Anthony Chene Production Who am I? The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi Anthony Chene interviews David Godman (Extended version) [Recorded in Perth, Australia] [Please introduce yourself. Who are you,
and what is your religious background?] My name is David Godman. I mostly
live in South India, near the ashram of Ramana Maharshi. I discovered Ramana and
his ideas when I was at college in 1974. I went out to India on a visit to just find out
for myself what was going on there. That was 1976. I liked it so much I fell in
love with the place, and more or less I stayed. And that was 44 years ago. I didn’t have a lot of background in that before. It was just one specific text that happened
to fall into my hands in the local bookstore, which triggered my interest. I came from a
background of Protestant Methodist Christians. That never really impinged on me much. I
think I discarded all that long before I went to university. It was at university that I
discovered Ramana, who he was, what he’d done, everything he stood for. And something instantly
clicked. And when I had a chance to go there, I did. I went there, and I stayed. [What were you looking for? What do you think compelled you to travel to India and stay there for decades?] I think there are two possible
things. You feel you are suffering and want to end your suffering, but
I think there’s another strand. I think for a lot of people, including myself, there’s what I
can only describe as a hunger for transcendence. There’s a recognition that there’s something
real that you haven’t quite been able to grasp or get your hands on. And occasionally
you meet someone or find an opportunity to examine the possibilities more clearly and
to go into them for yourself and find out what’s true, what’s real, and what’s incidental
and accidental, and discard the accidental. [Tell us a little about Ramana
Maharshi’s background.] I’ll tell you a little bit about him. He was
born in the late 19th century in South India, had a very normal upbringing. And then at the age
of 16, he had a spontaneous waking-up. He had a fear of death, a very intense fear of death, and
he was absolutely convinced he was about to die. But instead of panicking, he watched the process
inside himself, and conducted a kind of internal enquiry as to what was going to die and what
would survive. If this death came, to whom would the death come, to what would it come, and
what would survive that particular death? Along with that fear, he spontaneously asked
himself a question. ‘Who is the one who sees? Who is the perceiver? Who is registering
this world around me?’ And he said, as that enquiry took place, instantly, he
said, this perceiving ‘I,’ this thing inside himself which saw a world outside of himself
actually vanished. And he said the net result was that he found himself in what he called the
natural state of Self. This is something that has existed in Indian philosophy as a concept.
But it’s not just a concept. It’s something that you can aspire to. It’s something that you can
become one with, and you get to it by discarding your own sense of individuality, your own idea
that you’re an individual person occupying a particular space. With him, he didn’t have to
do anything. He didn’t have a prolonged period of practice. It just happened very quickly, very
spontaneously. And from the age of 16 onwards, he said, he was in that state permanently,
24 hours a day. You can say that the individual ‘I,’ his sense of being a person,
an individual, never functioned in him again. [What did he do with his new knowledge?
Did he try to communicate it to anyone?] He had no agenda. He didn’t
feel he had to go out and rush around and tell people about this great discovery. He
was quite content to abide in this state, this undercurrent which he’d become one with.
But people naturally got attracted to him. He left home at the age of 16. He went to a very
famous religious pilgrimage centre in South India, and stayed there. And there was something about
him that attracted people. People came to him, and somehow, by hanging out with him, they
got very quiet. They got very peaceful. I think there’s a 19th-century philosopher (I
forget his name). He said, if you invent a better mousetrap, no matter how hard you
try to hide yourself, even in a forest, people will beat a path to your door and find
you. There was something about him. He’d got this innate capacity to make people quiet, peaceful
and happy, but not by doing anything. Simply by people sitting in his presence, it happened to them. So,
he realized that he couldn’t really run away, that wherever he was, this would happen. So
he, shall we say, resigned himself to his fate and sat quietly in this major pilgrimage centre
in South India. And over time, thousands of people came, and they just sat with him. They absorbed
his silent emanations, and to whatever extent they were ready or mature enough to receive them,
they, too, got a kind of taste or a flavour of what he himself was experiencing all the time. [What were Ramana Maharshi’s main teachings?] When people said, what are your teachings?
he didn’t have a list of ideas or words. He said, ‘My teachings are the silence that comes off me
when I just sit here minding my own business.’ People would come, and if they were in a
relatively quiet state themselves, they would experience something of that silence. He said,
‘If you’ve got a question, fine, ask it, but those aren’t…, I can give you an answer, but the
answers are not my teachings. My true teachings are simply the silence that comes off me because
I’m naturally abiding in this state all the time.’ In later years he was quite willing to give
replies. But he wasn’t what in the western world you’d call a philosopher — although he
could do philosophy. He read philosophy books because people asked him about them and
wanted explanations. He wrote very little, spoke very little. I think for the vast majority
of people the reason they went to see him was something about his proximity, something about the
way he looked at them. There was something transformative about being around him. And for
the vast majority of people, that was enough. [What spiritual practices did Sri Ramana
advise his followers to undertake?] The real teaching was the silent presence, the
emanations that came off him. If people were saying, ‘Well, I’m not getting it. How do I find
out for myself? What is this state that you are saying that you’re in? I am not experiencing it now,
even though I’m sitting here? What do I do?’ So, the ‘What do I do?’ question… The general
response… He would tell you to do something called ‘self-enquiry.’ This is quite central to
the message that most people associate with him. If you remember when I described
what happened to him when he was 16, he said there was a spontaneous examination of
the observing, perceiving ‘I’ inside himself. And he said that by looking at it, by focusing on it
to see what it was in himself, it disappeared. He was lucky, or he was ready for it. For most
other people, they’re not that ready. They’re not that lucky. They have to undergo some kind of
process in order to eliminate this perceiving ‘I’ which takes up occupancy in your body, and says,
‘I’m a person. I’m going to conduct my life from inside this body.’ He said that’s the source
of suffering. That’s the source of everybody’s problem. It’s a sense of individuation — the
idea that there’s somebody inside the body who has a mind, who occupies the body, who has to make
choices and decisions to live in a particular way. He said that just gets you entangled in all kinds
of dramas. He said there’s an alternative. There’s a substratum. There’s a state in which this idea
‘I am a person who occupies a body’ simply doesn’t function. There’s nobody in there who chooses
or decides. There’s no one who strives, no one who attains. There’s simply an innate knowledge
that what you are is what’s true, what’s real, and it’s not associated or identified with
anything. It just is at it is. He would say if you want to try for yourself to find out what
this is, he said, your problem is that you have inside yourself a receiving or a perceiving ‘I’
which is constantly jumping out to latch onto, or associate with, objects that it thinks about,
objects which it sees, feelings, emotional states. On a moment-to-moment basis you might be seeing
something right now. I can see plants. I can see lights. There’s a subject inside me that I
call ‘David,’ but I could also call it ‘I.’ That’s the subject. The objects are the plants,
the bag. Everything I can see are the objects of my attention. He said that this idea that you’re
a person inside a body is fueled and sustained by all the things that this ‘I’ jumps
out to latch onto, to associate with. It feeds the illusion that there’s
somebody inside, somebody who has to collect this information, process it and use it
to make a next decision. He said that’s completely wrong. The idea that you’re a person inside a body
only appears to exist because you’re constantly looking at things and saying, ‘I am seeing this,’
‘I am feeling this,’ ‘I am experiencing this.’ He said, if you could instead put attention on
the inner feeling of ‘I,’ this state of interior ‘I’-ness, so that when you say, ‘I am hungry,’
‘I am angry,’ ‘I am a man,’ ‘I am a lawyer,’ the central core, the central thread, like the
string going through a necklace, is the ‘I’ upon which everything else becomes the predicate.
He said, hold on to this sense of ‘I’ and don’t let it jump out, don’t
let it associate with anything else, and you’ll find it’s a myth. It’s a fiction. It
only appears to exist because all of these other things are grabbing hold of it and giving it a
completely false sense of continuity, making you think that you’re a person inside a body. He
said, hold onto this perceived inner sense of ‘I.’ Every time something else tries to take
your attention away from it, just say, ‘No, not interested today.’ Like the salesman at
the door. ‘Just go away. Not today, thank you.’ Go back to the perceiving ‘I,’ the subject ‘I.’
And he said, you’ll notice that when it no longer has an impulse to reach out,
to connect, to associate, then it actually starts to subside, and eventually
it disappears, and it reveals that same state, that same substratum that he said he got
permanently and definitively at the age of 16. [How real is this ‘I’ that you
are asking us to investigate?] That’s the whole point. Whatever you think about,
whatever you feel, is not you. The ‘you’ is the ‘I’ who experiences: ‘I am angry,’ ‘I am happy,’
‘I am two metres tall.’ Everything that you add on to the ‘I’ is a predicate that
you’ve assumed somehow qualifies or colours in new aspects of you. But it doesn’t. It’s possible to
have an ‘I’ that’s not associated, not connected with any of these predicates or attributes.
And what he is saying is that, by constant, vigilant awareness of the ‘I’ that is making up
this story that it’s someone who lives inside you, you challenge it, you look at it,
you stop it making the connections. And slowly, slowly, it withdraws. And finally
it gets to the point when it disappears. And you say, ‘Huh! Yes! That’s what I am. That’s what I always
was. Everything else was a kind of fiction, a layer that appeared on top of me because
I didn’t look at this “I” long enough or hard enough to discover its true nature.’ [Do we have to give up our ordinary everyday activities and devote ourselves to this practice full time?] I think Ramana recognized that a lot of people
did have busy lives. They had job commitments. They had family. He never ever gave anyone
his permission or gave out advice to the effect that they should give up any of that.
He said, look after your family, do your job, but don’t waste your spare time. In every moment you
have that’s not required for doing the various obligations that have come your way in life, he
said, look at your mind, watch how it functions, and you’ll note that there’s this essence,
this ‘I’-thing inside yourself that’s the conductor of your internal orchestra. It’s
the person waving the baton, making the music, making all your reactions.
It’s latching onto things, getting excited over them, becoming averse
to them. He is saying all of these reactions are simply because you don’t look at the nature of
this thing that you call ‘I.’ We all glibly say, ‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ ‘I’m going to the
beach,’ ‘I like this,’ ‘I don’t like that,’ and we don’t look at this central thing
called ‘I,’ which is claiming authority, which is claiming occupancy of the body, and look
at it to the point where you understand that it’s just a framing mechanism. All the stuff that comes
in — the thoughts, the ideas, the perceptions — they come in and they get processed in such a way
that makes you think, ‘I am this person,’ ‘I live in this body,’ ‘I have to choose and decide what
to do next.’ He said if you can untangle that, if you can put full and complete attention on the
‘I,’ the ‘I,’ will vanish, and all your suffering will go along with it. He said suffering
is simply a consequence of buying into this idea that you’re a person inside a body. [How do we psyche ourselves up for this investigation? How do we learn to take it more seriously?] If you think you’re too busy and you don’t care,
that’s your problem. There are people, though, who think, ‘This is the most important thing in my
life.’ I talked about a hunger for transcendence earlier on. If you’ve got that hunger, if you want
to get out of the game, if you want to stop being affected or overwhelmed by all the things that
the game produces, have a look. Isolate this thing called ‘I’ inside yourself. Watch it, hold onto
it, watch it go back to its source and disappear, and then you find the peace, the stillness
in which suffering can’t arise at all. You have to want it enough, and you have
to want it more than all the other things that your mind is saying — ‘This is more
interesting. Go and do that instead.’ You have to understand that running after all
these ideas, these thoughts, these associations, not only doesn’t make you any better, any happier,
it actually makes you suffer. You have to get to the point of the diabetic in the cake-shop window,
looking in the window, salivating, thinking, ‘Wow, I’d really enjoy tasting that,’ but
simultaneously, having the knowledge that if he goes in and eats the cake, he’ll go into
a diabetic coma. You have to frame your constant desire to indulge against the consequences of
doing it, and say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to go that route. I want that mental
diabetic coma not to happen. I’m not going to go that route.’ So, you need some discrimination.
You need to say to yourself, ‘I’ve lived my life for however many years. I’ve had all the
suffering. I’ve had enough. This man is giving me a hypothesis. I’m going to check it out and see
if it works.’ You don’t have to believe anything. There’s no belief system here. He’s saying, ‘I
was like this. I did this. Then this happened. You try it for yourself. If it works for you,
fine. If not, it doesn’t bother me either.’ [How does one keep this state
once it has been attained?] It’s not some state or experience
that you attain because anything you attain is somehow timebound. You got it
in time, and over time it will disappear. What he’s talking about is something that’s there
all the time, which has always been there. But somehow, it was covered up because you invented
this personality, this occupant of the body, who bought into a whole bunch of myths about
living there, about being there, about being an individual who existed in a spatial universe
across a period of time. All that, somehow, is an outgrowth, is contingent on this idea, ‘I live
inside a body.’ He said if you can get rid of that through putting full attention on this sense
of ‘I’ inside yourself, then all the things you thought about yourself, thought about the world,
he said, they all go out the window. They’re all a complete myth, and they’re all anchored to
this sense of an ‘I’ being inside a body. [What is your own experience
of doing self-enquiry? How easy did you find it when you started?] I started doing it when I was at college in the 1970s. I got my instruction manual, if you like,
from probably the only book available in the West at that time. I did it. It made me extraordinarily
quiet, peaceful, happy. When you’re testing a hypothesis, you want some results. I started
doing it, and what it said on the can was what I found inside. It did make me very peaceful. It
did make me very happy. So, I continued with it. [Why is this method different and
better than other kinds of meditation?] Ramana had a division between different kinds of practice. He said if
you’re putting your attention on an object, then you are reinforcing the idea that
there’s a subject inside the body who can associate with or identify with an object. So,
if you’re looking at an image, if you’re saying some words, if you’re watching your breath, you
are the subject watching — the breath becomes the object of your attention. He called
that meditation. He said meditation is about witnessing or observing objects. He said that’s
not what I’m saying at all. He said if you keep putting attention on objects, then your sense
of being an ‘I’ is not going to diminish. It will continue to be just as strong because
you’re reinforcing it by focusing on an object. What I am saying is this thing called
enquiry withdraws attention from all objects, whether they’re practices, such as watching
the breath, repeating mantras. He said, these are all object-based practices. He said what I’m
teaching you is a subject-based practice, that you keep full attention on your inner sense of ‘I,’
‘I am,’ of being, of existing. And he said that severs the habit of this individual ‘I’ from
jumping out and connecting with objects. Because as soon as it does that, then you just continue
to believe that you’re a person, and each time you make a new association, that confirms your wrong
notion that there’s somebody inside the body who looks outside the body and needs to do something
or choose something or decide something. [Are there levels of the mind that one
moves through during this practice?] There’s no hierarchy. There’s a single substance
or essence, which he called ‘Self,’ simply because that’s what you are, and that’s why he used the
word ‘Self.’ In traditional Hinduism, it’s called ‘Brahman,’ ‘Atman.’ He liked to use
the word ‘Self,’ I think, to emphasize the fact it wasn’t something that you went looking for
that was different from you. It is what you are, and what you are is your own Self. He liked
the word ‘Self’ because the connotations of that are, it’s not something new or different you
go looking for. It’s what you already are. [What were Sri Ramana’s views on visions
and other similar spiritual experiences?] He had a very low opinion of them. He never
encouraged them. If they were occurring naturally to people who came to him, he
would just tell them to disregard them, that they’re just a distraction. You think, ‘Oh,
that’s new and exciting,’ and you run after them. But he said ultimately they have no benefit, and
he never recommended that anyone search them or try and practise to get them. If you’re having
an experience of something — let’s say you’ve got the siddhi of seeing something happen
a million miles away — it’s still an object of your attention. It’s knowledge that comes to a
knower. So long as there’s the division between a knower and something known by the act of knowing,
he said, that division is going to sustain the idea that you’re a person, an individual.
The knowledge might be something extraordinary, which may be completely out of the accepted realm
of ordinary experience. It might be a vision. It might be some knowledge that you think other
people don’t have. But it’s still an object of your attention. It’s something you’ve gained
or noticed by looking at or searching for. He said that process of inventing an internal
‘I’ who achieves a goal through practice, through study, and then gets the goal as an object, he
said, that’s not going to get you to the point where the individual ‘I’ no longer exists.
He said you’ve got to withdraw attention from objects. And experiences can be very enticing,
particularly if they’re good ones. You think, ‘Oh, this is great, I’m getting somewhere, this is
wonderful.’ But he said that that’s just another entertaining delusion that puts your attention on
something that’s not yourself. He said the only way to get out of the exit door, if you like,
the only way out is to isolate the ‘I,’ stop it playing with all these external phenomena, stop
it getting excited by them, and go back to where it came from, and disappear. The more entertaining
things it can come up with — whether it’s a vision or a siddhi — the more likely it is to think, ‘I,
this person in the body, I am wonderful. I’ve had these experiences, I can do wonderful things.’ So,
your sense of being a person is enhanced by this. It’s not diminished. The way to make it diminish
is to take attention off these phenomena. Instead, look at the one who is experiencing them, the one
who wants them, the one who sees them as something external, objective. Find the subject, hold onto
the subject and watch the subject disappear. [How do we rid ourselves of limitations, beliefs
and unconscious emotional conditioning?] In Ramana’s day, people got very… I won’t
say annoyed with him… But they would say, ‘Oh, you’re just throwing your Brahmastra
at me.’ The Brahmastra in Hindu mythology is a secret weapon that defeats all other
weapons. Every time you asked him a question, he would say, ‘Who is asking the question?’
You never got the kind of answer that you wanted. He wanted to tell you that
your question would be answered if you followed the advice and the procedures he
was recommending. People would come along, and they would say, ‘But what about my childhood
memories? What about these great powers?’ And his invariable answer was, ‘Who has these
memories? Who has these powers? Who is this person in front of me who claims to be a person who has
a memory, who wants to have these extraordinary powers?’ He said, solve that problem and all your
other problems are solved. Right now, you’re sitting somewhere in France talking to
me, and you have memories of being a child, whatever your professional career was, wherever you’ve
gone, all your past emotions. He said, treat them all as objects in your field of attention. They
are all occurring to, displaying themselves to, a subject. And that subject is the ‘I.’ When
you say, ‘I remember my childhood,’ ‘I remember my parents,’ ‘I remember going to this school,’
there’s something inside yourself that seems to think that there’s a continuity
of this first personal pronoun, and that everything that’s ever happened to
you has happened to this first pronoun, ‘I.’ He said the way to get out of that particular
idea is not to dwell on all your past thoughts, your past feelings, your past emotions, but to
look at the nature of this thing that you’ve spent your whole life labelling as ‘I,’ and see
what it is, how it arises, how it functions, and ultimately where it goes back to when it
doesn’t have anything to entertain itself with. [Are you saying that we should not
even value good spiritual experiences?] I think there are people who’ve had good
experiences. They’ve got very peaceful, very happy, very quiet. They think, ‘Aha,
that’s it!’ But they’re just pleasant experiences, which are experienced by an experiencer. The final
state is when there’s no longer an experiencer who alternates from one experience to another. The one
who said, ‘I had this good experience,’ has to go. [It is said that the final state cannot
be described in words. Is this true?] This is true. There’s nothing that you can
use to frame it and say, ‘It’s like this.’ Everyone you meet who’s got this state, no
matter how good they are with words, no matter how good their mind is, they say, ‘I can’t tell you
anything about it because whatever I describe isn’t what it is.’ One thing that you do have
is a sense of absolute indubitable certitude. There’s something about the knowledge that
you’ve discovered — you don’t gain it, you discover it — which you suddenly realize was there
all the time, which is so incontrovertible that nothing else anybody says can ever dissuade
you from this fact of your own experience, the fact of who you are. The best analogy
is, when you wake up in the morning and you laugh, and you say, ‘Well, how could I have believed all
of those things that were going on in my dream?’ There’s an instant of waking up that gives you an
absolute knowledge of what’s true and what’s real and an immediate understanding that everything
that preceded it in the dream world wasn’t true. There’s a kind of parallel process of knowing. When
you discover this substratum, there’s a moment of, ‘Ah, yes, that’s who I really am. That’s what’s
true. Everything else was just froth on the surface. It was an imagination that I imposed
on the only true real thing, which is myself.’ [What are some of the characteristics of this reality that you say cannot be accurately described?] What he would say is that there is something
that’s true. There’s something that’s real. And it’s not divided into subjects and
objects. It doesn’t consist of individual people occupying bodies, looking at
other individuals occupying bodies. He said there’s one essence,
one substratum, in which all of manifestation is an appearance. He said the
correct way of understanding, knowing this, is to be that Self, be that Brahman, be that substratum,
and know that everything that appears within it is indivisibly your own Self. You don’t see
it as something separate from you. You don’t recognize that there are individuals who function
in this self-made reality who interact with each other. He said once your own sense of being an ‘I’
inside a body vanishes, then what also vanishes is your view, your perspective on what the world is.
It ceases to be an assemblage of different objects distributed in time and space. It becomes somehow
an uncaused manifestation in your own substratum, your own being, and that’s what you are. What
Ramana is saying is that there’s an overlay, there’s a superimposition of an idea
that you live in a world of things, objects separated by space and time, and that
within that world, there are other people doing things, interacting with each other.
You’ve created this overlay of what he says is no different from your dream. You’ve created
a projection, which somehow obscures the source in which all this is coming out of. It’s a bit like
the pictures that appear on the cinema screen. He said it’s like you somehow become associated
with one character — the Tom Cruise character, if you like — and you suffer with the ups and
downs of the Tom Cruise character in the film. You get excited when he’s winning;
you get disappointed when he’s losing. And he said that’s just you. You have decided, ‘I
am this character in this film.’ But he said the film is just a seamless interplay of light on
a screen, on a substratum. He said when the movie is over, the screen remains. That which it’s
projected on remains. The characters have gone. He said, what he’s talking about is the permanent
essence, the permanent substratum, the Self, is akin to the cinema screen on which all the
pictures are projected. But he said when the projection is there, everything has equal
indivisibility, if you like. They’re all pictures appearing to the one Self on the one
Self, and whether the pictures are there or not, the Self is not affected. When the projectionist
turns his projector off at the end of the show, you, as screen, as substratum, are not
touched or affected in any way whatsoever. You can only have that perspective, have that
knowledge when you cease to identify with little Tom Cruise in one corner of the screen.
You’ve realized that the whole of the appearance of the world is a projection on a screen. You’ve
stopped identifying with one corner of it. You’ve had a good look at the ‘I,’ which thinks, ‘I
am this character in this corner of the screen interacting with all the other cinema
characters.’ You’ve found out the invalidity — is that a word? — the invalidness
of that perspective. You’ve watched it disappear. You’ve discovered that your true nature
is the substratum underneath. And when you identify with that, all of these other
projections are known to be false and unreal. And you know longer think, ‘This is me.
This is my world. This is my drama.’ [Everyone thinks ‘I am an individual
person.’ How can that be so wrong?] The idea of being a person is, according to
Ramana, it’s just your idea. It has no fundamental validity. What for him is fundamental, true
and real is the substratum in which all these images of manifestation will appear and disappear.
He said your problem is that you have decided, ‘I am this little character on the
corner of the screen. This is me. I will buy into the dramas of this character in
this corner of the screen. I will get excited when my little character does well, and I will get very
upset when he gets shot at the end of the movie.’ But he said that’s just your idea. You’ve
limited yourself to a particular portion of a manifest appearance, and by doing so,
you’ve framed the appearance in such a way that you see everything else as other and
different from yourself. When your perspective becomes the source, Brahman, then nothing that
appears in it is seen as different from you, and nothing in it is different from
all the other things that are in it. [How to determine what is real
and what is just an illusion?] In the Indian tradition that
Ramana is based in the idea of what’s real is not the same idea that
we have in everyday language in the West. If I kick a rock, I say it’s real because my toe
hurts. That’s not the Indian idea of what’s real. The Indian idea of reality is it has to be
there all the time. First of all, it must be there permanently. It has to have being. It has to
exist, and it has to shine by its own light. Now that’s an interesting qualification. Anything
that depends on something else is not regarded as real. So, in the same way that the light that
comes off the moon is reflected from the sun, anything that derives its being or its sense of
existing from something else is not regarded as truly real. It has to be there all the time.
It has to have being, existence. And it can’t be contingent on anything else for its continuity.
Ramana would say, and all the teachers in that tradition would say, the only thing that
meets that rather narrow set of definitions is the unmanifest Self. It’s Brahman. Other
things might appear in the unmanifest Self, in Brahman, but you can’t give them reality
because they appear and they disappear. Because they’re not there all the time, you can’t
say that they’re real. But at the same time, you can’t say they’re unreal because when you
have the perspective of being and knowing Self, everything that appears in it partakes, if you
like, of that same reality that you are. What disappears is the sense that there’s
something other than your Self, there’s something different from your Self, which you can then
categorize as unreal. The state of jnana, the state of knowing, is everything is your own Self,
but not as separate individual people, and not as interacting objects in a physical universe.
Everything is just there, and you know it to be your own Self. You don’t recognize differences
within it. You know it’s all your own Self. So, it’s real when you have that perspective, but
it’s unreal when you take a position within that manifest world, and say, ‘I occupy
one little corner of that manifest world, and all of these other things I’m taking to be
real, they must be real because I can see them.’ Ramana is saying that perspective is wrong.
You can’t say because you see a tree, that tree must be real. Because you see another person that
person must be real. He said that whole framework, that whole overlay of projection is wrong.
You can’t ascribe reality to anything you see because it doesn’t meet the
three core fundamental definitions of what’s real. You can say everything is an appearance
in the One. But when you are that One, when you are the substratum, then you don’t
recognize or see anything as distinct or separate from your own Self. You
don’t see anything as being something separate from you that has to be witnessed.
You don’t recognize the independent existence of objects or other people. You know them
to be your own Self. When you say, ‘Are they real?’ When you see them as their essence,
as the substratum in which everything appears, you can say, ‘Yes, they’re real.’ When you see
them as independently functioning objects, then, from Ramana’s point of view, that’s not real.
That’s a projection you’ve invented for yourself. [Don’t we need to identify with a person, a
limited form, in order to function in the world?] If you limit yourself to a particular form, then
you have to defend that form against all other forms. You’re in a constant battle to maintain
the integrity of that form, to keep it healthy. You come into contact, into conflict, with other
forms that you take to be like yourself. You fear the ones that are bigger and
stronger than you. All of these ideas are outgrowths of this fundamental wrong idea:
‘I’m a person who occupies a body. I live here. Therefore, I have to fight in my corner. I
have to defend myself against all other forms, all other people who think that they also
occupy bodies and have to behave the same way.’ [What’s the Self like? Is that
a reasonable question to ask?] I would say it’s not like anything. It’s
what’s left when you’ve stopped making imaginary ideas about who you are and what the
world is. When you stop all that imagination, what’s left is what’s true. You’re simply
disregarding all the things that you’ve taken to be real because you’ve never looked at them long
enough or hard enough to discover their essence. [How can we tell the difference between
a good teacher and a bad teacher?] This is a long topic. Rule number one, in my
opinion, is if anyone’s charging you money, cross them off your list of potential
Gurus. All of the teachers I’ve been with, all the ones I’ve benefited from, in their entire
career, they never charged anybody anything, ever. That would, I think, automatically, winnow out
95% of all of the potential teachers in the world. I spent a long time with Papaji in the 1990s.
When he was young in the 1940s, he had this desperate urge to find a teacher. At
that point, he was a big Krishna devotee, and he actually had an ability to have visions of
Krishna, and the visions made him very happy, but they weren’t there all the time. He wanted to
find someone who could give him a kind of on-off switch, so he could say, ‘Whenever I want to see
Krishna, Krishna will appear.’ So, that was his rather peculiar criterion of the kind of teacher
he wanted. He said, ‘I went all over India looking for someone. Nobody satisfied me. Nobody claimed
to be able to do this. I came back to my family in Punjab having spent all the money my dad had
given me. He was very upset that I hadn’t found a teacher.’ But he said, ‘Inside me, there
was such a hunger to find this teacher that the teacher actually more-or-less showed up at my
front door in the Punjab.’ He said that Ramana, or somebody who looked like Ramana, appeared
at his front door, dressed as a sadhu, and Papaji said to him, ‘I’m looking for a teacher — can
you recommend anyone? I want someone who can allow me to have these visions. I want to see
God.’ And the man said, ‘Go to Tiruvannamalai. Go and see this person, Ramana Maharshi.’ He
took the advice, and when he got there, he said, the same person sitting on the sofa at Ramanashram
was the person who had come to his gate in Punjab. But first up, he was very upset. He thought
the man had cheated him. He thought the man had hopped on a train and gone back to Tiruvannamalai
and sat on his sofa and waited for him to come. But then, the people who were around him said,
‘No, no, he hasn’t left this town for 50 years. Whoever showed up at your gate, it wasn’t him.’
But Papaji told me it was exactly the same person he saw sitting on that sofa. So, Papaji said, ‘What
I’ve learned from that is that there are two ways to find a teacher. The first is a geographical
search. You can run around the world looking. He said you might get lucky, you might not. But
he said, ‘In my opinion, if you want it so badly that nothing else matters, then the teacher will
find you. He’ll knock on your front door and say, “Here I am.”’ I think you need a very, very high
level of commitment and desire for that to happen. But he said that’s the one guaranteed way to
find a true teacher: to want it badly enough. I just remember... I was sitting with Nisargadatta
Maharaj in the 1970s. And somebody said, ‘Why are there so many bad teachers in the world?’
And he laughed, and he said, ‘It’s to keep the bad students away from the good teachers.’ He said,
‘Look at my little room, maximum capacity 35. If there weren’t all these bad teachers all
over the world, everybody would be fighting to get into my front door, and there wouldn’t be any
space.’ So it’s part of the arrangement — that the bad teachers attract the bad students, and that
leaves room on the floor in the good teachers’ spaces. You get the teacher you’ve earned, or
the teacher who you think will give you what you want. It may be a good one; it may be a bad one.
But that’s the one you’ve earned in that moment. [What was Sri Ramana’s advice on
choosing or recognising a good Guru?] I will just pass on Ramana’s advice. He was
asked this question. The problem is, if you have a functioning sense of ‘I am a person who lives in a
body,’ if you’ve got that overlay inside yourself, you have no capacity to ascertain who is or who
is not in a state of transcendence. There’s no faculty that you can use to determine,
‘Yes, this is a good one; this is a bad one.’ But the two criteria that Ramana advised people to use
when they went to check people out were the peace that you feel in their presence, and the equality
with which they treat all the beings around them. He said they’re not guaranteed proofs, but he said
they’re quite good indicators. If you sit with someone and you find naturally, spontaneously, your
thoughts are decreasing, you’re getting quiet, then there’s something there worth staying for.
And these people, if they really have established their basis, if you like, in the substratum, then
they do see and treat everything around them in a very equal way, a very egalitarian way.
He said these are good signs. Go for the peace you experience in their presence, and watch the
way they behave, and see if they treat everyone around them in an equal way. I would add to
that: don’t go for the people who want your money. [Why is it so bad to charge money for satsang?] I talked to Papaji about this. His
meetings, he called them ‘satsangs.’ He said if you have any interest in money, even if you just
have a possibility that donations are welcome, then somehow the focus becomes the money and
not the teachings. He said it just turns from ‘satsang’ to ‘moneysang.’ There’s a very
subtle transformation of the process of the meeting that becomes more and more geared to
making money to keep the whole show on the road. He said you have to keep it pure. You have to give
out your teachings freely to anybody who comes, and not charge for them. When he was active,
he travelled a lot. People would invite him to come and teach, and he said, ‘I will come on the
following conditions — that you buy me a ticket, I will come to your house, your town, your
country. If you want to organize meetings, then you book a hall for however many
people you think will show up. But nobody who comes to that hall is going to be asked for
money. No one is going to be asked for a donation. You can advertise, but no one is going to ask
for money in my name or to have access to me. If those terms are acceptable, I will come
to your town. I will come to your country. I am happy to talk to anyone who shows
up, but not if any money is involved.’ [How did Sri Ramana deal with money matters?] Ramana arrived at the place he spent
his entire adult life at the age of 16. He actually had a bit of cash left over from his
journey. He threw it into a local temple tank, and he never touched money again for the rest
of his life. So, from the age of 16 to 70, he never touched money in
the sense of transactions. [So how did he support
himself in those early years?] He occasionally begged for his food. But
somehow, if you’re in that state, Self looks after you. If you’re destined to be a teacher,
then somebody will come along and give you food. [When did he decide to become a teacher, to
share what he had discovered with others?] If you decide, ‘I’ve got some talent for teaching.
I’ve got something to give that other people need,’ that’s completely the wrong perspective.
Ramana himself said that anyone who thinks that they’ve got something to give, that there are
other people who are in need of it, is not a true jnani, is not enlightened. He said, don’t think
that you’re better than other people. Don’t even think you’re different from other people. Know
yourself to be that Self, and if people come and ask you questions, the right answers will come.
They’ll appear in your mouth and you’ll say them. [Did Ramana Maharshi not regard himself as a Guru
who had practical and useful wisdom to impart?] Ramana himself, he never said, ‘I am a Guru, I
am a teacher,’ because once you put that label on yourself, then you’re accepting differences.
You’re putting yourself in a position where you’re better or more knowledgeable than somebody
else. And from that perspective, you’re saying, ‘I have information, I have teachings, I have
practices, which I think you’ll benefit from.’ The automatic underlying assumption of that is
these other people are not in your state, that they need to be improved in some way, and that you
need to give out advice to them to do something. That’s not how somebody like Ramana sees himself
or frames the world around him. He would say, ‘I remain in this state all the time, 24
hours a day.’ He said by remaining in that state there’s a kind of automatic energy created around
me. People come, and they ask me questions, and that energy field that’s created by abiding in
the Self looks after all the people who come. It answers their questions. It helps them with
whatever they need helping with. But it’s nothing to do with me because there’s nothing
inside me that recognizes that there’s anything outside me that needs assistance or help.
I abide as the Source. I abide as my own Self, and by doing so, that creates this presence, this
energy, which looks after everyone who comes. It’s nothing to do with me, and I don’t do
it because I see difference, or suffering, or people who need something from me — that’s just an
automatic consequence of me abiding in this state. [Sri Ramana once said, ‘Whatever is destined to happen will happen.’ Do we have any free will at all?] That was actually a little note he wrote to his
mother when his mother wanted him to come back to his family home. And that was his way of saying,
‘Sorry, that’s not in the script. I’m not coming home.’ But in general, he did teach that all
the activities that you undergo in this life are part of a predetermined script. But he also
said that, moment to moment, you always have the opportunity not to identify with the person
who is performing the actions in the script. So, although he would say, yes, there is a certain
unfolding, as a film unfolds according to the scriptwriter’s and the director’s instructions,
he said there’s a possibility to recognize that you are in a movie, if you like, that you have
a series of actions that you have to undergo. But the idea, ‘I am this person in this body
performing these actions,’ he said that’s your choice. That’s not part of the script. He said
you always have the opportunity to step out of the script and recognize that you’re the ground, the
substratum, in which the movie is appearing and disappearing, and not identify with the characters
which are performing their destined actions. [So, the idea that we have
choices is just an illusion?] He would say that choice is an illusion,
and it’s an outgrowth of the idea, ‘I live inside this body. I am a person. I
will collect sensory data: stuff that I see, stuff that I think about. And on the basis of
that I will process it and then decide what I have to do next to continue my idea of myself
and to protect this body that I think I live in.’ Once the fundamental individual ‘I’ is
discarded as being a fiction, an invention, then the idea that there’s either free will
or predetermination goes. Ramana says they exist only so long as you think you’re a person who
occupies a space. He said there’s no free will and there’s no predestination in the Self, but
so long as you think that you’re in a body, then you can argue about which is the more
important, which controls your life. But he said they’re just two bald men fighting over a comb.
He said it’s not anything that’s really important. It’s not something that you can argue about. It
has no fundamental validity because the entity to whom free will or predetermination
might apply doesn’t actually exist. [How to reach this state where everything
happens smoothly, without conscious choices?] I don’t think he used that vocabulary. But yes,
his preferred term for this state… He didn’t have a term that made it very exciting or exotic.
He used the term ‘sahaja.’ Sahaja just means ‘natural.’ He said that this is the natural
state. It’s the only state there really is, and everything else is unnatural insofar as it
requires some effort to sustain. He said when the effort to sustain the idea of being a person
vanishes, when you no longer regard yourself as somebody who lives in a body, who has to
interact with other bodies to get by in the world. He said what remains is this
constant unchanging substratum. And he just called it ‘natural.’ He
called it, ‘This is the sahaja state. It’s your true state. And it’s the only state
there is. And you’re not in it right now because you’ve imagined yourself to be a person in a body
who has to make choices and decisions.’ [Who or what is God in Sri Ramana’s
system? How is He reached or experienced?] In Ramana’s world, he said if
you imagine that you’re in a body, doing your stuff… He said that there’s a whole process
of creation — you do bad things, then you get bad karma — the whole traditional idea that
what you do has consequences, and that somewhere involved is some kind of divine power or
principle that decides what’s going to happen because you’ve done a particular thing.
He said all of these things are not real or permanent. Remember I explained what was real
and what was permanent before. He said that God is as much an invention as your idea of being an
individual person. The way I would explain it in modern language (I don’t know if Ramana would go
along with this) is it’s a bit like a video game. You switch it on. There are rules. There’s a
character in the video game who does certain things. If he does them well, he jumps up a
level. And there’s a kind of series of rules or operating functions that hands out the rewards and
the punishments. All of that persists and exists so long as there’s a wire going into the wall
and an on-off switch, and the position is on. What Ramana is saying is if you pull the plug from
the wall, the whole creation vanishes. The idea of you in the game vanishes. The idea of some
kind of overarching divine principle vanishes. They all arise, coexist, continue together.
They appear through the power of the Self, and you take them to be real — you get caught
up in these worlds of progress, punishments, rewards, divine realms. But he said, if you
turn the off switch at the wall. If you stop the ‘I’ from seeing a world, from creating a
world, from getting entangled in a world, then even the gods themselves disappear. They have no
independent ability to affect you if you pull that plug out of the wall. And pulling that plug out
of the wall is ceasing to exist as an individual ‘I’ who thinks he or she occupies a space inside a
body. When that goes, the whole show goes with it. [How do all these ideas connect with science? Are
they compatible with a scientific world view?] Somebody complained to Ramana,
obviously with a scientific background, and said, ‘What you’re saying doesn’t
make sense, you know, I’m a scientist. I want something scientific. I want a proper
procedure.’ And Ramana’s reply, which I love, is… He said, ‘Holding onto what’s real and
eschewing what is unreal is the essence of science.’ I think that’s a really good answer.
What you’re doing on this is exactly what a proper scientist should be doing — it’s finding out what’s
true and what’s real in a particular situation, holding onto that and discarding everything else
which is not true, not real, and then you find out the truth of yourself. He’s not asking you
to take on board any ideas which are not testable. It’s scientific insofar as his prescription for
self-enquiry is a working hypothesis. He’s saying, ‘I did this when I was young. I succeeded. I
found out who I was by having this question spontaneously appear inside me. If you want my
advice, I would say, ask this question yourself, follow it to its natural conclusion, and then
you will discover for yourself what’s true and what’s real. You won’t have any belief. You won’t
need me to tell you what’s true or what’s not. You’ll find it for yourself.’ So, in
that sense, Ramana makes a proposition. He gives you a working hypothesis. He asks you
to test it yourself by looking at this invention inside yourself, which you call ‘I.’ And he
said if you conduct the experiment properly, the ‘I’ that you’re looking at will
disappear. And in that act of disappearance, you will discover what’s true and what’s real.
And he said that that’s all that scientists are doing. They’re trying to find out what’s true
by letting go of everything that’s not true. [What is the mind? What is its
fundamental nature and origin?] Mind appears to exist, according to
Ramana, because its true nature is never scrutinized or looked at. It’s something
that we allow to continue inside ourselves simply because we haven’t had a good look
at where it arises, how it sustains itself, how it continues to make us believe that
there’s something real going on in there. To use this nice analogy of a wedding. Ramana said in
a wedding there are always two groups of people: the bride’s people and the bridegroom’s
people. And that gives the opportunity for a stranger to walk in and have a good time because
half the people in the room think he’s with the other half. So, he can have a good time and make a
nuisance of himself until somebody comes along and says, ‘Excuse me, which party do you belong to?’
At which point, when both sides agree he doesn’t belong to them, they kick him out. It’s
the same principle. The ‘I’ doesn’t belong to the mind. It doesn’t belong to the body. It just
sets itself up as a kind of interloper and says, ‘I’m going to have some fun in here.’ Because
nobody really looks at it. Nobody says, ‘Who are you? What are you doing in here? Why
have you taken up residency? Why are you causing me all of these problems?’ Ramana says, if you
do that, if you pin it down, if you look at it, examine its credentials, examine its right to be
there, and discover it’s just an outsider who’s taken up residence illegally, if you like. And
then, you kick it out. And that’s it. Job done. And there’s no more suffering after that. It’s
the same answer to every question. Everyone’s looking for the magic bullet, the quick fix,
and he’s telling you what the magic bullet is. It’s saying this ‘I’ that you take yourself
to be has no fundamental reality. It’s just set itself up as a kind of squatter in your body,
in your head, and it’s running your life for you. Just go and challenge this squatter, and tell him
he has no right to be there. And the way you do that is by not allowing it to connect with all the
ideas, thoughts, perceptions it wants to play with in order to validate its own self-existence.
If you can do that, he said, it disappears. [The yogis speak of controlling the mind.
Are they talking about the same thing?] It’s not a system of suppression. Ramana used
to critique the yogis and the yogic school. Their most famous text starts off with the phrase
‘suppression of mind.’ He said, ‘I’m not asking you to suppress thoughts or feelings or emotions
because that’s an act of a doer who is performing an action.’ He said that just increases the idea
of personness. He said, ‘What I’m asking you to do is to frame it properly.’ If there’s anger or
sadness or anything else, recognize that this is a state or a feeling that has occurred as an
experience to someone. He said, instead of wallowing in the emotions, which just makes them
worse and stronger, he said, just try to see what it is that’s experiencing them, and hold on
to the experiencer and not the experienced. [How can we improve the world
and make it a better place?] Ramana would say that the greatest thing you
can do for the world is to realize your own Self. It’s very counterintuitive. Back to the
dream analogy. He said if you’re in a dream, and you watch everybody suffering in your dream,
you can run around in your dream handing out dream food, building dream houses for the dream
homeless. But he said a far more effective solution is to wake up. He said that the mere
act of waking up makes you realize that your dream characters didn’t have any validity and they
weren’t actually suffering. That you attributed suffering to them when you had the perspective
of being a fellow character in the dream. He said that the very act of knowing
your own Self, being your own Self, somehow radiated or transmitted some kind of benefit to
everybody in the world, he said, far more so than any actions you can perform, which are always
motivated in selfishness, in the sense that you as a self choose some other self to try and
help. Every act that you do is targeted at someone or something or some problem. That
is only ever going to have a limited benefit. He said, but by knowing your own Self, you
somehow become one with the core or essence of all beings. And he said by becoming one with
that essence, you subtly benefit everybody else in the world. He said it’s quite possible to
be in this state in a cave in the Himalayas, and to be in that state for your whole life, and
be of more benefit to the people of the world, even though nobody knows you're there, than the
most industrious social reformer or politician. He said abiding as that state is the
greatest benefit you can confer to the world. I should like to thank the following people. Anthony Chene, for arranging the interview. The president of Sri Ramanasramam for permission to use photos of Sri Ramana. Markus Horlacher for photos of Arunachala. Jussi Penttinen for editing the film.
