Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (Compass)

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What is interesting is that people try again and again, but he will make no exceptions, because the I AM is Absolute, unconditional for everyone, without exception. Six weeks later he ran away to the holy hill of Arunachala where he would remain for the rest of his life. Relative knowledge requires a subject and an object, whereas the awareness of the Self is absolute and requires no object.

I knew that You always hear Me, but I say this for the benefit of the people standing here, so they may believe that You sent Me. It is an awareness that is single and undivided, the thoughts which are many and divided having disappeared. David Godman’s Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi chronicles most of the important teachings of Ramana Maharshi. It is not an exercise in concentration, nor does it aim at suppressing thoughts; it merely invokes awareness of the source from which the mind springs. Sri Bhagavan was intensely active and yet so concealed was his activity that casual visitors and those who failed to perceive believed that he gave no upadesa at all or that he was indifferent to the needs of seekers.Just at that moment he wakes up and finds he has not moved an inch but was sleeping where he lay down. I found that after about a third of the book I was seeing the same idea repeated and decided to move on to another book. His concern throughout his long life of imparting his experience to others was to convince his listeners that self-realisation – or enlightenment – is not an alien or mysterious state, but the natural condition of man. So long as the sense of duality persists in you, you seek a Guru, thinking that he is different from you.

He currently lives in Tamil Nadu and is working at translations of Tevaram poetry and the poetry of the sage Guhai Namasivaya. In the beginning this requires effort, but eventually something deeper than the ego takes over and the mind dissolves in the heart center.When the mind perishes in the supreme consciousness of one’s own Self, know that all the various powers beginning with the power of liking (and including the power of doing and the power of knowing) will entirely disappear, being found to be an unreal imagination appearing in one’s own form of consciousness. Misinterpretation of these books can lead to all sorts of new-age fluffy ideas which only eclipse the wisdom that is truly grounded. You may be dreaming of something quite impossible, for instance, of having a happy chat with a dead person. The editor points out that the book is written in such a way that advanced readers will "get it" early on, and that later chapters are trying to communicate the same idea using different methods. Sri Ramana Maharshi was a sage's sage, as well as everyone's sage, and his words have inspired a whole generation of western awakened.

Be As You Are is the definitive guide to his knowledge, edited by the former librarian from Sri Maharshi's ashram, which can be found flourishing at the foot of the holy mountain of Arunchala. The Father in the Son and the Son in the Father; both Father and Son taking up their abode in the believer, and the believer, therefore, in the Father and the Son. This is not a book for a beginner to Vedanta philosophy, it delves deep into the intricate concepts of atman, introspection and personal god(Ishvara). Recommended as a intermediate level Advaita book, or Ramana book, rather than for someone starting off on the path of self-inquiry or nonduality. It is axiomatic that one who is a Guru in this supreme sense of having realized his identity with the Absolute does not say so, inasmuch as there is no ego left to affirm the identity.It offers a lot of insight on a wide variety of concepts and goes through all core Hindu principles from the view of the non-dual self. He was profoundly inspired by a book on Ramana Maharshi’s teachings and was the librarian and archivist at the Tiruvannamalai ashram from 1978 to 1985.

It is the same in the waking state, for you are unable to doubt the reality of the world which you see while you are awake. Question: But you have often said that one must reject other thoughts when one begins the quest, but the thoughts are endless.

The jnani being established in the fourth state – turiya, the supreme reality – he detachedly witnesses the three other states, waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep, as pictures superimposed on it.