The Nature of the Self - [14] & last

[Guest guest]

Q: All books say that the guidance of a Guru is necessary.

 

Sri Ramana Maharshi:

The Guru will say only what I am saying now. He will not give you anything

you have not already got. It is impossible for anyone to get what he has not

got already. Even if he gets any such thing, it will go as it came. What comes

will also go. What always is will alone remain. The Guru cannot give you anything

new, which you don’t have already. Removal of the notion that we have not realised

the Self is all that is required. We are always the Self, only we don’t realise it.

 

We go round and round in search of Atma (Self) saying, ‘Where is Atma? Where is it?’

till at last the dawn of jnana drishti (vision of knowledge) is reached, and we say,

‘This is Atma, this is me.’ We should acquire that vision. When once that vision is

reached, there will be no attachments even if one mixes with the world and moves

about in it. When once you put on shoes your feet do not feel the pain of walking on

any number of stones or thorns on the way. You walk about without fear or care,

even if there are mountains on the way. In the same way, everything will be natural

to those who have attained jnana drishti. What is there apart from one’s own Self?

 

Q: The natural state can be known only after all this worldly vision subsides.

But how is it to subside?

 

A: If the mind subsides, the whole world subsides. Mind is the cause of all this.

If that subsides, the natural state presents itself. The self proclaims itself at all times

as ‘I, I’. It is self-luminous. It is here. All this is that. We are in that only. Being in it,

why search for it? The ancients say: ‘Making the vision absorbed in jnana one sees

the world as Brahman.’

 

___ BE AS YOU ARE, David Godman