The essence of Ramana Maharshi’s method is to transfer your attention from mental activity to yourself.
Stop paying attention to thoughts, emotions, images, sensations, memories, wishes, awareness of awareness, etc.
Instead pay attention to yourself. By “yourself” I mean you who experience all those mental activities. You who know them.
To make this work you must let go of mental activity. Willingness is required, a willingness to ignore your attraction to mental activity and a willingness to be aware only of yourself.
You can tell when you’ve succeeded in doing this because the distinction between subject and object vanishes. There is only an integral self-knowing. This self-knowing is very different from our usual experience of mental activity.
In the beginning it may feel disorienting to stop paying attention to mental activity. You may feel like you’re letting go of your anchor, of your reference point, but soon you’ll recognize that you yourself are a firmer anchor.
Look for — be — the magnetic center at the heart of you.
Attention can be paid only to one or the other. Either you’re aware of mental activity or you’re aware of yourself. If you’re trying to do both simultaneously you’re not practicing Ramana’s method. You’re doing something else.
It’s the total transfer of attention that makes Ramana’s method work. Total attention to yourself. Awareness only of yourself.
Hi Freddie,
Amazingly clear as always! You have captured the essence of Ramana’s teaching in so few words but with such precision!
I need to read the last 3 or 4 of your articles that I missed. This one just popped up and I read it immediately. Please keep them coming.
I’ve noted in my practice that as soon as I focus attention on “myself”, my mind wants to hijack my attention to itself and this clearly is my vasana, the habit my mind doesn’t want to give up! At the same time, I do notice that the “taste” for “myself” is slowly becoming stronger. So hopefully my mind will yield one day and surrender (not try to hijack my attention when focused on “myself”)! Thank you
Thank you Rama. It’s good to hear from you. Your comment delights me because it confirms the truth of what I wrote. But even more your comment delights me because it shows you understand Ramana and have successfully applied his instructions to your actual experience in consciousness.
I’m starting to think that very few people manage to do this. Lately I’ve been talking to seekers and trying to help them notice “I” and recognize that they aren’t mental activity, and I find that most of them have great trouble doing this. Either they can’t recognize “I” or they think they’ve recognized it but they’re actually looking at some sort of mental state. I’m so glad that you’ve succeeded. I remember our emails and conversations from years ago and I’m so happy for you.
It sounds like your arrival at the destination is guaranteed. 🙂
Ramana said that self-inquiry can also be practiced during everyday activities. Do you think it would be possible in the way you have described?
Yes, certainly. Try it and see. This is possible because those activities are normally done with very little attention. We are usually lost in thought (daydreaming) while we do them. The attention moves from daydreaming to the Self without affecting the activity very much. However this is a matter of degree, of intensity. “Extreme” episodes of Self-enquiry require full concentration, total resources. This was true for Ramana too. We have only one description of him doing Self-enquiry. It was the day he lay on his bedroom floor and realized the Self. He immobilized his body and held his breath — pretended his body was a corpse. Obviously he wasn’t washing the dishes while his body was a corpse! 🙂
Hi Freddie,
1) ‘To make this work you must let go of mental activity’:
Fixing attention on ourself is enough because the ‘letting go of mental activity’ will be a natural by-product. Moreover, the thought ‘I have to let go of mental activity’ is a hindrance for self-attention (self-abidance), that is why Ramana always wrote ‘see to whom thoughts appear’ and never ‘try to let go of mental activity’.
2) ‘You can tell when you’ve succeeded in doing this because the distinction between subject and object vanishes’.
I suppose you wanted to write ‘You cannot’ instead of ‘You can’, because when this distinction is no more, how can an ‘I’ (ego) rise to think or feel ‘I have succeeded in doing this’? The rising of such an ego would be the proof of loss of self-attention, and then the appearance of subject and object.
Bye!
[You need not aspire for or get any new state. Get rid of your present thoughts, that is all.]
I feel like such quotes from Talks With Sri Ramana do indeed suggest that Ramana occasionally suggested people let go of mental activity.
Another one, and one of those times Ramana seemingly quotes the Bible:
[Moksha is to know that you were not born. “Be still and know
that I am God.” To be still is not to think. Know, and not think, is the word.]
I will fully concede that stillness on it’s own may not be enough for most people, and directing such people to notice the first-person sense of “I” is a great way to get them to see the point, but I could definitely see how the right individual could arrive at Ramana’s realization from a practice of pure stillness.
I would like to take the opportunity to share the story of my experiences with the self-inquiry practice and the challenges I have faced, or am still facing. Perhaps you have some advice or guidance for me.
I deeply value your perspective and hope you can help me deepen my practice or clarify some misunderstandings.
About a decade ago, I was a follower of Zen Buddhism. After 2–3 years, however, my enthusiasm waned. I stopped meditating but remained interested in mysticism and felt drawn to spiritual questions.
When I first came across Ramana and his teachings about two years ago, I was immediately fascinated. I was particularly intrigued by the self-inquiry technique as he described it, and I began practicing it right away.
My initial attempts at self-inquiry involved trying to focus on the subject of my experience. Since the subject, as the one who experiences, is not itself an experience, I nevertheless imagined or envisioned something as the “background” of experience. I felt as though I was stepping back from experiences into this background. However, to reach this (imagined) background, I first had to “have on my radar” my entire experience — everything that could be objectified, such as perceptions and mental contents — and only then “bounce back” into the background.
This practice was quite exhausting, as I kept switching back and forth between the object and the imagined subject. Often, it felt like an endless regression or a hall of mirrors, where I would use each content of consciousness as a springboard to the subject, only to use the next imagined subject as another springboard, and so on.
Since this was very demanding, and I have a vivid imagination, I eventually concluded that this could not be the right approach. I realized I was simply imagining something that did not correspond to the described state of effortlessness.
I then came across Michael Langford and his technique, “Awareness Watching Awareness.” One might think it’s the same as the technique I described earlier, but this practice gave me a completely different feeling. I tried to “just observe the awareness that is right now looking through your eyes,” as he described. This was somewhat more pleasant, but over time I kept doubting whether I was truly observing awareness. In the end, I was quite confused.
Then I discovered Michael James. The practice he describes seemed quite different to me. Here, I was instructed to observe my “I-feeling.” Maharshi called this Aham Vritti. Observing the “I” as a feeling essentially meant observing my ego. In practical terms, it was an emotionally charged self-image, sometimes even physically felt. James described it similarly: “Observe what you perceive as ‘I,’ even if it is the ego, and in the end, the snake will become a rope.” Maharshi also used a similar metaphor, comparing the “I” to an uninvited wedding guest mistaken for an important relative.
Over time, however, I became dissatisfied with what I was focusing on as “I” (which was quite object-like) — especially since Michael Langford mentioned that he spent 27 years observing his “I.” Only when he transitioned to “Awareness Watching Awareness” did things start to progress for him. What amazed me was that Michael James recognized Langford’s “Awareness Watching Awareness” as a valid practice.
At another point (Muzika), Langford’s technique was equated with Shikantaza, which further confused me.
In other sources, I then found confirmation that one should first observe just an “I-feeling.” For me, this was the least strenuous practice, and it is what I still practice. I would say that the object-like quality of my “I” has somewhat diminished over time.
After carefully reading your blog entries, I strongly feel that I am on the right path.
I would be very grateful if you could offer me some advice on this matter, as I deeply appreciate your extraordinarily refined approach.
Hi Vrazz. My history is very similar to yours. I know what this is like. Even many of the details are similar: I became exhausted from infinite regressions, read and listened to Muzika, read Langford (I copyedited his book for him almost 20 years ago), and I’m very familiar with Michael James’s ideas and translations. However no Zen for me.
Would you like to talk about this on the phone? That would help me because coincidentally I’m trying to write an article that answers your question, and you can give me feedback about whether I manage to say something helpful.
I’ll say a few things here so nobody wonders what secrets I’m saving for a phone call.
The thing that helped me most was noticing what I mean when I say the word “I”. It was as simple as that. A child could do it.
If this works for you, there’s nothing to think about or understand. What do you mean when you say “I”? For years I thought I didn’t know what I mean when I say “I” but one day I realized that I do know and always did know. The problem all along wasn’t that I didn’t know. It was that I didn’t know how to put attention on it and I mistakenly interpreted that inability as not knowing. I had to learn a new way of paying attention for that knowledge to become evident and take over. Up till then, every effort to “see” that knowledge had been a look through a telescope that pointed in the wrong direction.
(Ben: The proposed phone call is what I meant about learning from conversations. I didn’t mean printing transcripts. I meant using conversations to learn which answers are helpful to people who ask questions. In other words, instead of me trying to guess which answers are helpful, the questioners tell me. They are the best judges not me.)
That makes sense, and frankly these comment sections serve as transcripts well enough already!
Quote : “This was somewhat more pleasant, but over time I kept doubting whether I was truly observing awareness. In the end, I was quite confused.”
If you think there is one “precise” and “correct” technique, this confusion is going to happen. It’s not that complicated, just see what happens when a thought breaks (dies down), and the awareness naturally will shine. To avoid such confusions there are traditions like zazen where they ask you to simply sit and nothing more. You were (are) doing fine.
Here are some words from Shankara for you.
Laghu vakya vritti, verse 11:
Consciousness shines forth clearly by itself in the space between two thoughts, when the preceding one has died down and another is yet to arise.
Vakya vritti, verse 11:
Why do you not recognise your own Self, which shines within you as the form (idol) of consciousness (chaitanya vigraha).
Here is zen master Daito Kokushi:
“Every time a thought arises, throw it away. Just devote yourself to sweeping away the thoughts. Sweeping away thoughts means performing zazen. When thought is put down, the original face appears. The thoughts are like clouds; when the clouds have cleared, the moon appears. That moon of eternal truth is the original face.”
It’s all the same. Good luck.
Hi Freddie,
I’m very happy to hear that parts of my experiences are familiar to you. I had a feeling they might be because many of your thoughts and the subtle introspections you share on your blog have deeply resonated with me. I’m more of a loner, without active participation in communities, and I have barely anyone who could truly understand what I’m doing – let alone the challenges I face. But through reading your blog posts, I’ve often felt understood, at least to some extent.
I stumbled across your blog late last year while browsing Google search results and came across a few sentences that really struck a chord with me. Finding it incredibly interesting, I ended up reading your entire blog chronologically in one sitting. I was especially impressed by the entries you wrote this year because I strongly felt that you really hit the nail on the head when describing what Ramana meant by self-inquiry.
Shortly before that, while engaging with Michael James’s teachings, I had come across another Maharshi follower who described self-inquiry in a similar or identical way to you and who intuitively seemed very valuable to me. His name is Broken Yogi. If I understood his story correctly, he too went through a painstaking process of trying to figure out exactly what Ramana meant by self-inquiry until he eventually gained certainty about what it truly is.
That certainty, by the way, led him to criticize Muzika, as he felt that Muzika had overly mystified the “I” that should be the focus of the practice – as if it were a hidden treasure one must first uncover (though I must say, I also find Muzika very helpful). Broken Yogi emphasized, as you do, that self-inquiry is about the simple “I” – the “I” we mean when we say “I.” Just as you described. And that has also been a strong intuition of mine recently.
You could say that this technique has somehow started to mature within me. At first, as I mentioned earlier, it was the egoic “I-feeling,” but over time it has gradually become less object-like and more subject-like. However, it remains quite inconsistent: Sometimes I feel good about it, and other times I’m confused. I don’t have full certainty, but I definitely found your comment extremely helpful as well as affirming that I’m on the right track.
In fact, I’ve also come to the same conclusion you mentioned in your last comment – it’s about what we call “I,” and the key is simply finding a way to direct attention to it.
As for the possibility of a phone call, unfortunately, that’s not an option since my English is far from sufficient for a conversation. I live in Germany, and as you probably know, there are people here who pretty much “slept through” foreign language classes in school . But feel free to send me your article or a draft of it via email, or we could work on it together in the comments section, whichever you prefer.
Hi Vrazz,
That’s very interesting because in this website’s early years he was
the only personone of the few people who linked to it. I used to see “brokenyogi.blogspot.com” when I viewed this site’s incoming links with web utilities. During those years I looked at his site several times but for some reason never got hooked by it and never read very much of it. Maybe I’ll go back and read it now.Hmm. I’ve never had the impression that Muzika mystifies anything. I think he tries to describe his experiences as straightforwardly as he can. He talks not only about the “standard” Ramana stuff but also “life-force” experiences, and he changes his mind a lot, but I think this is the result of his efforts to describe what he knows accurately. (By the way I think Ramana had those sorts of life-force experiences too.) Maybe Muzika was talking about direct experiences of the source not the “I” we take as the starting point of the practice.
How are you writing your comments here? Your written English is perfect.
I used to be conversational (badly) in German but I’ve forgotten it all. The last time I used it was 1977 or 78. I studied German because I planned to write my PhD thesis on Hegel and/or Marx but I lost interest in academia and never wrote it. I spent the summer of 1977 or 1978, I forget which, in Bavaria and Karlsruhe.
Okay, thanks.
Hi Freddie,
I only visited the “Broken Yogis” blog because I found some valuable sentences in this forum:
https://www.thedaobums.com/topic/36439-can-we-perform-sri-ramana-maharshis-most-important-question-who-am-i-with-our-eyes-open-during-the-day-if-not-what-else-is-there-to-do/?tab=comments#comment-582767
However, I quickly gave up on the blog as it was still caught up in the intellectual struggle with the idea of Self-Inquiry, whereas in the forum (which I linked above), the author already seemed to have a clear understanding of it.
His critique of Muzika referred to one of Muzika’s texts, which discussed, among other things, what exactly the “I” is that one should focus attention on. In this text, it seemed as though one would have to search for this “I” for a long time. When I read Muzika’s text, I had the impression that Broken Yogi misunderstood him.
I use ChatGPT to translate texts. As far as I can tell, the translations are perfect. When I have my German texts translated, I double-check to ensure the meaning hasn’t been altered—but that never happens anyway.
To return to my idea of Self-Inquiry: Nishant wrote that the expectation of having a precise technique is what causes the confusion. I don’t need absolute certainty about what the “correct” Self-Inquiry is. I only want two conditions to be met, as mentioned by Ramana and his close devotees: it should not be strenuous, and it should drive thoughts away. So far, I haven’t had the impression that this is the case.
You wrote above that self-observation and thinking exclude each other. I want to see that in my practice.
Hi Vrazz,
I read the page you linked on Broken Yogi’s site and I think the issue is what I guessed earlier, namely a confusion between the “I” we start with and the “source” of that “I” that Ramana most definitely told us to search for and find. You probably remember Ramana’s metaphor of the dog finding its master by tracking his scent.
You and I have been talking about the “I” with which we start the practice, not the source to which it leads. One of the most curious aspects of Ramana’s teaching, for me, is that it’s apparent from the compiled conversations that he encountered many people who (like you and me) had a great deal of trouble recognizing the starting point. And yet as far as I know — somebody please correct me if I’m wrong, I would love to be wrong about this — he never gave any advice for finding it. He didn’t seem to think that finding the starting-point was something he should be concerned with. But finding the source — that was something else. That’s the whole purpose of vichara.
I’ve had the same experience. I’ve talked with GPT-4 for hundreds of hours and never saw it write an English statement that was less than perfect. Everything it wrote, with zero exceptions, was graceful, idiomatic, grammatical English.
Is it equally good in German?
A few months ago I mostly switched over to Claude Sonnet 3.5 because it also writes perfect English but in addition it’s much smarter than GPT-4 when talking about the sorts of intellectual topics that interest me, and it’s much better at translating and explaining literary Tamil and Sanskrit texts. I never had an interesting conversation with GPT-4 about ideas or books but I’ve had fascinating conversations with Claude. I’ve been using it to understand Ramana’s Tamil works. I ask it for word-by-word glosses, explanations of connotations of important words, examples of usage in other contexts, etc. I find this a much better way to read Ramana than with normal translations.
My two cents on the space between two thoughts and similar instructions: When I tried this years ago I found myself looking at a quiet mind instead of a noisy one. My attention was still pointed in the wrong direction and the space was just as much an experience as the noise. Maybe this instruction works for other people, I don’t know, but it didn’t work for me. For me, “I” is what knows both the thoughts and the spaces.
You are not an experience. Not any sort of experience. You are knowing. You are the knowing that can have experiences. Due to the way the mind works, we recognize this knowing only when we stop knowing experiences (objects). This idea is a familiar one in many traditions. We stop knowing objects by changing attention not by turning the volume down on the mental mp3 player.
All you need to do is put all your attention on yourself.
A thought… I think sometimes people cause trouble for themselves with these practices when they divorce them from the original context. That is, as I understand it, the instructions for atma vichara were given along with the rider of sorts that the practice will be made significantly easier when one is not going solely by one’s own effort, but is at the same time relying on the guru or God’s grace. I get the impression that sometimes people ignore that element and instead try to practice as if they were some lone desperado bent upon “hacking” their minds… or trying to break into the Enlightenment or Realization Building. Our minds are already complicated enough and busy striving and straining too much as it is. Hence, simplicity, PATIENCE, and reliance on grace is called for. Trying to do it alone just reinforces the sense of ego.
Hi Rico,
Ramana was famous for the power of his transmission, in particular transmission by gaze. He would look into people’s eyes and (I suppose) give them a direct experience of the Self. Only a few of the memoirs discuss this at length but the ones that do leave no doubt in my mind that this occurred regularly. I think this is why Ramana became famous. I think this is why many people, as soon as they met him, became convinced that he was a great jnani.
Arthur Osborne discusses Ramana’s transmission by gaze at some length in one of his books. Annamalai Swami, in Final Talks, explains that it was much easier to find the source with Ramana’s help than without it. If I remember correctly he uses a metaphor of drilling a well. There are probably thousands of words about this in back issues of The Mountain Path and David Godman’s Power of the Presence books but I can’t look to see because of my poor eyesight.
I agree with you that it’s easy for people to overlook these facts but is that really the problem? I think the main problem is that we no longer have the opportunity to look into Ramana’s eyes and receive his glance of grace.
I got lucky and received a sort of echo-through-time transmission from Ramana in 1985 in Meenakshi Temple. Nevertheless it took me many years of effort after that to recognize the starting point of his method. If I had thought of grace as something that comes from outside me, and if I had relied on that alone, I would never have gotten anywhere. 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.
Immediately after I wrote the preceding comment, I started to work on something else and searched Google for something unrelated, and the first search result was the following paragraph from an interview with Ramana.
If transmission by gaze isn’t sci-fi enough, now we have channeling by Google! 🙂
From Arunachala Ramana, Feb. 1982, reprinted on David Godman’s website.
I was a member of two Indian organizations that used “transmission of Grace” to help their students to meditate. It’s a bit different than the original concept, where a Guru sends his Grace to his disciples. In both the organizations, the Guru had taught or initiated ‘advanced’ disciples to do the work for him. It was often brutally effective for me. It would bring me into very, very quiet meditation states effortlessly, for long period of times. Which I, unfortunately, can’t do anymore by myself on my own. Downside of these organizations, is that you become dependent on them, and one especially was on the verge of being a sect.
Hi Freddie,
Thank you for your advice regarding AI. It’s truly fascinating that you’re translating Ramana’s texts directly using AI. That wasn’t on my radar at all.
I asked ChatGPT about its proficiency in different languages. It claims to handle all languages well, but says it’s most “trained” in English and can therefore perform better contextually compared to, say, German. The more it is fed with text-variations, the better it can handle nuances. However, I haven’t found a single flaw in its German capabilities. The translations are significantly better and more elegant than Google’s and, in every respect, quite satisfactory.
All these AI models, including the subscribed versions, have limited capacities. For example, when translating longer texts, you need to proceed in a measured way; otherwise, parts of the text might get “hallucinated.” ChatGPT-4 can retain about 30 pages of text in its memory. This means that digital books cannot be satisfactorily summarized in one go. You have to summarize sections individually and then condense those summaries into a final overview to get a reasonably useful summary of the book.
That’s why I’m considering installing Meta’s Llama (an open-source solution) on my computer for unlimited use. However, I’d need to invest in more powerful hardware to achieve greater context capacity.
I have a similar relationship with the so-called “gap between thoughts” method. I never really understood the concept of perceiving gaps between thoughts and eventually dismissed it as something I probably don’t have a talent for. I couldn’t even properly observe my thoughts. Thoughts in the narrower sense (daydreaming, problem-solving, etc.) seem—if I may put it this way—fundamentally unobservable because they consume the entirety of the “self’s” energy. This leaves no capacity for introspection. For instance, one cannot be fully immersed in a chess game and simultaneously watch TV—unless one’s attention keeps jumping back and forth. As such, I can only retrospectively view my thought processes, almost like memories. A “real-time” observation essentially involves constant switching.
Thoughts in the broader sense, such as spontaneous imagery, associations, emotionally charged or hypnagogic visions, I can, however, experience as flowing before me.
Hi Vrazz,
AI: Have you tried the new models released last week by Google and OpenAI? People on social media are raving about the the new Gemini Flash 2.0 models. They’re experimental so they’re free on Google AI studio. I used them yesterday for 8 or 10 hours. In a few ways they’re noticeably better than any model I’ve tried so far but for the main way I use them, to make literature searches by ideas instead of by words and to talk to them about ideas, Claude is still much smarter. Claude Sonnet 3.5 is the only one so far that sometimes makes me feel like I’m talking — actually conversing — with a really smart human. The others never make me feel that way. I don’t mean that he seems human but that he sometimes understands and notices things like a very smart person.
Gemini Flash 2.0 experimental has a 2 million token context window. You can upload a very long book in one piece. I haven’t asked it to translate a book yet or summarize a book yet but I gave it an entire book in PDF form yesterday and asked it to extract the text. I took the text out in chunks because I didn’t want to copy and paste a whole book from the web UI but I only had to load the book once. In fact I closed the browser for several hours and came back later and reopened the saved conversation and Google still had the book loaded (tokenized, I suspect) on their servers. Google’s doing this for free at the moment since the 2.0 models are experimental. I imagine the new model might be able to summarize a book from a single upload.
Yes!!!!!!! Oh my God, I think you’re the first person I’ve ever known who has told me that you’ve noticed this. (In case someone else here also noticed it and we’ve talked about it in the past, my apologies, I’m getting old and senile.) I think it’s especially true with daydream/planning/scenario-simulation thoughts, i.e., thoughts in what neuroanatomists call the default mode network where most people spend most of their time while awake.
I think the “gaps between two thoughts” are the moments when we view our completed thoughts as memories. Once we notice these moments, we can learn to stay in that state deliberately. This was the topic of the first article I ever wrote on this website, which is still on the home page. Thoughts don’t get generated in that “gap” state, they only get understood, so if we stay in that state, thinking (in a certain sense) stops.
After playing around with this for years I realized it doesn’t lead to what the dog in Ramana’s metaphor is following. I think the real gateway or target or magnet or whatever we should call it is “me” aka “I am” aka “me knowing” aka just plain “knowing”, exactly as Ramana said. “me knowing” is not a state of mind. It’s what can know states of mind. It’s not enough to be in the “gap” state. While in that state we have to make a deliberate effort to focus on “me knowing.”
I think it’s possible but unlikely that people would notice “me knowing” aka “I am” by following the instruction to notice the gap between two thoughts. But anything is possible. People react to words in different ways. It’s impossible to notice “me knowing” while in the daydream state but it’s possible in the gap state so the instruction can’t hurt.
I created a new Substack blog a few months ago and wrote 6 or 8 articles there on topics like knowing thoughts only retrospectively but no one seemed terribly interested so I stopped. The link is on the menu on top of the home page of this site if you’re interested.
Yeah. I think that explains a lot of traditional sadhanas like focusing on the breath and japa. Some mental activities make us less conscious than others. Like I said, the DMN stuff (daydreaming etc.) seems to be the worst. Unfortunately it’s called “default mode” for a good reason, namely that it’s where the human brain naturally spends most of its time while awake.
What happened to Ramana: https://ramanahou.org/bio#self-realisation.