Post by atman on Jul 23, 2009 18:31:06 GMT -5
While Sri Ramana said that Self-realisation could be brought about --- as it was for him --- merely by giving up the idea that there is an individual self which functions through the body and the mind, few could readily do so. When asked for the most effective practice to facilitate Self-awareness, he commonly recommended forms of self-enquiry and Association with Being, in the form of mental contact with a realized Guru, or more properly the One Guru "within",] as the fastest path to realization of one’s true Self...
"The place where even the slightest trace of the 'I' does not exist, alone is Self."
Sri Ramana Maharshi warned against considering self-enquiry as an intellectual exercise. Properly done, it involves fixing the attention firmly and intensely on the feeling of 'I', without thinking. The clue to this is in Sri Ramana's own death experience when he was 16. After raising the question 'Who am I?' he "turned his attention very keenly towards himself"
Attention must be fixed on the 'I' until the feeling of duality disappears.
from Wiki article, Sri Ramana Maharshi
Another way of saying this might be that when engaged in the above practice, the real Self may begin to "see" that there is and has been a second 'self' that contains thoughts, ideas and mental pictures of a 'self-conceived, self'. This imagined self is the core of the 'false self'. It could be accurately identified as false, since only one could possibly be real. It is this "self", which Buddha and Jesus, among others correctly identified as the root of suffering.
Jesus is reported to have said, "Die of the self into everlasting Life."
That sounds like something we can all do now...not in some imagined future that is not right where we are in the present moment of now.
"The place where even the slightest trace of the 'I' does not exist, alone is Self."
Sri Ramana Maharshi warned against considering self-enquiry as an intellectual exercise. Properly done, it involves fixing the attention firmly and intensely on the feeling of 'I', without thinking. The clue to this is in Sri Ramana's own death experience when he was 16. After raising the question 'Who am I?' he "turned his attention very keenly towards himself"
Attention must be fixed on the 'I' until the feeling of duality disappears.
from Wiki article, Sri Ramana Maharshi
Another way of saying this might be that when engaged in the above practice, the real Self may begin to "see" that there is and has been a second 'self' that contains thoughts, ideas and mental pictures of a 'self-conceived, self'. This imagined self is the core of the 'false self'. It could be accurately identified as false, since only one could possibly be real. It is this "self", which Buddha and Jesus, among others correctly identified as the root of suffering.
Jesus is reported to have said, "Die of the self into everlasting Life."
That sounds like something we can all do now...not in some imagined future that is not right where we are in the present moment of now.
