An interesting coincidence occurred the other day as a result of my writing a comment on this blog. At the time I pointed it out in the comments but I keep remembering that it happened so I’m going to elevate the matter to a full post.
I was replying to a comment by Rico Rico. I won’t summarize it for fear of misrepresenting what he wrote but I’ll link to it below. My reply to Rico was pretty bad. I didn’t address his main points and instead wrote about a different one.
Suddenly I went into one of my old “bhava” moods. Cold blue energy flowed through my body, and a feeling or belief arose that what I was writing was inspired. This used to happen frequently during my peak mystical years from about 2015 to 2018, and a lot of my old blog posts from that period were written in that state, but it doesn’t happen very often anymore.
You may be able to identify those posts by how pretentious and pompous they were.
I’m making fun of myself but actually I take that blue cold energy as a sign that what I’m writing is probably true even if I’m not sure it’s true.
While the energy flowed and I shivered, here’s what I wrote:
The most important form of grace, in my opinion, is having the desire to make the effort. The desire for God is God, as God once told me. In my opinion, to get what Ramana had, considerable effort is required.
That desire and effort are neither me alone nor me not-alone. They may appear to belong to the ego but they do not. They are the wormhole between the ego and Reality. They cannot reinforce the ego. On the contrary, that desire and effort are the ego’s autodestruct mechanism, put there by God for our liberation.The Guru is within us. In a sense we are the Guru. That doesn’t mean the Guru is ego.
I hit send, forgot the comment thread, and turned my attention to writing a blog post about Ramana’s metaphor of the dog following its master’s scent. To find the exact quote I entered something like “Ramana dog master’s scent” into Google. I’m telling you this detail because I didn’t ask Google to look for “grace” or the question of whether our own actions can be grace.
The first result on Google’s response page showed the following sentence quoted from the link:
It is by the grace of God that you come to desire to know yourself. This desire…
The link went to a conversation with Ramana on David Godman’s blog. Here’s the relevant section of that conversation:
Question: From this I understand that one can reach the source by one’s own effort.
Bhagavan: It is by the grace of God that you come to desire to know yourself. This desire to know yourself is itself a clear sign of the Atman’s grace. So, there is grace already working as the source of your effort. Grace is not an external quality of the Self but its very nature. It abides in your Heart, pulling you inward into itself. The only task you must do is turn your attention inward and search the source of ‘I’. This is the only personal effort we have to put in. That is why [one can say that] where there is no grace, there is no desire at all for the quest for the Self.
Links
The Ramana inteview on David Godman’s site
This is what Google showed me
The same interview on Realization.org
I had removed this interview from realization.org a couple of years ago but restored it immediately after the coincidence happened.
Once again Freddie, this is so beautiful to read and experience!
I remember reading this quote too from Ramana “It [Grace] abides in your Heart, pulling you inward into itself.”
In my teenage years, I used to experience this inward pull and I used to go to my prayer room and sit quietly. Those were the most beautiful moments of my life. My mind was not so “polluted” back then with desires, goals and other “problems”. Grace had more access to my attention to pull it inward.
Now in adulthood, I regret not having the pull at the same intensity that it used to be. And then as I read your post, I recall another statement by Ramana telling a devotee to “go the way you came”. Meaning, get rid (or see through and let go) all the stuff we have added to our minds and complicated our life, and return to that same innocence we all had as children/young adults so Grace can once again draw us to itself.
Thanks again for this wonderful post Freddie!!
Hi Rama,
Wow!!! I don’t think I knew that. I don’t know why I’m about to say what I’m about to say but I’m sure you’ll be that way again and even more. Maybe you’ll have to wait till old age (I hope not) but for some reason I feel certain.
Thanks for telling me you appreciate the posts so much. I think you’re making me write more.
27th February 1979, Sadhu Om as recorded by Michael James:
If we feel disheartened by our repeated failure to cling firmly to self-attentiveness, we should remember that the doer and the one who experiences failure is ourself as ego, and that as ego we cannot be self-attentive merely by our own effort but only by the grace of guru. However, this does not mean that we should ever give up trying to be self-attentive, because Bhagavan’s grace works through us, giving us the love to be self-attentive, so whatever effort we make in this path is the working of his grace. His grace is always working to pull us within, so by trying to turn within we are yielding ourself to his grace.
Repeatedly making effort to be self-attentive is therefore essential, because it is a key part of the process of his grace gently but firmly pulling us inwards. No matter how many times we seem to fail in our efforts, we should keep on trying, because every attempt we make to be self-attentive is a step forward on this path. As Bhagavan often said, it is only by perseverance that we can progress on this path, so whether we seem to succeed or fail, we should keep on trying.
To the extent that we truly love to know and to be what we actually are, we will persevere in trying to be self-attentive at every moment, so our perseverance is the measure of our love, which is why Bhagavan said that perseverance is the only reliable sign of progress. When he said that bhakti is the mother of jñāna, what he meant by ‘bhakti’ is wholehearted and all-consuming love to know and to be what we actually are, and this love is what impels us to cling firmly to self-attentiveness.
This love is svātma-bhakti [love for our own self, meaning love for ourself as we actually are], which is what is also called sat-vāsanā [the inclination to attend to our being and thereby to be as we actually are]. The reason we often fail in our attempts to hold fast to self-attentiveness is that we allow our mind to be drawn outwards under the sway of our viṣaya-vāsanās [inclinations to attend to and seek happiness in things other than ourself]. The stronger our viṣaya-vāsanās, the more we will be swayed by them, but by patient and persistent attempts to turn back within and cling fast to self-attentiveness we will gradually strengthen our sat-vāsanā and correspondingly weaken our viṣaya-vāsanās, as Bhagavan implies in the sixth paragraph of Nāṉ Ār?:
If other thoughts rise, without trying to complete them it is necessary to investigate to whom they have occurred. However many thoughts rise, [so] what? Vigilantly, as soon as each thought appears, if one investigates to whom it has occurred, it will be clear: to me. If one investigates who am I [by vigilantly attending to oneself, the ‘me’ to whom everything else appears], the mind will return to its birthplace [namely one’s own being, the source from which it arose]; [and since one thereby refrains from attending to it] the thought that had risen will also cease. When one practises and practises in this manner, for the mind the power to stand firmly established in its birthplace increases.
The ‘power to stand firmly established in its birthplace’ is the strength of svātma-bhakti, which increases to the extent to which we persevere in trying to turn our attention back and keep it fixed firmly on our own being, ‘I am’. There are therefore two powers that are pulling our mind in two opposite directions, namely the power of sat-vāsanā and the power of viṣaya-vāsanās. The power of sat-vāsanā is pulling our mind back within to face ourself alone, whereas the power of viṣaya-vāsanās is pulling it outwards to face the world of viṣayas [objects or phenomena]. However, since vāsanās are just inclinations, we are always free to choose which vāsanā or vāsanās we allow ourself to be swayed by at any given moment, so even if our viṣaya-vāsanās are stronger than our sat-vāsanā, we can always use our icchā-kriyā-svatantra [freedom of will and action] to yield ourself to the inward pull of sat-vāsanā rather than the outward pull of any viṣaya-vāsanās.
The practice of ātma-vicāra [self-investigation] is therefore a battle being fought within our own will between our sat-vāsanā and our viṣaya-vāsanās, and our willingness to be swayed by one or the other of them, as Bhagavan says in verse 396 of Guru Vācaka Kōvai:
The work [doing, process or operation] of making oneself [namely ego], who is parāmukha [facing away, towards things other than oneself] because of the sway [dominion, power or force] of practice [training, habit or familiarity], ahamukha [facing inside, towards I] by ātma-vicāra [self-investigation], which is the effort of untiringly investigating who am I, alone is the dēvāsura-yuddha [the war between gods and demons] that one fights.
Since sat-vāsanā is a seed that has been planted, cultivated and nurtured in our heart by Bhagavan’s grace, this battle between our liking to be facing inwards (ahamukha) and our liking to be facing elsewhere (parāmukha) is actually a battle being fought by his grace, which is why he describes it as ‘aruḷ-pōrāṭṭam’ (the warfare of grace) in verse 74 of Śrī Aruṇācala Akṣaramaṇamālai:
Arunachala, in the common [natural and all-pervading] space devoid of going and coming [namely the heart, the infinite and eternally immutable space of pure awareness, which never goes (ceases to exist) or comes (begins to exist), and in which, having known it as one’s own real nature, one will know that one could never have gone out anywhere or come back] show [me] the warfare of grace [in which you do not cease fighting to save me until you achieve victory, destroying in me the vast army of demons, namely ego and all its viṣaya-vāsanās].
Though this warfare is always being fought by grace in our heart, it will end in victory only when we cooperate with grace by yielding ourself entirely to it, and since we can yield ourself to it only to the extent to which we untiringly make effort to investigate who am I by looking deep within ourself, our persevering in making this effort is essential. However, though patient and persistent effort is necessary on our part, we need to recognise clearly that it is only by his grace that we are making such effort, because to the extent that we recognise this, our love to be keenly and steadily self-attentive will increase.
If we do not recognise this, we will easily be disheartened seeing the inadequacy of our own efforts, whereas if we do recognise this, we will gain the courage to persevere no matter how many times we seem to fail in our efforts. His grace is always playing its part in ways and to an extent that our mind can never adequately comprehend, but we will be willing to yield ourself to it only to the extent that we appreciate that it is doing so.
Through countless lives his grace has been working in our heart, preparing us to follow this ultimate path of self-investigation and self-surrender, and it will not cease doing its work until we are finally willing to surrender ourself entirely by sinking back within and dissolving forever in the heart. All our effort to turn back within and surrender ourself to him is being made by us only under the sway of his grace, so our effort is part of the process of his grace, preparing us unfailingly for the final moment when it will swallow us entirely in its infinite light of pure awareness.
This is why Bhagavan often used to say that grace is the beginning, the middle and the end. It is grace alone that has brought us to this path, it is grace alone that is leading us unfailingly along it, and it is grace alone that will finally swallow us entirely.