I rewrote this article extensively on May 28, 2024, so some of the comments may no longer apply to it.<\/i><\/p>\n
People sometimes summarize Ramana’s method as, “Keep your attention incessantly on yourself.”<\/p>\n
This is a pretty good summary except for one big problem. <\/p>\n
Normally when we pay attention to something, we target or select it. <\/p>\n
This can feel a little like aiming a telescope or choosing an object on a computer screen with a mouse pointer.<\/p>\n
It may feel like that, but what we are really doing is prompting the brain to generate mental activity. <\/p>\n
We’ve been doing this all our lives so naturally it’s what we do when we try to practice Ramana’s method.<\/p>\n
This way of paying attention is wonderfully effective for ordinary tasks — listening to a child tell us about her day at school, trying to remember a forgotten name, etc. — but it doesn’t work for Ramana’s method. Two reasons why:<\/p>\n
So how do you place attention on yourself?<\/p>\n
Please notice that what I just described is only one meaning of “attention.” The word also has a second meaning: the fact that some particular object is salient or evident, that it fills consciousness, at a given moment. We don’t usually notice the ambiguity because both things happen together. But the second thing can happen without the first, and that’s the key.<\/p>\n
Without using attention in the first sense — without aiming it, without prompting the brain to generate mental activity — allow yourself to fill consciousness; let yourself become that which you are aware of to the exclusion of everything else.<\/p>\n
This tactic doesn’t work with objects (mental activity) but it works with yourself because you are always already knowing yourself. You don’t need to be generated by the brain.<\/p>\n
People often complain, “I don’t know what Ramana means by ‘myself’.” Yes they do. They only think they don’t because every time they try to focus on themself, they fail. But they aren’t failing because they don’t know themself. They are failing because the focus mechanism cannot point to themself. The focus mechanism is like a gun turret on a warship which is designed to turn in all directions except toward the ship itself. The attention (in the aiming\/prompting sense) cannot point to its source, yourself. <\/p>\n
Four hints:<\/p>\n
1. When you say the word “I”, you are referring to yourself. Notice what you mean when you say it. This hint comes from Ramana. For a long time this hint seemed too simple to me. I couldn’t make sense of it. Then one day I realized that his method is<\/i> that simple. When Ramana says “I” and “yourself” he means those words in the simple sense that a child understands them. I think this hint comes closer to anything else he ever said to explaining experientially<\/i> how to do his method.<\/p>\n
2. You are not an object. You are self-knowing. As soon as you find a way to make your experience match Ramana’s written instructions, you will instantly be subject and object simultaneously which is a way of saying you will be neither. If you haven’t yet had this experience you haven’t yet understood experientially<\/i> what he is telling you to do. This is not some sort of fancy yogic attainment. It is what happens when the attention is on oneself.<\/p>\n
3. Yourself is already known at all times. In a way, part of the attention is already on it. Notice it without generating any mental activity.<\/p>\n
4. Don’t settle for objects (mental activity), not even subtle mental activity like space and awareness of awareness. You want the knower<\/i> of those things.<\/p>\n
That’s Ramana’s way, as I understand it — those are my words not his — of putting attention on yourself. <\/p>\n
Now I’ll describe another method which is related but doesn’t necessarily reveal yourself. For me it reveals something interesting but I’m not sure what that something is. A pure form of chidibhasa<\/i>, maybe, if such a thing exists. I’m tempted to omit this part of the article but it was the only method in the original version and some of the comments refer to it.<\/p>\n
See all at once (I use “see” figuratively) the totality of mental activity including subtle objects such as whatever you are aware of when you are aware of awareness. You know it’s mental activity; you know that none of it has what you’re looking for; there is no consciousness in it. Automatically you disregard all of it, and automatically you come out of it, and automatically consciousness is the only thing left standing; it becomes obvious. It was there all along, but you only recognize it clearly when everything else is disregarded or unseen.<\/p>\n
It all happens in an instant, in the present tense.<\/p>\n
This is a kind of neti-neti: not the one in books that people laugh at, but a real one.<\/p>\n
I think this may be what Nisargadatta meant when he talked in Seeds of Consciousness<\/i> about coming out of consciousness. The comparison is confusing because he (or his translators) used the word “consciousness” for what I call “mental activity,” and the word “Absolute” for what I call “consciousness.”<\/p>\n
It’s like the sun and stars. No matter how hard you try, you can’t see stars during daylight. <\/p>\n
But after the sun sets, and only after the sun sets,<\/i> they are effortlessly visible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I rewrote this article extensively on May 28, 2024, so some of the comments may no longer apply to it. People sometimes summarize Ramana’s method as, “Keep your attention incessantly on yourself.” This is a pretty good summary except for one big problem. Normally when we pay attention to something, we target or select it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,21],"class_list":["post-5559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-self-enquiry","tag-sri-ramana-maharshi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6YVpx-1rF","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5559"}],"version-history":[{"count":56,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5936,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5559\/revisions\/5936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}