Art and meditation - The ‘last station’ and the train to oblivion: part 4 

Who am I? The method of self enquiry .. 

Like we have seen in episode 1, Sri Ramana Maharshi had a ‘death experience’ and he came to clarity while this crisis of life and death had seized him. It was not an intellectual process, it was existential, experiential and he was not engaged in any form of ritual or meditation, it was direct and immediate for him. 

The method he followed was to enquire as to whether the body was real, whether the mind was real and the insight he had was what he understood was that, what we call as ‘I’ is in fact none of these things that constantly change. In this way he realized that that which is real, that which is the very substratum, changeless and eternal, that ‘I’ is what remains when all the non essential identifications are eliminated and that ‘Self’ is the changeless eternal. This method is what he then taught as the enquiry into the Self .. the method of finding out ‘who am I’.

So as we study his method, the thing to realize first is that there is no reference to ‘god’, a particular faith, or a technique of meditation. It is about you. We get to understand that liberation and enlightenment cannot be stations that we can arrive at. You cannot buy a ticket to it. There is no last station, there is no where to reach, no achievement to make. Sri Ramana Maharshi has defined liberation as realizing one’s true nature. 

So right here, let’s drop all concepts connected with spirituality, enlightenment, liberation and any achievement that you might get if you belonged to any order of monks or a particular faith. This is about what is the very basis of all of humanity, all of life, truth. Lasting peace is to be found in our essential nature if we are willing to forsake all that is non-essential, so that we are in the process of finding out what is essential, what is the very substratum of my existence, all existence .. 

And if we are really serious about this question, then we are not concerned with just the picking up of a technique from a retreat or a seminar. It is a 24x7 concern that one is engaged in. One is therefore an enquirer, an investigator, one who is concerned with finding out for oneself the truth. 

The next thing that comes out of this is that we are now looking inwards. We are keenly attentive to every single thought since in the end it is all happening in the mind. So you are the subject of the enquiry. If you can stick to it, success does not depend on god or guru; yes there is the grace of the master, if you are lucky to be in contact with one who has worked through this and has realised it for himself because he can point out where you are going wrong, but the effort is entirely yours and it is entirely internal. 

It is said about realised souls that they are the ones who have truly realised the truth of their own essential nature. There are no signs to make out who has that clarity. They could be begging for alms, one could be a butcher, another could be a businessman .. and often in the hills we have seen that they are sometimes the ones who could be most nondescript, serving you maybe or maybe ones who are seemingly ‘lost’.

The non essential and the essential 

What is non essential? The process of enquiry begins with finding out ‘am I this body’ .. because if I am the one aware of this body. Who is that I? Similarly, if we look at breath, we could say that I am aware of my breath, so the one who is aware of the breath is not the breath, so I am not the breath and as we pursue with this line of enquiry relentlessly the doors begin to open it is like an investigation into a crime or a fraud. As you eliminate the possibilities, automatically you begin to see things you could never see before and then you investigate a whole new bunch of factors.

So in this process of enquiry, we gradually become more and more aware of the different layers of our psyche and each layer is subjected to the same investigation .. and each would yield to the same realisation, that “I am not even these unconscious impressions” because who is the one investigating? He is not the material that he is investigating, he is the investigator, the ’I’, then “who am I”?

This is a process of viveka or discernment, we are continuously differentiating the essential from the non essential in the process of finding out really ‘who am I’.

And this does not happen once a day. Closing our eyes, that will help a little, but the goal here is not to enjoy the label of ‘I meditate daily for an hour’, because if you have been on a long road journey for thirteen hours and your child is thirsty and you want to find drinking water for your child in a barren village at 1 am in the night, you will not just say, “I searched the entire village and all the shops are closed”. You will just knock at any door, you will bribe, beg, fight, you will do what it takes ..

So the method of self inquiry is not a technique. It is about doing it till you reach the clarity that your life can never be the same. Sure, you continue with your life, your career, family, holidays; but the enquiry, the investigation is going on all the time. Sri Ramana Maharshi used to say “let your body be on the earth but keep your head above the clouds”.

As the enquiry continues, we are left with just the mind. We have eliminated our identification with everything, the body, which means  its ups and downs.  Sure we take care of the body, do what it takes to stay fit and healthy  but we have realised that it is not the essential ‘I’ and similarly, we have eliminated identification with achievements, with our memories of the past, good or bad, with the unconscious and all this is not the achievement of a stage. It is an ongoing process, as it occurs we cut it with the ‘knife of enquiry into whether it is really the ‘I’. 

We are then left with the flow of thoughts. All kinds of mundane and serious thoughts and what we call mind is just what exists because the thought process is on. Apart from the thought process there is no ‘mind’ and so, confronting every single thought is like what the weaver of the carpet has to do. He has to weave every single warp and make every single knot the same way without exception, there can be no glossing over.

Similarly, in our dreams too we have content. They are also essentially thoughts. We cannot cry without a thought. We need a thought to make us feel wronged, only then we can cry. When we keep revisiting the past, memories too are thoughts and so is imagination. It is a thought process. If we say two plus two is four that is correct. If we understand the most complex mathematical equations that too is a thought process and that is why in the Yoga Sutra it is said…

“Yogah chitta vritti nirodhah .. tada drushtuh swaroope awasthaanam .. vritti saarupyam itaratra .. vrittyaha panchatayyah klishtaaklishttah .. pramana viparyaya vikalpa nidra smitayah” .. yoga is the stopping of the modifications of the human mind. Then the seer is established in his essential nature. The modifications are five fold and are painful or not painful. right knowledge or wrong knowledge, imagination, sleep and memory. 

All these are the ‘vrittis’ or modifications. They are not the essential me. So yoga is the process by which we eliminate these non essentials and when we do that successfully, what is left is the essential. What Sri Ramana Maharshi called ‘the Self’. As we can see, these Yoga Sutra are not techniques, they are a statement of vision, they define the problem and point to the approach of eliminating the non essentials. It is basically a ‘not this, not this’ approach. It is called ‘neti’.

So what we are doing in the method of self enquiry is that  we confront each of these vrittis. With the question of who is having the thought. Again it leads to the answer. It is ‘I’. “I am having this thought. I have this E equals MC square playing in my head all the time. I have this delusion of grandeur or this insecure feeling. I am the one who is crying and so on. So who is this ‘I’? Who am I’?

This process is also called ‘viyoga’ or separation, where the ‘seer’, the ‘experiencer’ separates from what he sees, what he experiences and as every single vritti or thought is confronted in this way. Each time we lead ourselves back to the one who experiences, the seer, ‘I’. 

If this is done continuously, without break, without identifying with anything that arises, the seat of our sense of ‘who I am’ shifts from the head to the heart. Sri Ramana Maharshi used to say that when we say ‘me’, when we refer to ourselves, we point with our index finger to our heart and not our head, or any other part of the body, the heart is the seat of the Self or reality.

Reality or god is therefore not out there. It is the place from which the ‘I’ arises and that is the heart. 

This method is the method of ‘turning inward’ called ‘antarmukha’ and that is why the serious practice of Yoga pratyahaar, dharana, dhyaan and samadhi are called ‘antarang’ as they pertain to the internal and to the inward facing practitioner.

And the key to this method, called Jnana Yoga, is to hold on at all costs to the ‘I’ thought - “to whom does this thought arise”, “to me”, “so “who am I” and this process is termed as the destruction of the mind because as you can see, it is exactly that, it destroys our identification with the mind.

So mind, as we can see, is the power that is there in us because of which the first ‘I’ feeling arises when we are in deep dreamless sleep. We are in the state of complete lack of identification. It is as good as a realized state of yoga. There is no difference except that we are not conscious in sleep and when we dream or when we wake up that original pure state is gone.

So what happens when we dream or when we wake up. The power called mind arises and this power of the mind is called Maya. It is so powerful that as soon as it occurs all the vrittis are activated. 

If you can recall waking up from a deep sleep where you felt a certain bliss, a bliss that was not caused by anything but something that is there naturally; in that state, there is no ‘I” feeling. There is just that supreme joy without even the knowledge that “I am experiencing it”. There is no knowledge that I even exist. That state is what is called the ‘anandamaya kosha’ in yoga parlance, “the peace that passeth all understanding”. 

Sri Ramana Maharshi called it ‘sat chit ananda’, ‘true existence bliss’. This is the state that we are really after all the time when we say we want to be happy. What is our primary reference? It is the spontaneous experience of this bliss, our memory of it that makes us seek it all the time in everything we do. Due to the play of maya, due to the power of the mind, we have associated it with an external experience. We have forgotten that this bliss is in the very nature of the experiencer. It is in the entera, in the antara and the joy that we experience through any means externally through events or internally though the mind is only a reflection of our own essential nature. 

So when we wake up from such a deep sleep, after an interval, the first thing that occurs is the feeling of ‘I am’ and then comes the identity ‘I am so and so’ and the whole story of the mind. Maya begins. We now have an external world, whereas, in the state of bliss there was only ‘I’. This pure ‘I’ is what is called as the ‘seer’ in yoga parlance and in the language of the ancients the nature of the seer is bliss. 

And soon as the identification process starts, we remember our name, our address  and the play of Maya begins. We cease to be aware that Maya, powerful as it is, is separate from the seer. We fall prey to its veiling nature and all the subsequent thought processes arise because of the power of the mind. We begin to believe that this mind is me. In yoga, this is called ‘samyog’ the state of oneness or non separation or identification of who I am with what I experience. 

And Jnana Yoga .. the method that Sri Ramana Maharishi taught, is the process of enquiry into ‘who am I’. 

If carried out relentlessly, without letting a single identification pass, separating every single flicker of experience from the one who experiences it, the identification with experience will cease. The entire set up of identification with the mind will be destroyed.

We hope that this note has been a contemplative experience for you .. 

Until next time .. 

Lots of love .. 

Bharat Thakur