Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi's 141 Jayanthi - Q & A Recorded with David Godman

live my apologies in advance if your question didn't make the list i've got half a half a page here and the the exam paper was over three pages long so again apologies if your question didn't make the cut the first one is what is the significance of the heart center in bhagavan's teachings is it fair to say that until one has had some experience however vague of the heart center one cannot fully grasp the import of bhagavan's core teachings the phrase vidya that's knowledge of the heart first thing to say about this i think the heart center just for background information that's referred to in the question is the one that bhagavan said existed on the right side of the chest which was the place in the body where he said consciousness arrived and emanated to the rest of the body he said that after realization one could feel this to be the core the center the place where bodily consciousness arose and withdrew too but what he never did say was that it played a significant role in insofar as it's not a place that you look at contemplate on put your attention on as part of your practice bhagavan himself has given several accounts of his self-realization and in not a single one did he mention that he was aware of the heart center prior to his full realization so i think we can say fairly confidently from that that it's not an essential part of the process of realization but that after self-realization you can if you're like bhagavan you can feel this place on the right side of the chest there are people in the bhagavan tradition i'm thinking particularly of lakshmana swami saudima who said that on the day of their own realizations they felt the heart center immediately before full realization took place in lakshmana swami's case he said the question who am i spontaneously appeared inside him and as if in answer to the question his i thought subsided into the heart center and there he saw witness felt the smiling picture of bhagavan on the right side of the chest and then that picture disappeared and took the i thought with it leaving self alone and he said from that moment on the i thought never arose or functioned in me again so in his particular case there was definitely a final precursor of realization having this heart-centered sensation saudina recorded something very similar i mentioned both both of these case studies if you like to papaji when i interviewed him in the 1990s and i asked him if he had had any experiences of the heart center in his final stages of bhagavan and he gave me a very long interesting story which i never heard him repeat again about he too had had some experience of this heart center uh the first time he met bhagavan bhagavan looked at him and he said he he wasn't really expecting a big experience he went there as a cynic but he said somehow the heart made itself known to him and he said it's the heart of my heart it was something not physical not in a particular place he just said bhagavan revealed the heart of the heart to me in that first darshan so you can find people who've had this experience immediately before the final extinction of the eye but as bhagavan himself has reported it's not essential because he himself didn't have this experience he did say that after his realization he was aware of it on the right side of the chest as almost a kind of throbbing palpate palpating sensation uh there's an incident i think it's in talks where somebody asked about this and bhagavan invites the people around him at the time to put their hand on the right center chest and actually feel it uh one of one of the people who was included in the list was this one at a swami so he was still alive when i first came to raman ashram so i said what what was it like to feel bhagavan's heart center throb throbbing away on the right side of his chest and he laughed and he said i wouldn't dare put my hand on bhagavad bhagavan's chest that's very enough that's very inappropriate uh i don't remember that incident and even if he had invited me i would have felt very uh very shy about doing it in my field my feeling is that this is an opportunity not only to touch bhagavan but to touch him in a major power center in the body if if bhagavan had invited me to put my palm of my hand on his heart center i would have jumped at the chance but biswanatha swami somehow refuted the story and talk said it never happened and said he'd never put his hand on bhagavan's chest so he didn't have any direct report of what it felt like so all of these stories about the heart center have inclined many people to believe that somehow you have to focus on this place that you have to be aware of it as part of your sadhana bhagavan said that the i thought rises from this place instantly on waking it goes to the brain it breaks out explodes in the brain into the world that we see around us and simultaneously creates an internal observer of the external world and from then on we imagine that we're a person looking at the world experiencing it thinking about stuff and so on so he did say that to get rid of this idea that we are a person inside the body you have to take this eye back into the heart and make it disappear he recommended self-inquiry for this but he never ever said that self-inquiry involved putting attention on the place in the body where he said the heart sorry the i thought arose from this is important because it gives me a little opportunity to um expound on why bhagavan's teachings on inquiry work and why other teachings tend not to because they focus on objects and not subjects the eye the rising eye which we take to be our individual self imagines itself to be located in the body and when bhagavan says find out the source of this eye we recollect that bhagavan said oh it rises from this place on the right side of the chest and so we instinctively think that we have to go looking for it in a place in a location and by holding on to that location we somehow find the source by the effort and concentration of focusing on that particular spot now what bhagavan said is completely different he said that the eye exists and continues to thrive by attaching itself to objects that you concentrate on that you identify with that you associate with so he said the eye rises it grabs hold of a thought object a sense object and then it sees another one coming along and it attaches itself to the next and the next and the next and he wrote and he said that this is like a caterpillar which won't leave its back legs on one leaf before it's got hold of the next leaf with its front legs so this continuous moving from one thought object to the next thought creates the illusion of continuity for this risen eye and he said the way to abolish this sense of permanent individual selfness is to stop being attracted by all these objects that arise in front of you to stop associating with them stop identifying with them and he said if you can put the eye in a state where it's no longer clinging to objects it wants to concentrate or focus on it can't subsist by itself it cannot exist in isolation without identifying with a thought an idea of perception so when you sever it from all the things it wants to think about it spins around rather like a gear failing to find something else to mess with and then very very slowly it subsides back into the heart and disappears now if you think about what happens when you concentrate on the heart center you're doing exactly the opposite you are putting your focused attention on an object that's a place in the body and assuming that through the intensity of your focus your search your intent you can actually experience what this center is like and how it's functioning there's a lovely analogy that bhagavan gave to an amla swami and an emily's army when he first came to bhagavan he asked from mantra and bhagavan didn't usually give mantras but in his case he said repeat shiva shiva that was the mantra which bhagavan almost invariably gave out if devotees asked to won sorry about my camera or internet froze for a few minutes i have no idea why so i stopped it and decided to start again um i mentioned that bhagavan had at anomaloswami's request had given him the mantra shiva shiva to repeat and that's independent of that he had been told or he'd read that bhagavan recommended focus or awareness of the heart so he assumed that this was the heart center which he'd read about or uh been told by other devotees so he started concentrating on the heart center and bhagavan came across this by anomalies for me told him and bhagavan said no no don't don't do that this is not how you're supposed to do focusing on the heart and then he gave a wonderful metaphor he said the heart center is like the electric meter on the side of the house it's the place in the building where the universal current enters that specific location and from that location spreads out to all the various rooms and sockets that are distributed throughout the house so i like this analogy when anomaly swami told this story he elaborated on it this is not bhagavan's elaboration but i think bhagavan would support this and that and then i'm lay swarm he said i understood from bhagavan's comments about the meter box that just as you cannot experience the flow of electricity by staring at the meter box all day you can't experience the current the flow of the self by staring at the place in the body where that flow of consciousness of body identification enters and then rises to the brain so after this little exchange with bhagavan he gave up focusing on the heart kapali sastry uh quizzed bhagavan about this kapali sastry was a devotee of ganapati muni as well as bhagavan and i in that particular school they put considerable focus on putting attention on parts of the body he also attempted to get bhagavan to uh explain or endorse his idea that he should be putting his attention on this place in the body and he came up with this possibly the best answer that bhagavan gave on this he said you should try to have rather than locate the experience i think this this is the key line when bhagavan talks about the heart center it's not something that you find by putting attention on a place it's something that you discover and experience for yourself by not connecting with thoughts ideas perceptions and feelings so the i thought having risen having connected with other ideas other sensations is not aware of its source and stays away from its source because it's continually jumping from one idea one thought one sensation to another when it's stopped doing this when you've made a a strict severe continuous attempt to stop it making these connections then it idles for a bit and then it starts to go back to its source so you find the source not by looking at it as an object in a place but by holding onto it as a subject the withdrawing eye slowly goes back into the heart disappears into the heart and then you experience the heart as it is this is the the phrase that bhagavan uses in the first verse of olodynakido you don't experience the heart by running around trying to locate it experience it as an object you experience it by having the i thought disconnected from other objects slowly withdraw into its source until it disappears in that source and then you experience the heart as it is that was question one that took longer than i expected um question two do you believe that it is bhagavan who chooses his devotees i like this question because it there are several ways of um approaching it the first thing i would like to say is that as a nyani as someone fully established in the south i don't think bhagavan made choices at all i think the power of the self animated him it made him do the things that he did it made him do the things that he said but i don't think there was a conscious body bound individual in there who said i will choose this course of action or i will choose this person to be my devotee that perceptual frame of reps reference was completely absent in him but then we have to account for the fact how did some people become his devotees um how did they end up at ramanashram how did some of them take one look and go away how did some people fall in love with him spend the rest of their lives there and so on i think um category one i think some people no not some people all people i would say who end up who have the good fortune to be in the presence of a nyani for any length of time have earned the right to be there i think you do your practice you work hard you aspire for self-realization you aspire for a teacher and the merits you acquire from that intense desire for liberation gives you at some opportunity uh the chance to come and sit in the presence of a sad guru such as bhagavan you may not know when your efforts take took place uh a good example of this is narayana aya who was um a government civil servant who bhagavan clearly had a lot of affection for but put a lot of attention on and mariana aya never really understood why he was such a favorite at ramanashram ganeshan has written that one of the recurring um conversations you had with mariana was why why is bhagavan giving me so much love why is he giving me so much attention why has he picked out me from all possible people in the world why why did he make me fall in love with him i don't feel in any way qualified or worthy and there's no resolution of this in bhagavan's right in ganesha's writings but a couple of years ago i read what was until then an unpublished manuscript which had been put together by ella my art she was a european devotee who spent time at ramanashram in the 1930s in in 1938 i think mariana i was making his usual complaint in the hall and he said oh why am i so lucky to be here i've done nothing i haven't done all the religious observances but the books etc etc and bhagavan said your past is a very rich one in some of those lives you did what was necessary to bring you here i think this is a really good story because i think it applies to everyone who we read about the people who were attracted by by bhagavan the people who came there the people who fell in love the people who spent their whole life in bhagavan's orbit at some point we and i say we the current generation who never saw him in the body we we did something we did something good and we built up a large posit positive balance of punyas if you like and we're now reaping the benefits of our past activities there's a paragraph of more abstract confirmation in living by the words of bhagavan and bhagavan says that being in the company of that guru comes effortlessly to those who have um worship guarding past lives pilgrimage and so on and then that reminded him of a verse from tai manavar para parakani and it's it it's almost exactly what bhagavan just said he said for those who have in the correct way embarked on a spiritual path by worshiping divine images going on pilgrimages to holy sites uh going to tear thems the satguru will come and speak the one unique word um tai manavar amongst all the tamil saints he was one of the few who uh liked the phrase summa eru uh aaron aguirre natalie was one thai i like to think that the what the one unique word is also in this case and that by doing all your past tapas your past practices you've earned the right to come and sit in front of the satguru your good karma has brought you there you sit there um bhagavan or whichever satguru you've earned the right to be with looks at you bestows grace on you says sumairu the one unique word and if all goes well your business there is over and then bhagavan explained the verse a little bit he said only those who've done plenty of nishkamyapunyas these are spiritual activities performed without any thought of a reward in previous births will get abundant faith in the guru if you have that abundant faith then such a devotee will follow the path and reach the goal of liberation so here is a clearly marked out course of action you strive you work hard you may not know when your work was done because it was at some point in the past but then fortuitously a chance meeting a book a photo takes you to somewhere like tiruvannamalai and gives you the opportunity to be with bhagavan to practice his teachings don't think you're better than anybody else just say thank you i've done the work i've got the cash in the bank now i can start spending it by sitting quietly with bhagavan i think part of the our show is so the divine accounting is that the more work you've done the more preparation you've put in uh the closer a connection you're going to have with the sad guru when you eventually show up and the longer time that you'll be there um two examples spring to mind from uh bhagavan uh kirapati who was the lady who served bhagavan on the hill she cooked food for him uh she served him the general consensus of raman ashram was that her efforts and the merits that she earned in her life as a servant of the satguru on arunachala um earned her the right to come back as lakshmi the cow and as bhagavan said in his summary of tai manavar's verse her past effort surpassed tapas her past practice put her at the feet of the satguru and in that earth she attained liberation through his power and his presence others for example madame aswami he was bhagavan's attendant for 12 years he served bhagavan he followed the timeline of our prescription he did a spiritual practice he served the guru for 12 years which is a very traditional amount of time passed away but not late enough for him to have the possibility to come back he came back as bhagavan's white peacock bhagavan never ever conceded that kiripati was lakshmi although everybody was under the impression that he knew it he just refused to say it but bhagavan was prepared to say that the white peacock who came back uh had been mad of aswami in a previous life in fact uh in one unguarded moment um bhagavan was telling off the white peacock for misbehaving and he said you didn't listen to me last time around and you're not listening to me now so okay occasionally he would make comments that more or less confirmed what was going on the next how she would say aspect of this is once you've been attracted by bhagavan because of all your merits your bunions your previous practice what decides how long you stay what kind of career you have at the sakura's feet and do you even have the possibility of leaving i think there are a few examples of devotees who came to bhagavan who had obviously earned the right to be there but for one reason or another they were not happy with the environment at raman ashram and they tried to run away and things went so badly for them that they were compelled to return i i will tell two stories in this vein anomaly swami came for a few weeks and somehow he didn't like what he thought was the uh the chatter the gossip the politics of ramanashram and decided he wanted to go off to a solitary place where he could do meditation by himself so without telling bhagavan he ran away he went north ended up in polo town about 33 kilometers north of tiranemalay everything went wrong for him he couldn't get anything to eat he tried begging nobody would uh bring him any food he was starving he was cold he was hungry and then he thought no this was a mistake i should go back to raman ashram my screen froze again so i'll carry on where i thought i got to when uh the freezing start started so anomaly was um on his way back to tourism a little bit humbled he had decided that he was better off at raman ashram he had no money so he thought he would try to be a ticketless traveller now before he got on the train having made that decision um he found someone who invited him in for a meal gave him a sumptuous feast so as soon as he took the decision i need to be back at raman ashram everything went well so having been fed he then went to the train station hopped on a train and hoped nobody would spot him uh there was a ticket inspector on the train and anomaly swami told me i was completely invisible to him that he went all through the carriage demanding tickets from everybody except me he just walked past me without uh asking for anything when i got off at the other end the man who collects the tickets at the ticket barrier at trivanage station he paused in front of him not knowing what to do and the inspector looked at him and said you've already given your ticket go go on you're holding up everybody else but everything went well having taken that decision to go back to bhagavan everything went well he went back to raman ashram confessed to bhagavan that he had run away because he wasn't liking ashram life and that his attempts to run away were all thwarted but this as soon as he took the decision to come back everything went well including the miraculous invisibility on the train home and bhagavan looked at him and said how can you leave without having first done all the things that you are destined to do here so i think bhagavan knew that he had a destiny to be at ramanashram for a long time that running away wasn't an option wasn't a possibility he could try it but he knew that it would all go badly and that as soon as he took the decision to go back to churn emily and stay with bhagavan everything went so well you could almost say miraculously well he was invisible to the particular examiner on the train and the ticket collector at tourist station so you can see from this there is a kind of destiny bhagavan famously said once that we're we're all like the prey that's fallen into the tiger's jaw the deer that's falling in once he gets his teeth into you that's it you can wriggle and squirm you can try and get away but after that moment your destiny is with bhagavan and if you try to run away it's just not going to work the other person whose story i love is natasha i and natasha i was a very junior cook in the ashram kitchen and in that position he was being constantly bullied by the brahmin widows who were the [Music] the head the head cooks and the people who bossed everybody else around he put up with it for a while and then he decided that this is not for me i'm going to run away uh he at that point in his life had a physical aversion to touching money um it burned his skin if money ever came near him so his only option was to walk home and his hometown was chidambaram which is a very very long walk away so he set off one day and at the end of the first day he didn't tell bhagavan at the end of the first day he found a quiet place off the main road he said he found a hollow tree stump um he thought that would be a good shelter for the night and he was just about he had a bath and he was just about to curl up inside the tree trunk and try and get some sleep for the night when bhagavan appeared in front of him a vision of bhagavan and said how far have you managed to go from me at which point natasha aya realized that there was no escaping from bhagavan but his attempts to run away would be futile and that he could never leave bhagavan he said they formed the vision of bhagavan then started walking back down the road towards chironomy natasha aya decided he wasn't even going to have his night sleep in the hollow tree he started walking back towards chiropractic this is a long walk by the way tiruvannamalai villaporum was 60 kilometers he'd earned his night's sleep in the tree but he turned around and spent the whole night walking back to tiruvannamalai presented himself in the hall much as anomalous while he had presented himself chastened by his failed escape bid bhagavan hadn't known that he was going and of course it wasn't the real physical bhagavan who appeared to him near villapuram but bhagavan looked at him and said exactly the same thing that the former bhagavan had said the day before how far do you think you can go away from me he said natasha i just said i burst into tears and realized that my home was ramanashram and that from then on i would i would put up with whatever went on in the kitchen that was my destiny to be surrendered to all the events at raman ashram i will say not putting myself in the category of these people but in my own case back in the early 1980s by then i'd lived at ramanashram i'd worked at ramanashram and rather like an amale swami i thought i'll just i'll just go away and live independently i'll meditate by myself but for that i need to earn some money i didn't have any money in those days i thought i'll go back to the uk i'll get a job um i'd earn some money i'll come back i'll live outside the ashram quietly mind my own business and not be dependent on anyone like all the previous attempts to run away this didn't work in london um i failed to find employment of any any kind whatsoever um i was reasonably educated i had certain qualifications every time i tried to apply for a job i got turned down and sometimes in quite quite a rude and unnecessary way i applied for one job for which i was eminently qualified and received a letter that said um dear mr godman thank you very much for your very entertaining application however we would prefer to employ someone who was qualified to do the job um i thought well that's a bit cheeky i i wasn't having high expectations one of my friends was working in the london zoo um sweet sweeping up all the garbage and i thought that's a nice outdoor job i like animals i can work outside so he got he got me an interview with the lady who hired the little pickers at london zoo and i've even managed to blow that interview apparently i laughed at the wrong moment and the lady decided i wasn't serious enough to be a litter picker in the london zoo so i didn't get that job either this went on for weeks and weeks and weeks and then i just hadn't had a chance meeting with uh the landlord of my neighbor's house who was a philosophy lecturer and he had come to london to deliver a manuscript written by his wife he was also a philosopher to a publisher in london and uh i had a thought i thought well you know oh no then he said i talked to the publisher and she discovered that i was also a philosophy lecturer and she said why don't you write a book yourself you're always looking for new good philosophy manuscripts so the thoughts arose well that's something i could do i could go back to india and write a book i got the name of the publisher the lady the commissioning editor picked up the phone and it was like a namely swami's story of everything going wrong until you took the right decision which in my case was to go back to india and write a book i picked up the phone and lady on the other end said who are you what do you want i explained who i was i said where i came from and i said i'd like to write a book on ramana maharshi please and she just said don't go anywhere else come immediately we we want you now i hadn't heard the phrase we want you for a very long time everybody else had said go away go away go away and without seeing me knowing who i was even who ramana mahashi was she just said come immediately to my office which i did and sat down and about half an hour later i walked out with a publishing agreement to write me as you are i came back to india and realized well that seems to be my destiny it wasn't my destiny to go and earn a pot of cash in the west i came back to raman ashram with a book contract started writing books and that's more or less been my own personal destiny ever since there's a very nice um paragraph i think it's in maharshi's gospel where he said if you're not destined to find work no matter how hard you look how hard you try you won't find it that that was my case in london i wasn't destined to earn money to put in the bank to go back to india to live off it was my destiny to come back to india and write not just one book but a whole series of them as soon as i accepted that that was my fate everything went well i started this very what's turning into a very long answer by saying that bhagavan doesn't choose his devotees because he has no sankalpi he has no capacity to say okay i like you you can be my devotee no you're not so good i reject you but there is a way of looking at this phenomenon which in a sense does imply some kind of selection some kind of choice um bhagavan liked the verses of guhai nami shivaya guhai namashiva was a tamil cyber saint who lived on the hill about 500 years ago in the in the first decade of the last century bhagavan lived in his temple in his compound and while he was there he found unpublished manuscripts of uh namishi by his poems he even made a copy of all the poems i found that book in the ashram archives when i was working there in the 1980s but there was one verse that particularly struck him because he used to bring it out once in a while and it says arunachala attracts to itself all those who are rich in yana tapas so what this means to me is that if you have a serious interest in liberation a strong desire to find a guru a past history of spiritual practice a willingness to do more tapas spiritual practice in the future then somehow you you show up as a dot on aeronautical radar that's that's the best image i can think for this you imagine there's a one of these big you know 360 degree sweeps on the top of arunachala it goes round and round and those devotees who have a connection a past a determination to make a big spiritual effort somehow you make a blip on arunachala's radar and at that point arunachala starts to pull you in as the verse says arunachala attracts to itself all those who were rich in yana tapas bhagavan himself said it was the power of arunachala that drew him to our natural and made him stay and i think it's the same power that's pulling people today we all um have a respect and a veneration for bhagavan for our natural bhagavan told one person who said i came to you you attracted me you pulled me here and he said oh that's just what you think you identify that pulling force with this physical form that you now see in front of you and you say oh bhagavan you brought me here but i know that the same power that brought me to this mountain has now brought you to this mountain and that same power that same force is pulling all people who have an interest or a passion for liberation enlightenment or bhagavan's teachings so i had another freezing crisis um i was just about to sum up this particular question by saying that to some extent we've all earned the right to be in the companies of devo the company of devotees who followed this path we've all been pulled to bhagavan to arunachala by a force that we don't understand can't remember why we might feel unworthy but i think we've all done something to be in that company of devotees to be sharing this satsang here today and to have a common interest in [Music] revering arunachala and in following bhagavan's teachings so that leads on to the next question um do you miss the physical proximity of arunachala when you were away from it right now as i explained i'm several thousand miles from my usual location i'm in western australia i don't miss it because i feel that i can always be um in our naturalist presence by being aware of it by thinking about it in in a loving way that perhaps physical proximity doesn't always do uh last time i checked there were 150 000 people or so living in the town of tiranamalai um i suspect for the vast majority of those um aaron ashley is um a landscape feature and not much more the people who are in proximity to it are those who revere it those who think about it and that thinking is not dependent on physical proximity remember bhagavan himself when he was a boy in madurai said that he was thinking about bhagavat thinking about our nation very intensively um on one occasion he told rangan one of his schoolboy friends that uh when i was playing with you you were all indulging in the games i was just being sucked into the inner silence that aaron actually was pulling me into so there was this very strong connection between arunachal and bhagavan right right from an early age and when he came to write his poetry it was full of references to this attractive magnetic power of arunachala and on a couple of occasions he was quite forthright in saying that the thought of arunachala had brought about his own realization so it wasn't because he was our natural just the intensity of his thought his desire his love had brought about that particular uh event there's a story i think it's around the christmas story but it illustrates this very well um sounds like a roman christian story he said there were two teenage boys deciding what to do with that evening and one of them the pious one decided he would stay home and study bhagavatam and the other one the uh not so pious one decided he'd go off to the local brothel which shocked the first boy anyway so they both went after their chosen activities for the evening the the boy who went to the brothel spent the whole evening thinking about his friend who was reading bhagavatam saying oh i should have stayed home this is terrible i'm committing a sinful act here i should be back home reading the bhagavatam like my friend and his friend who was back home allegedly aspirationally reading the bag of atom was thinking i bet my friend's having a good time in that place and he was imagining what his friend was getting up to in the brothel so the bottom line of this story according to ramakrishna is that the the boy who spent the evening at home with the book was where his mind was and that was in the brothel and the boy in the brothel was where his mind was which is back home reading the bhagavatam so it's where you put your mind that that's where you are um if you put your mind on arunachala then you're in the proximity of our natural if you love it long for it desire it then that attention that focus can as bhagavan said even bring about your liberation do i miss it when i'm away from it not so much but i have to say that the reason i don't feel badly about being away from it is that i know i can always go back um this this is a big issue for me particularly um as a a foreigner who doesn't have the right to spend the rest of my life in india i'm always to some extent at the mercy of rules and regulations in india i have never ever left india in a situation where i didn't have the right to come back this is something very very important for me for about six months this year the indian government locked india down uh cancelled all scheduled flights and even suspended all the visas and residential documents of people such as myself living in india i could have gone to the airport and got on a plane a repatriation plane to my own country the uk but had i gone that route they would have stamped my passport in chennai with uh visa expired back in india is it working again so i definitely didn't want that so i waited at least six months until india started to relax its regulations a little bit and as soon as those regulations allowed me to leave and come back then i started looking into flights there was a long and tedious way of getting to where i am but i took it because i know that when the time comes for me to return i have a document a piece of paper which will let me back into india let me back into my house or i can sit on my veranda and look at arunachala again

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Length: 44min 13sec (2653 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021