Ramana.The heart is the Self #3

[Guest guest]

D: How then shall I understand Sri Bhagavan's statement that the

experience of the heart center is at a particular place in the chest?

 

M: Once you accept that from the true and absolute standpoint, the

Heart as pure Consciousness is beyond space and time, it will be

easy for you to understand the rest in its correct perspective.

 

D: It is only on that basis that I have put the question about the

positions of the Heart. I am asking about Sri Bhagavan's experience.

 

M: Pure Consciousness wholly unrelated to the physical body and

transcending the mind is a matter of direct experience. Sages know

their bodiless, eternal Existence just as the layman knows his

bodily existence. But the experience of Consciousness can be with

bodily awareness as well as without it. In the bodiless experience

of pure Consciousness the Sage is beyond time and space, and no

question about the position of the Heart can then at all arise.

 

Since, however, the physical body cannot subsist (with life) apart

from Consciousness, bodily awareness has to be sustained by pure

Consciousness. The former, by its nature , is limited to and can

never be coextensive with the latter, which is infinite and eternal.

Body consciousness is merely a monad like, miniature reflection of

the pure Consciousness with which the Sage has realize his identity.

For him, therefore, body consciousness is only a reflected ray, as

it were , of the self-effulgent, infinite Consciousness which is

himself. It is in the sense alone that the Sage is aware of his

bodily existence.

 

Since, during the bodiless experience of the Heart as pure

Consciousness, the Sage in not at all aware of the body, that

absolute experience is localized by him within the limits of the

physical body by a sort of feeling-recollection made while he is

with bodily awareness.

 

 

The Teaching of Ramana Maharshi.. Shambala