We find the source by remaining continuously aware of ourself

When we start practicing Ramana’s method our goal is to find the source. He says this happens when the mind sinks or subsides. And he says that we make the mind sink by paying continuous, unbroken attention to ourself (or what seems to be ourself).

It’s the continuity, the unbrokenness, that makes the sinking happen.

This is one of the most important things to understand about Ramana’s method. For emphasis I’ll restate the idea a little differently.

We remain aware of ourself, of me.

If we do this unbrokenly and continuously, that me (which is really the mind) will sink into its source (which is another word for heart, Self, Brahman, etc.).

“Unbrokenness” and “continuity” are ways of saying that we have to remain aware of ourself for substantial lengths of time. The mind doesn’t sink during brief flashes of attention. Attention must be held for minutes or hours or even longer. The longer we remain aware of ourself, the more the mind subsides. This is the mechanism that results in finding the source.

This post is addressed mainly to beginners. With practice our ability to sink increases and the mind subsides more quickly — but the need to sink is less because we remain sunk more of the time.

The end state, the ultimate goal, is permanent sunkeness: Self-realization, irreversible dissolution in the Self, destruction of the mind. This article is concerned only with finding the source, not with being permanently swallowed by it.

For most of us, when we start practicing Ramana’s method, it’s impossible to remain aware of ourself for long periods of time. We have to develop the ability to do that. Ramana often refers to this process as the mind getting stronger. His use of “stronger” in this context can be confusing because we’re trying to destroy the mind not strengthen it. He means only that the mind’s ability to remain aware of itself and avoid wandering gets stronger.

Ramana and other authors have given numerous tips for strengthening the mind in this way. I wrote a post about one of these tips a few days ago.

One of the most basic facts about meditation of every kind is that the mind needs time to settle. By “settle” I mean the mind stops its usual cycle of switching between semi-conscious wandering and brief flashes of intensified awareness during which voluntary acts of attention are possible. This settling only happens through deliberate, sustained acts of attention. The brief flashes of intensified awareness, by themselves in their natural form, can’t stop the cycle because they are part of the cycle. Those flashes are useful — indispensable, even — but only if we take advantage of them by using our attention in certain ways while they happen.

Ramana’s method is a kind of meditation and like every other kind, it relies on deliberate, sustained attention. In this case attention is directed toward ourself.

Especially for beginners, the mind needs time to settle and meditation must be sustained for a while to make that happen. I think these facts were widely understood in India during Ramana’s lifetime but nowadays, especially in the West, these basic principles may get overlooked.

Where does Ramana say that sustained attention is necessary to make the mind sink into its source? We can choose from hundreds of quotations in dozens of texts, but let’s look at the most authoritative document, Nan Ar (Who Am I?), Ramana’s instruction manual for getting enlightened.

To avoid cherry-picking quotations or taking them out of context, two big problems in many online conversations about spiritual topics, I’ve copied Michael James’s list of terms that Ramana uses for his method in Nan Ar, given the list to Claude Opus 4.5, currently the smartest AI on the planet for understanding texts, and asked Claude to make a table showing Ramana use of every term. Here’s what Claude reports:

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1. nāṉ-ār eṉṉum vicāraṇai: Investigation called “who am I”

“Only by the investigation called ‘who am I’ does the mind subside” (paragraph 6)

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2. ahamukham: I-facing, inward-facing, self-attentiveness

3. antarmukham: Inward-facing, introspection

“Keeping the mind in the heart without letting it go out is alone called ‘ahamukam’ or ‘antarmukham'” (paragraph 6)

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4. summā-v-iruppadu: Just being, silently being, peacefully being, motionlessly being, being without doing anything

“Being thus still is alone called ‘jnana-drishti’. Being still is making the mind subside in ātma-svarūpa” (paragraph 6)

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5. sorūpa-dhyāna: Self-contemplation, self-attentiveness

“All of them [vasanas] will be destroyed as sorūpa-dhyāna rises” (paragraph 10)

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6. sorūpa-smaraṇai: Sustained mindfulness of Self

“If one firmly takes hold of unbroken sorūpa-smaraṇai until one attains sorūpa, that alone is sufficient” (paragraph 11)

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7. āṉma-cintanai: Self-contemplation, thought of oneself, thinking of oneself

“Without giving even a little room for any thought other than āṉma-cintanai to arise” (paragraph 13)

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8. ātma-niṣṭhā: Self-abidance, steadiness as oneself, being firmly fixed as oneself

“Remaining devoted to ātma-niṣṭhā is alone giving oneself to God” (paragraph 13)

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9. ātma-vicāram: Self-investigation, Self-attention

“Keeping the mind in the Self at all times — that alone is called ‘ātma-vicāram'” (paragraph 16)

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What does the table show us? In 2 and 3 Ramana says, “Keeping…without letting…” In 4, “motionlessly being.” In 5, “Being still is making the mind subside.” In 6, “Unbroken sorūpa-smaraṇai.” In 7, “Without giving even a little room for any thought other than āṉma-cintanai to arise.” In 8, “remaining.” In 9, “at all times.”

All the words I marked in boldface imply “sustained.” (I’ll explain below why “smaraṇai” implies sustained.)

Number 9 is Ramana’s definition of “Self-enquiry.” It includes “at all times.”

Maybe I should repeat that. Ramana defines “Self-enquiry” as something done at all times.

Maybe I should move 9 to the top of this article and delete the rest of it. 🙂

The motherlode of these quotations, in my opinion, is number 6. Ramana’s entire method is summed up in that sentence. Here it is in full:

If one firmly takes hold of unbroken sorūpa-smaraṇai until one attains sorūpa, that alone is sufficient.

“Sorūpa” means our real nature, the Self.

“Smaraṇai” is an ordinary Tamil word for remembrance but in discussions of spiritual practice it has the special meaning of sustained mindfulness. Said another way, it means sustained attention to something present rather than something recalled. Therefore “sorūpa-smaraṇai” means sustained awareness of ourself.

Number 6 is my favorite because it expresses the main idea of this post more explicitly than the others, and because it’s incredibly terse, even for Ramana. I like it so much that I asked all three state-of-the-art AIs (Claude Opus 4.5, ChatGPT 5.2, and Gemini 3.0 Pro) to translate it fully. To get good translations out of them I fed them the complete Tamil text of Nan Ar, asked them to read it carefully, reminded them that Nan Ar is an instruction manual for spiritual practice in a Hindu tradition, and then asked them to translate the sentence. Here’s what they came up with:

If one holds firmly to uninterrupted awareness of the Self until one attains the Self, that alone is sufficient.

If, until one attains one’s own real nature, one firmly abides in unbroken Self-attention, that alone is sufficient.

If one holds on to uninterrupted Self-attentiveness until the Self is attained, that alone is sufficient.

The meaning of number 6 hangs on the word “smaraṇai”. As I said a moment ago, in ordinary contexts it’s usually translated “remembrance” but here it has a technical meaning. I asked all three AIs whether “smaraṇai” needs to be translated in a special way here and they all told me the same thing. Here’s ChatGPT 5.2’s version of that answer:

In this Advaitic practice context, smaraṇa does not mean recollection of something absent (memory). It means direct, present attending to what is, i.e., being as or holding fast to the Self without lapse. Rendering it as “remembrance” suggests a mental act directed at an object, which misrepresents the instruction.

I think the second sentence of that paragraph is a better description of Self-enquiry than most of Ramana’s human followers could give, and it comes from an unconscious machine. We live in a funny world.