Lucy Cornelssen - Identity

[Guest guest]

IDENTITY

 

By Lucy Cornelssen

 

Question: If the ego or ‘l’ be an illusion, who then casts

off the illusion?

Answer: The ‘I’ casts off the illusion of ‘I’ and yet remains

as ‘I’. This appears to be a paradox to you; it is not so to the

jnani.

 

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

Question: Is an intellectual understanding of the truth

necessary?

Answer: Yes. Otherwise why does not the person realise

God or the Self at once, i.e. as soon as he is told that God is

all or the Self is all? One must argue with himself and gradually

convince himself of the truth.

 

How is this? Are there not many quotations from Sri

Ramana Maharshi’s works and talks quite to the contrary,

wherein he clearly states that there is no reaching the truth by

intellect, but that intellect (or mind) has to be transcended in

order to attain to the truth? Isn’t this a flagrant contradiction?

Only apparently.

According to the highest revelations of mankind we are

the truth. Why then are we not aware of this plain fact?

Because the intellect has developed from being a useful

servant into a troublesome and tyrannic master in the house.

It will not and cannot be convinced of the higher truth, because

this is beyond its scope. However, it can be transcended and

the conviction reached that there is a higher power, and that it

will do to open the ‘Heart’ to the possibility of direct

experience.

 

Let us see. First of all, what is meant by ‘intellect’? It is a

faculty of the brain. Its roots are simply discriminating and

choosing; when mature, it is the thinking faculty. In a wider

sense we have to add two other faculties — emotion and will.

These three together are a biological mechanism of reacting

on impulses from without and within our body. It developed

with the development of the brain and nervous system and is

prompted and conditioned by the faculty of perceiving,

consciously or unconsciously, which itself is not part of that

mechanism of reacting, but is independent of it.

A newly born child reacts merely to bodily comfort and

discomfort, which means that it shows only feeling. After some

weeks or even months it starts to discriminate faces and tries to

understand things, which means it is beginning to develop its

intellect. The will is only discovered by it in its third year. In

between it has learned to speak and to discriminate among the

members of the family by name, using its own name when it

wants to point to itself. It does not talk about ‘my’ ball, or ‘my’

doll, but ‘Peter’s ball, ‘Mary’s doll. This is an important feature,

since it shows that the child has as yet no genuine feeling of ‘I’.

It takes itself as one person among other persons. And even

when after some time it starts to use the ‘I’ for itself, this is still

not a genuine ‘I’. The child has simply learnt to imitate the way

persons around itself express themselves, that everybody,

though having a name by which he or she is known and spoken

of by others, says ‘I’ when speaking of himself or herself.

During this first decade of life the child learns to

discriminate between ‘father’ and ‘mother’ and ‘mother’ and

‘I’, ‘myself’ as persons with certain qualities, everyone

occupying a certain status within the group, the family. When

the brain and nervous system of the child are nearly fully

developed, then it has a concept of itself as a clear-cut person,

boy or girl, named so-and-so, tall or short, fair or dark, clever

in school or not — in short a ‘personal I’, complete in itself.

 

However, strange to say, this young human being is not at all

happy, though not knowing why.

Parents and elders believe they know the reason, if the

boy or girl is in the period of puberty and adolescence, the

body undergoes a certain change in its metabolism.

It does, but that is quite a natural development which started

unperceived much earlier without giving trouble. The real

reason for the unbalanced mental condition of the young

person is quite different.

Brain and nervous system are more than just working

mechanisms in the service of the individual body-mind-complex;

they have a higher purpose. They are meant as a ‘wireless receiver’

for impulses from the universal Consciousness too. The mental

and emotional struggle at the time of puberty is also caused by

the first powerful impulse from cosmic Consciousness, the

mystery of identity, of the parabiological ‘I am’, which tried to

enter the individual consciousness. However the entrance is

blocked by the ‘personal I’, which is entirely an image only, a

concept, a mere construction of the intellect.

There would be no need for struggle and disturbed balance, if

young people knew what was happening, if they were prepared

to surrender to that wonder which is in store for them during this

high time of their maturity. They should have learnt to witness

what is going on within themselves. Then they would discover

that their individual consciousness has a greater Consciousness

for its source, from which now emanates a ‘greater I’ than that

by which they are more troubled than pleased, an ‘I’ without an

identity which is simply itself, omnipresent, void, silent, pure, a

glorious and mysterious peaceful joy.

Alas, the entrance is blocked, though quite unconsciously,

by sheer ignorance, which caused the growing intellect to be

busy entirely with the impulses from outside, neglecting

everything which is not sense perception.

 

In the young Venkataraman the genuine ‘I am’ broke

through the unconscious resistance by means of a dramatic

experience. What started as a sheer horror of physical death,

developed itself during the experience as the ‘death’ of the

manifold ‘personal I’ for the sake of Aham-sphurana, the ‘I’

– ’I’ or genuine identity.

In almost all other cases it succeeds only in sneaking in,

which means not being able to overwhelm and wipe out the

intellectually constructed ‘I’. Both of them get confused into

a knot of a personality which now is no longer simply false,

as it was before, but worse. It now has the spark of genuine

identity as its backbone, as it were, making it seemingly

impossible to discriminate and separate one from the other!

Never mind, there will be other opportunities later on in life

to work on the ‘wireless’ as will be shown presently.

It is to be kept in mind that according to the sages, we

always are that true identity, the Atman. It is our true nature.

The change of the situation during maturity consists merely

in the fact that the true identity is going to become conscious,

to open up the individual consciousness to the dimension of

cosmic Consciousness.

However there is the usurper intellect and the more it

develops the more it obstructs. What can we do to remove it?

Intellect will never be able to grasp the reality of an

identity beyond itself, but it can be brought to acknowledge

its own limits. We have gently to train it, not to interfere any

more; we have to keep it quiet by not listening to its arguing.

When we do not pay attention to its pros and cons it finally

gets tired and gives up. Meditation is the means of such

systematic training. But even more efficient is a mindful

awareness throughout the day. It keeps the intellect to those

areas of everyday life for which it is meant and where it is a

useful servant.

 

This is the royal means to bring it under control for the

future. Usually it is restless, the favourite vehicle of rajoguna.

But fortunately there are periods of spontaneous sattvaguna,

when even the intellect is automatically inclined to rest. These

are the moments when we may discover suddenly a free access

into the beyond, where the adhikari (the ripe one) may meet

his true identity.

 

.............. to be cont.

 

taken from:

RAMANA SMRTI

Sri Ramana Maharshi

Birth Centenary Offering 1980