If I correctly remember all the Ramana books I’ve read, and of course I don’t, it was Sadhu Om who invented the idea of describing Ramana’s method in English as “self-attention”.<\/p>\n
Regardless of who invented it, Michael James, Sadhu Om’s friend, student, collaborator, and literary executor, has done a great deal to popularize the term.<\/p>\n
Michael recently completed a book of Sadhu Om’s teachings called The Paramount Importance of Self-Attention<\/i> which appeared in installments over 13 or 14 years in The Mountain Path<\/i>. <\/p>\n
I can’t imagine a better title. It perfectly captures the essence of Sadhu Om’s interpretation of Ramana’s instructions. <\/p>\n
I like this use of the English word “attention”, and I’ve gotten into the habit of describing Ramana’s method as a “transfer of attention from mental activity to knowing.”<\/p>\n
But verbal formulas, even the best, are seldom perfect. It’s hard for them to be perfect because words are names of concepts, and concepts are not the same kind of stuff as the things they describe. (Mathematical terms may be an exception.) As the old metaphor says, “the map is not the territory.”<\/p>\n
The problem with the word “attention” in this context is that in order to pay attention to consciousness itself, which Ramana calls the source, we have to learn a new way of paying attention.<\/p>\n
For our entire lives, “pay attention” meant “do a certain kind of thing with our minds.” <\/p>\n
That familiar action, that thing we did with our minds, doesn’t work for transferring attention to the source. <\/p>\n
Maybe “be aware of” is more accurate than “pay attention to” because that describes the goal of paying attention rather than the action.<\/p>\n
But that has problems too.<\/p>\n
We could try, “You want to bring about a state in which there is awareness of knowing instead of awareness of mental activity.”<\/p>\n
Ugh.<\/p>\n
There are no perfect words for our purposes. They are approximations. We should concentrate on understanding the things they describe, not on the words. Words are only tools. <\/p>\n
The chef loves her copper-bottom pan but doesn’t mistake it for the omelet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I correctly remember all the Ramana books I’ve read, and of course I don’t, it was Sadhu Om who invented the idea of describing Ramana’s method in English as “self-attention”. Regardless of who invented it, Michael James, Sadhu Om’s friend, student, collaborator, and literary executor, has done a great deal to popularize the term. […]<\/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":[21],"class_list":["post-6140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-sri-ramana-maharshi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6YVpx-1B2","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6140","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=6140"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6256,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6140\/revisions\/6256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}