Ramana Maharshi speaking about Self-realization:
Later in the morning, at Rishikesananda’s request, Bhagavan [Ramana Maharshi] recounted his first experience of the Self in his upstairs room at Madura. “When I lay down with limbs outstretched and mentally enacted the death scene and realised that the body would be taken and cremated and yet I would live, some force, call it atmic power or anything else, rose within me and took possession of me. With that, I was reborn and I became a new man. I became indifferent to everything afterwards, having neither likes nor dislikes.”
…Later Bhagavan said, “The spark of jnana will easily consume all creation as if it were a mountain-heap of cotton. All the crores of worlds being built upon the weak (or no) foundation of the ego, they all topple down when the atomic bomb of jnana comes down upon them.”
[Quoted by A. Devaraja Mudaliar in Day by Day with Bhagavan, 22-11-45 Morning and Afternoon]
Today’s brain teaser
The photo shows Ramana a couple of years after the atomic bomb went off for him. Look at his face. I mean really look at it. Does that look like the kind of “awakening” we read about on social media?
I have problems with my understanding of that story. Isn’t that the description of an event? But realization is not to be gained through events, its already what we are. It is more of a remembrance. Right? Ramana himself insisted on that point, but really all Advaita stresses it going back to Shankara and his master Gaudapada. Whatever the little ego goes through, no matter how dramatic, we already are what we search.
But, I add this. The idea of simply “remembering” what you are and leave it at that never quite felt right to me. I may be mistaken, but from the point of view of the jiva the feeling of a definitive transition must occur. Obviously nothing really happens from the POV of Brahman. Maybe people would be scared by descriptions like that one and stop questioning theselves. Coming from anxiety, I know I am: I can’t shake the impression that Ramana had something like a panic attack of incredible magnitude.
I recall him saying realization isn’t something new to be gained but not that it’s not an event.
Reminds me of a friend who bumped his head, had an MRI, and learned that he had had an anatomical deformity in his brain since birth that needed surgery. That MRI was a pretty big event in his life even though the deformity wasn’t new.
I’m joking around a little bit but like you say in your other comment, for Advaitins, realization is from the jiva’s point of view. Brahman isn’t affected by anything. But I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to call Ramana an Advaitin.
As far as I know there are six records of what Ramana said about this…episode? If you haven’t read them, you might like to see what light they shed on your panic attack hypothesis. You can find them here.
Here’s my most recent attempt to explain what happened that day.
Thank you, I will have a check. Can you look up my comment in the post on LITS? There is something that is really nagging me which could be relevant for many inquirers.
Done.
Our attention is entirely focused on thinking almost all the time. Even when we do that, we are still the SELF (the Real I as Ramana calls it). However, being addicted to and consumed entirely by thinking, it takes an “event”, a little shock, to our system to wake us up and notice that we are the SELF and not the false identity derived from/made up using thoughts.
We could also notice the SELF without any special event happening too, but most people (including me) just don’t do that since we are busy (fascinated by and addicted to ) with thinking. Its our default mode of operation. Culture supports that with statements like “think and grow rich”, “time is money. so think out-of-the-box to come up with an idea to make money” etc. Thinking is given an inordinate amount of importance. A person sitting quietly at peace with himself would probably be labeled as “useless”, “lazy” or “good for nothing” in today’s fast-paced living.
One other thing about thinking vs the SELF is the “movement of thought” which interests people more than putting attention on the SELF, which is interpreted as boring, being lazy, lacking action etc. That one can experience a profound peace by focusing on the SELF is overlooked.
When Buddha was asked if suffering (look upon it as a continuous event) was necessary for self-realization, he said (paraphrasing) “its absolutely not, but most people desire it only after they go through hell”.
Hi Rama. It’s good to hear from you here and on Substack. Unfortunately my girlfriend just suddenly suffered a medical crisis and I have to get on a train tomorrow and go back to New Mexico and be her 24-hour-a-day live-in caretaker. I won’t have a computer to type on, at least for a while, and I can’t type easily on other devices, so I may not be able to answer your comments for weeks.
If you’d like to talk on the phone, the train ride lasts 53 hours, plenty of time.
Cheers,
Freddie