this definitely existing ‘I’ may not be whatever it now seems to be.

We must experience what is, not what merely seems to be

In a comment on one of my recent articles, How to attend to ‘I’?, Palaniappan Chidambaram asked: ‘Is being completely present to what is there is same like attending to “I”?’

Before attempting to answer this question, we need to consider what is meant by ‘what is there’, and whether this is the same as what should be meant by it. The obvious meaning of ‘what is there’ is what exists, but many things that we generally take to be existing may not actually exist, because they may only seem to exist. Therefore what we should mean by ‘what is there’ or ‘what exists’ is what actually exists and not what merely seems to exist.

‘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’.

Self-awareness is the very nature of ‘I’

Last month a friend called Venkat asked me several questions in a series of three comments that he wrote on one of my recent articles, Is consciousness a product of the mind?, so this article is written in answer to his questions.

In his first comment he wrote:

Thanks very much for your response. I agree that it is not possible to know whether the external world (and the body-mind) exist independently of the perception of it. Equally, I don’t think that it is possible to prove that the world is just an illusion, a perception in consciousness.

So I agree that one has to examine / question what the ‘I’ is. You imply that the result of this is the certainty that only consciousness is real and all else (including ‘my’ body mind) is an illusion.

You commented in this blog, that Bhagavan’s ‘I am’ can be equated to the awareness that is aware of the awareness of a perception, and that we should turn our attention to this awareness. But is it possible to be ‘aware of the awareness that is aware’? since under Vedanta’s neti neti, one cannot be aware of this awareness, one can only BE this awareness, as I think Bhagavan says.

So two questions. Firstly, is the point of this attention on awareness to recognise that the feeling of ‘I’ is just another perception that arises, equivalent to all other perceptions and is neti neti [‘not this, not this’]? And second what does BEING awareness mean?

Yes, I agree that just as we cannot know that our body and this world exist independent of our experience of them, we equally well cannot know that they do not exist independent of our experience of them. In other words, we cannot know whether their seeming existence is a mind-created illusion or not, though there is no doubt that our mind does at least play a major role in creating the mental picture of this body and world that we experience. That is, what we actually experience is not any body or world as such, but only a mental picture of them consisting of ever-changing sights, sounds, tastes, smells and tactile sensations, and we seem unable to ascertain whether this mental picture is created entirely by our mind, as in dream, or is at least partly caused by anything (any actual body and world) that is external to or independent of our mind.