Maha Yoga, The Sage of Arunachala - #1

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The Sage of Arunachala

 

THERE IS A profound Truth in us, the truth of ourselves,

the practical knowledge of which will make us free; but

he that would be free must seek, and reverently question one that

is himself free. So says the ancient lore. Thus it emphasises the

need of resort to a living teacher of the Truth of the real Self, if

one such can be found. The knowledge that comes by the study

of the sacred lore is of little value; one can learn more, and more

quickly, from this silence of a living teacher than he can gather

by a lifetime of the study of the books.

 

We are told by the great teacher Sri Ramakrishna

Paramahamsa that there are two kinds of Sages, namely those

who are born with the mission to teach and elevate other men,

and those who have no such mission; the former are from

birth untainted by worldly desires; they win the state of

Deliverance about the time they cease to be boys; and they do

so with little or no effort; the latter are born in subjection to

worldly desires and weaknesses and have to go through a long

period of sustained and well-directed effort in order to reach

the same goal. The former kind of sage is naturally very rare.

Whenever such a one appears, multitudes of disciples and

devotees are drawn to him, and they profit greatly in his

 

presence.

 

Bhagavan Sri Ramana is such a one. He is the last

of a long line of great Sages, who have renewed and confirmed

the teaching of the ancient Revelation.

He was born in the south of India in the village of

Tiruchuzhi about thirty miles from Madura, and received the

name of Venkataraman. His father died when he was twelve

years old and after that he was brought up by his mother and

uncles. The boy was sent for education, first to Dindigul and

then to Madura, which is a great centre of pilgrimage. His

guardians had no suspicion of what he was destined to become.

They tried their best to fashion him after their own idea of

what he should become; they sought to equip him for the life

of the world by giving him a ‘good education.’

 

The boy was not at all wanting in intelligence. But he was

incorrigibly indifferent to his studies; he would put forth no

personal effort to learn and remember; in so far as he did learn

something, he did so in spite of himself. The reason was that he

had no ‘will to get on in the world,’which every boy has, who is

above the average. We now know that he was one of those rare

beings who bring with them an endowment of spirituality. That

perfection which was to make him the revered Master of millions

of men existed in him already in a latent state; and it is a law of

nature that a spiritual endowment makes one indifferent to worldly

gains.

 

It is because the average man is poorly endowed in a

spiritual sense, that he falls an easy prey to worldly desires; urged

by these desires he takes great pains to achieve what he calls

success in life. We know that Sri Ramakrishna also had an

incorrigible aversion to “this bread-winning education.”

Thus the boy Ramana gained hardly any knowledge while

at school. But destiny put in his hands a copy of an ancient

sacred book in Tamil, which gives detailed narratives of the

sixty-three Saints of the cult of Siva. He read it through with

fervour. We have reason to believe that he had already been a

 

Saint of the same high degree of excellence, and had passed

this stage of spiritual evolution; he had in him the potentiality

of something far higher, namely the status of a Sage; when

we come to the chapter on Devotion we shall be able to see

the difference between a Saint and a Sage. For the present we

need only say that the Sage differs from the Saint as the ripe

fruit does from the flower. Saintliness is no more than the

promise of sagehood, which alone is perfection; when Jesus

told his disciples: ‘Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven

is perfect,’ he had in mind the Sage, not the Saint.

.....................

 

taken from MAHA YOGA, by WHO