An Interview with Integral Yoga Magazine

About a year ago I was approached by the editor of Integral Yoga Magazine for an interview. She was planning to do a special issue on self-enquiry and wanted me to talk about Ramana Maharshi’s approach to this topic. It wasn’t a real interview since we never actually met. We put the material together by email. She started off by taking portions of what I had written on my site about this subject, and then asked for clarifications and supplementary information. The draft went backwards and forwards until we both agreed on the following version. It appeared in the October 2007 issue of the magazine.

I also gave a slightly shorter presentation on Papaji’s approach to self-enquiry in a separate interview in the same issue. I will post that one tomorrow.

Integral Yoga Magazine: How did you first become interested in the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi and go to India?

David Godman: In the mid-1970s, I read Arthur Osborne’s The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words. Reading Sri Ramana’s words for the first time completely silenced me. My mind stopped asking questions and abandoned its search for spiritual information. It wasn’t that I had found a new set of ideas to believe in. It was more of an experience in which I was pulled into a state of silence. In that silent space, I knew directly and intuitively what Sri Ramana’s words were hinting and pointing at. I spent about a year reading the teachings and practising the technique of self-enquiry, mostly in Ireland, and then, in early 1976, I decided to go to India to visit Sri Ramana’s ashram. I spent my first eighteen months here just meditating, practicing self-enquiry and occasionally walking round Arunachala. In 1978 I began to do voluntary work for Sri Ramanasramam. I looked after their library from 1978 to 1985, edited their magazine for a short period of time and, from 1985 onward, did research for my various books.

IYM: Are there books on Ramana Maharshi you would recommend for a beginner?

DG: When I compiled Be As You Are: the Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi I specifically targeted westerners who had never heard about Sri Ramana, and who knew little or nothing about the Hindu tradition and its terminology. Anyone in that category should find this book a good place to start. For a good introduction to Sri Ramana’s life, I would recommend Arthur Osborne’s Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self Knowledge. For those who want more, I can suggest some of the primary texts in which Sri Ramana’s teachings were recorded by those who were listening to him. Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Day by Day with Bhagavan, and Maharshi’s Gospel are good places to start.

IYM: Would you tell us something about Sri Ramana’s own spiritual journey?

DG: He had a normal, ordinary childhood in which he exhibited little or no interest in spiritual matters. At the age of sixteen he had a spontaneous awakening, attaining complete and full enlightenment when a sudden and unexpected feeling that he was about to die prompted him into a spontaneous act of self-enquiry. He told no one what had happened to him, but about six weeks later he left home, without telling his family, and headed for the sacred mountain of Arunachala. He spent the rest of his life there.

In one of his poems, composed years later, he wrote, ‘From my unthinking childhood the immensity of Arunachala had shone in my awareness’. He didn’t know in his childhood that it was a place he could go to; he just had this association with the word Arunachala. He felt, ‘This is the holiest place, this is the holiest state, this is God himself’. For many years he was in awe of Arunachala and what it represented, without ever really understanding that it was a place of pilgrimage he could actually go to. After his enlightenment experience, he understood that it was the power of Arunachala that had precipitated the experience and pulled him physically towards it. In that same poem I just quoted from he also wrote, ‘When it [Arunachala] stilled my mind and drew me to itself and I came near, I saw that it was stillness absolute’. This contains a very nice pun. ‘Achala’ is Sanskrit for ‘mountain’ and it also means ‘absolute stillness’. This poem describes Sri Ramana’s physical pilgrimage to Arunachala, but in another sense he is talking about his mind going back into his heart and becoming totally silent and motionless.

IYM: Many associate the question, ‘Who am I?’ with Sri Ramana’s teachings. Was this the main teaching?

DG: He always maintained that his primary and most effective teaching was the silence that radiated from him on account of his Self-abidance. It stilled the minds of the people who were fortunate enough to be with him and, on occasion, it even gave them a taste of the direct experience that he himself was experiencing all the time. The words, the spoken teachings and the various methods he advocated were for those people who were unable to attune themselves to these silent emanations.

I would say that self-enquiry, telling people to ask themselves, ‘Who am I?’, was his most distinctive teaching insofar as it was a new and innovative path that no one else had taught before, but I would not even say that it was his main verbal teaching.

He spent a lot of time telling people, ‘You are the Self. The Self is already realised. Just be it,’ but of course no one believed him. Instead, they would say, ‘Yes, but that’s not my experience. What do I do to attain it?’ When people spoke to him like this, he would often ask them to do self-enquiry.

IYM: Can you explain the technique of self-enquiry?

DG: The key to understanding self-enquiry is Sri Ramana’s assertion that the individual ‘I’ can only exist in association with the thoughts and perceptions that it latches onto. In ‘I am angry,’ ‘I see a tree,’ ‘I am a lawyer,’ there is a subject ‘I’ who is associating with an object of thought or perception. Sri Ramana taught that, when these associations cease completely, ‘I’ itself disappears. He said that if one could put one’s attention exclusively and continuously on the subject ‘I’, without being distracted by any extraneous thoughts, this ‘I’, the sense of individuality, would subside into its source and vanish, leaving an awareness of the Self that is unmediated by any sense of being an individual person.

It’s all about redirecting attention. When you become aware that your mind is directing itself to other thoughts, objects that are not the ‘I’, he suggested asking, ‘To whom do these thoughts or things appear?’ The answer is, of course, ‘To me’. Then, having switched attention from objects of thought to the perceiver or thinker of them, Sri Ramana says, ‘Ask yourself, “Who am I?” or, “Where does this ‘I’ come from?”’ This process, done repeatedly, de-conditions the ‘I’ from its habit of always looking for and associating with external perceptions, thoughts and ideas. Eventually, when the ‘I’ no longer feels impelled to catch hold of stray thoughts and indulge in them, it simply vanishes since it cannot exist free of associations. If I may summarise: The practice of self-enquiry is unremitting attention to one’s inner feeling of ‘I’.

IYM: For those who may find this challenging or a bit abstract, are there any helpful hints you could share?

DG: Sri Ramana had a very appropriate analogy for this process. Imagine that you have a bull, and that you keep it in a stable. If you leave the door open, the bull will wander out, looking for food. It may find food, but a lot of the time it will get into trouble by grazing in cultivated fields. This is an Indian story. Here, there are no boundary fences, so cattle can wander anywhere in search of food. The owners of the fields our bull wanders into will beat it with sticks and throw stones at it to chase it away, but it will come back again and again, and suffer repeatedly, because it doesn’t understand the notion of field boundaries. It is just programmed to look for food and to eat it wherever it finds something edible.

The bull is the mind, the stable is the Self where it arises and to where it returns, and the grazing in the fields represents the mind’s painful addiction to seeking pleasure in outside objects. Sri Ramana said that most mind-control techniques forcibly restrain the bull to stop it from moving around but they don’t do anything about the bull’s fundamental desire to wander and get itself into trouble. You can tie up the mind temporarily with japa (repetition of sacred names) or pranayama (breath control), but when these restraints are loosened, the mind just wanders off again, gets involved in more mischief and suffers again. You can tie up a bull, but it won’t like it. You will just end up with an angry, cantankerous bull that will probably be looking for a chance to commit some act of violence on you.

Sri Ramana likened self-enquiry to holding a bunch of fresh grass under the bull’s nose. As the bull approaches it, you move away in the direction of the stable door and the bull follows you. You lead it back into the stable, and it voluntarily follows you because it wants the pleasure of eating the grass that you are holding in front of it. Once it is inside the stable, you allow it to eat the abundant grass that is always stored there. In this way you train it to stay home. The door of the stable is always left open, and the bull is free to leave and roam about at any time. There is no punishment or restraint. The bull will go out repeatedly, because it is the nature of such animals to wander in search of food, but every time you notice that your bull–mind has wandered out, tempt it back into its stable with the same technique. Don’t try to beat it into submission or you may be attacked, and don’t try to solve the problem forcibly by locking it up. Sooner or later even the dimmest of bulls will understand that, since there is a perpetual supply of tasty food in the stable, there is no point wandering around outside, because that always leads to suffering and punishments. Even though the stable door is always open, the bull will eventually stay inside and enjoy the food that is always there.

IYM: What can we do if the mind continues to wander?

DG: Whenever you find the mind wandering around in external objects and sense perceptions, take it back to its stable, which is the heart, the Self, the source from which it rises and to which it returns. In that place it can enjoy the peace and bliss of the Self. When it wanders around outside, looking for pleasure and happiness, it just gets into trouble – but when it stays at home in the heart, it enjoys peace and silence. Eventually, even though the stable door is always open, the mind will choose to stay at home and not wander about. Sri Ramana said that the way of restraint was the way of the yogi. Yogis try to achieve restraint by forcing the mind to be still. Self-enquiry gives the mind the option of wandering wherever it wants to, and it achieves its success by gently persuading the mind that it will always be happier staying at home.

IYM: What about Self-realisation?

DG: Though it is not part of Sri Ramana’s analogy of the bull, we can extend this story to cover other parts of his teaching. For realisation, for a true and permanent awakening, the bull has to die. While it is alive, and while the door is still open, there is always the possibility that it will stray. If it dies, though, it can never be tempted outside again. In realisation, the mind is dead. It is not a state in which the mind is simply experiencing the peace of the Self. When the mind goes voluntarily into the heart and stays there, feeling no urge whatsoever to jump out again, the Self destroys it and Self alone remains.

This is a key part of Sri Ramana’s teachings: the Self can only eliminate the mind when the mind no longer has any tendency to move outwards. While those outward-moving tendencies are still present, even in a latent form, the mind will always be too strong for the Self to dissolve completely. This is why Sri Ramana’s technique works and the forcible-restraint way doesn’t. You can keep the mind restrained for decades, but such a mind will never be consumed by the Self because the desires, the tendencies, the vasanas, are still there. They may not be manifesting, but they are still there. Ultimately, it is the grace or power of the Self that eliminates the final vestiges of the desire-free mind. The mind cannot eliminate itself, but it can offer itself up as a sacrifice to the Self. Through effort, through enquiry, one can take the mind back to the Self and keep it there in a desire-free state. However, mind can’t do anything more than that. In that final moment, it is the power of the Self within that pulls the last remains of the mind back into itself and eliminates it completely.

Bhagavan's death experience

In a recent comment on one of the other posts I promised to find the manuscript version of Bhagavan's enlightenment experience that was printed in The Mountain Path. It's from 1981, pp. 67-69. It's a very interesting account, one that sheds a lot of extra light on the events of that day and the weeks that followed. The material in italics is the editor's introduction to the article, while the material in roman is Bhagavan's story, as recorded by B. V. Narasimha Swami.

The most detailed published account of Bhagavan’s realisation is to be found in B. V. Narasimha Swami’s biography Self Realization. It was the first major biography to be written, and all subsequent accounts have relied heavily on his version, either quoting it verbatim or summarising its contents. The account in the book was not a direct transcription of Bhagavan’s words, and the author makes this clear in a footnote which has appeared in most of the editions of the book. He said that he was merely summarising, in his own words, a series of conversations which he had with Bhagavan over a period of six weeks in 1930. The following account gives two of the conversations on which his final account was based. These are the only records of the conversation that are still in existence, but fortunately they cover all the known aspects of the experience, so it is unlikely that much valuable material has been lost. The first conversation took place on 8th January 1930 and the second a few weeks later on 5th February.

There are two important points in this account that are not brought out in the published version. The first is Bhagavan’s repeated use of the word avesam to describe his initial perception of his experience. In Tamil the word means ‘possession’ in the sense of being taken over by a spirit. For the first few weeks Bhagavan felt that he had been taken over by a spirit which had taken up residence in his body. The second related point is that the feeling persisted until shortly before he left home. His discovery that the avesam was the Self, and not some external being residing in his body, may have been a contributory factor in his decision to leave home.

The account is in Bhagavan’s words, and though there are strong traces of the translator’s style and preferred terminology, it is still a more accurate version than the ones that have appeared in all the published biographies.

Bhagavan: My fear of death was some six weeks before I left Madurai for good. That was only on one day and for a short time. At the time there was a flash of excitement; it may roughly be described as ‘heat’, but it was not clear that there was a higher temperature in the body, nor was there perspiration. It appeared to be like some avesam or some spirit possessing me. That changed my mental attitude and habits. I had formerly [had] a preference for some foods and an aversion to others. This tendency dropped off and all foods were swallowed with equal indifference, good or rotten, tasty or tasteless. Studies and duties became matters of utter indifference to me, and I went through my studies turning over pages mechanically just to make others who were looking on think that I was reading. In fact, my attention was never directed towards the books, and consequently I never understood their contents. Similarly, I went through other social duties, possessed all the time by this avesam, i.e., my mind was absent from them, being fascinated and charmed by my own Self. I would put up with every burden imposed on me at home, tolerating every slight with humility and forbearance. Periodically, interest in and introspection on the Self would swallow up all other feelings and interests.

That fear was only on the first day, that is, the day of the awakening. It was a sudden fear of death which developed, not merely indifference to external things. It also started two new habits. First, the habit of introspection, that is, having attention perpetually turned on my Self, and second, the habit of emotional tears when visiting the Madurai Temple. The actual enquiry and discovery of ‘Who I am’ was over on the very first day of the change. That time, instinctively, I held my breath and began to think or dive inward with my enquiry into my own nature.

‘This body is going to die,’ I said to myself, referring to the gross physical body. I had no idea that there was any sukshma sarira [subtle body] in human beings. I did not even think of the mind. I thought of the gross physical body when I used the term body, and I came to the conclusion that when it was dead and rigid (then it seemed to me that my body had actually become rigid as I stretched myself like a corpse with rigor mortis upstairs, thinking this out) I was not dead. I was, on the other hand, conscious of being alive, in existence. So the question arose in me, ‘What was this “I”? Is it the body? Who called himself the “I”?’

So I held my mouth shut, determined not to allow it to pronounce ‘I’ or any other syllable. Still I felt within myself, the ‘I’ was there, and the thing calling or feeling itself to be ‘I’ was there. What was that? I felt that there was a force or current, a centre of energy playing on the body, continuing regardless of the rigidity or activity of the body, though existing in connection with it. It was that current, force or centre that constituted my Self, that kept me acting and moving, but this was the first time I came to know it. I had no idea of my Self before that. From that time on, I was spending my time absorbed in contemplation of that current.

Once I reached that conclusion (as I said, on the first day of the six weeks, the day of my awakening into my new life) the fear of death dropped off. It had no place in my thoughts. ‘I’, being a subtle current, it had no death to fear. So, further development or activity was issuing from the new life and not from any fear. I had no idea at that time of the identity of that current with the personal God, or Iswara as I used to call him. As for Brahman, the impersonal absolute, I had no idea then. I had not even heard the name then. I had not read the Bhagavad Gita or any other religious works except the Periyapuranam and in Bible class the four Gospels and the Psalms from the Bible. I had seen a copy of Vivekananda’s Chicago lecture, but I had not read it. I could not even pronounce his name correctly. I pronounced it ‘Vyvekananda’, giving the ‘i’ the ‘y’ sound. I had no notions of religious philosophy except the current notions of God, that He is an infinitely powerful person, present everywhere, though worshipped in special places in the images representing Him. This I knew in addition to a few other similar ideas which I picked up from the Bible and the Periyapuranam. Later, when I was in the Arunachala Temple, I learned of the identity of myself with Brahman, which I had heard in the Ribhu Gita as underlying all. I was only feeling that everything was being done by the current and not by me, a feeling I had had ever since I wrote my parting note and left home. I had ceased to regard the current as my narrow ‘I’. This current, or avesam, now felt as if it was my Self, not a superimposition.

While, on the one hand, the awakening gave me a continuous idea or feeling that my Self was a current or force in which I was perpetually absorbed whatever I did, on the other hand the possession led me frequently to the Meenakshi Sundaresa Temple [in Madurai]. Formerly I would visit it occasionally with friends, but at that time [it] produced no noticeable emotional effect, much less a change in my habits. But after the awakening I would go there almost every evening, and in that obsession I would go and stand there for a long time alone before Siva, Nataraja, Meenakshi and the sixty-three saints. I would sob and shed tears, and would tremble with emotion. I would not generally pray for anything in particular, although I often wished and prayed that…

The rest of this particular manuscript is missing, but a few weeks later, on 5th February 1930, Narasimha Swami questioned him again on this topic, and Bhagavan gave the following answer:

It was not fear of death that took me to the Madurai Temple during those six weeks in 1896. The fear seized me for a short while when I was upstairs in my uncle’s house, and it gave rise to that avesam or current. That obsession made me introspective and made me look perpetually into my own nature, and took me also to temples, made me sob and weep without pain or joy or other explanation, and also it made me wish that I should become like the sixty-three saints and that I should obtain the blessings or grace of Iswara – general blessings, specifying and expecting nothing in particular. I had no thought or fear of death then, and I did not pray for release from death. I had no idea before those six weeks or during those six weeks that life on earth was full of pain, and I had no longing or prayer to be released from samsara, or human life or lives. All that idea and talk of samsara and bandha [bondage] I learnt only after coming to this place and reading books. I never entertained either the idea that life was full of woe or that life was undesirable.

That avesam continues right up to now. After reading the language of the sacred books, I see it may be termed suddha manas [pure mind], akhandakara vritti [unbroken experience], prajna [true knowledge] etc.; that is, the state of mind of Iswara or the jnani.

Question: How is it that there was a perception of difference and prayer that ‘I should become like the sixty-three saints and get Iswara’s grace?

Bhagavan: The akhandakara [unbroken] current was sporting with these and still remained despite that desire.

[Back to me in 2008... What I like in this account is the clear process of self-enquiry that is mentioned. This seemed a lot more vague in the final published version. I was also pleased to note that the phrase ' ...I feel the full force of my personality...' is absent here. I always found it odd that Bhagavan would say that he felt the full force of his personality after his realisation, so I suspect that this phrase was inserted by Narasimha Swami. Twenty-five years ago I talked to Prof. Swaminathan about this and asked him what Tamil phrase might correspond to this 'full force of his personality', but he couldn't think of anything that it might have been.

The term avesam does appear in the Self-Realisation account, but it is translated there as 'spirit, current or force'. The idea of possession is absent.]