Lucy Cornelssen - Investigation (1)

[Guest guest]

 

Investigation

 

 

Are you happy?

When you reply with the counterquestion ‘What is happiness?’

that means that you have already observed how brittle,

how transient and short-lived your so-called happiness is.

But maybe what we have in mind was not happiness at all,

but only pleasure?

 

‘Pleasure’ means the fulfillment of some desire or the

removal of something unpleasant. But experience teaches that,

after one desire has been fulfilled, two other ones will emerge,

and after something unpleasant has been removed, something

else of a similar kind will present itself and obstruct our intention

to enjoy ourselves. We try and try again to change circumstances

and conditions; is it not our birthright to be happy?

It is.

 

Then why have we to struggle and to fight and still miss it?

Because of a single error of ours: We do not know ourselves

properly, and by that same error everything else is spoiled. Nor

do we know what happiness is.

 

Real happiness needs no struggle nor endeavor, no reason

nor cause; it is inherent in the real ‘I’. However you and I, we

live on a wrong ‘I’, as it were. That is the mistake which has to

be removed before we can claim our birthright on real happiness.

 

So says Ramana, the Maharshi. And he advises us to dive

deep into ourselves with the question: ‘Who am I?’

 

Don’t expect an answer to it; there is none, because every

possible answer which might come to our mind is wrong.

However, he promises us that one day, provided our

perseverance and patience keep us on the path, there will

emerge a real ‘I’, the identity of the Great Experience, and

together with it the true happiness, which is Sat -chid- ananda,

the Bliss of Conscious Be-ing.

 

 

Somebody asked Sri Ramana:

“When we start this enquiry, who is doing it?”

Sri Ramana’s answer: “The Self does no vichara. That which

makes the enquiry is the ego. The ‘I’ about which the enquiry is

made is also the ego. As the result of the enquiry the ego ceases

to exist and only the Self is found to exist.”

(Day by Day, 21.11.45.)

 

But there are people who feel unable to attack the wrong

idea of themselves immediately. They want first to be shown an

intellectual approach. There may also be some who do not even

know how to ‘go within’. To those we recommend first that

they take a closer look at their own ‘person’, at that which they

take as ‘I’.

 

You say: ‘I sit, I walk’, obviously taking the body as ‘I’,

because it is the body that sits or walks.

But don’t you also say; ‘I think, I believe, I decide’, etc.?

This ‘I’ seems rather to be of the nature of the thinking mind!

And what about your being glad or sad, elated or depressed?

Isn’t it an ‘I’ of some sort of feeling? And at another time there

emerges an ‘I’ which is intending something, planning,

designing, an ‘I’ which seems to be sheer willing?

The conclusion seems to be: ‘I’ means all this together as

my body-mind-person.

 

‘My?’ Whose? By looking at these ‘I’s quite frankly, we see

that this body-mind-person also is not ‘I’, but ‘mind’. So whose?

Where is the ‘I’ to be found in this case?

A strange whim of language?

 

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

 

HUNTING THE ‘I’

 

according to Sri Ramana Maharshi

LUCY CORNELSSEN