Arthur Osborne - Sri Ramana Maharshi [8]

[Guest guest]

 

 

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A visitor once asked: “Isn’t it funny that I should be

searching for the ‘I’? Doesn’t the enquiry ‘Who am I?’ turn out

in the end to be an empty formula? Or am I to put the question

to myself endlessly, repeating it like an incantation?”

 

And he was told: “Self-enquiry is certainly not an empty

formula; it is more than the repetition of an incantation. If it

were mere mental questioning it would not be of much value.

Its very purpose is to focus the entire mind at its source. It is

not therefore a case of one ‘I’ searching for another. Still less is

it an empty formula, for it involves intense activity of the entire

mind to keep it steadily poised in pure Self-awareness. Self enquiry

is the one infallible means, the only direct one, to realize

the unconditioned, absolute Being that you really are.”

 

Just as aspirants were warned not to make a mental

investigation out of Self-enquiry, so also they are warned not

to make an incantation out of it and not to confuse it with

the meditation ‘I am He’. “Self-enquiry is a different method

from the meditation ‘I am Shiva’ or ‘I am He’. It rather lays

stress on Self-knowledge, because you are first concerned with

yourself before you proceed to know the world and its Lord.

The ‘I am He’ or ‘I am Brahman’ meditation is more or less

mental, but the quest of the Self is a direct method and is

superior to it.”

 

Usually a man’s mind is turned outwards, creating or

following a course of action or of thought. Instead of that it is

to be turned inwards upon itself, asking ‘Who am I?’, not

seeking an answer to the question but simply experiencing the

sense of awareness, of I-am-ness, letting that alone remain in

the consciousness........................

 

taken from Arthur Osborne's My Life & Quest