A clearer audio copy of this video can be listened to on Sri Ramana Teachings podcast (ramanahou.podbean.com) or downloaded from ramanahou.podbean.com/e/without-investigating-oneself-how-to-achieve-self-annihilation and a more compressed audio copy in Opus format (which can be listened on the VLC media player and some other apps) can be downloaded from mediafire.com/file/nb5w9s5osy2cbid
There are so many gems and clarifying explanations in this, as usual. Many thanks. 1:09:15: Michael: ‘If we understand Bhagavan correctly, nothing else is necessary.’ Namo Ramanaya 🙏🙏🙏
My main problem with practising is that I am doing it for 2, maybe 3 weeks and am very calm and peaceful, but after a few weeks of intense practise my vasanas go so strong and I go to local pub, drinking with friend and people from neighbourhood. That inclination is so strong that it feels like I am not in control of myself, like dr. Jekyll and mr. Hide story almost. After I drink for two or three days I again go back to practise for two or three weeks, and this goes on for about a year and a half or two maybe, always in the same intervals. I was praying for this not to happen, but somehow it seems that depth that I go into practise is proportional to strength of vasanas prompting me to go outside and hang out drink and staff. I am starting to think that the deeper I go into practise the more strong will vasanas become. I always thought that the deeper we go the less vasanas will be in my will.
I am a beginner but I will try to answer this. First of all, the purpose of atma vichara is not to try to achieve peace of mind. Peace of mind is just a side effect of atma vichara. The purpose of yoga is peace of mind and the purpose of atma vichara is to know who we are. By controlling the breath the mind can be calmed but this peace of mind cannot kill even one superficial desire. When you try to keep your attention on the consciousness of "I" you automatically calm the mind but when you try to achieve peace of mind this peace is simply something you like and desires are something you dislike. Our likes and dislikes are simply vishaya vasanas. To overcome vishaya vasanas we have to stop paying attention to them and try to turn the mind on ourselves thereby cultivating sat vasana or love for the state of pure being. The only solution is to try to keep the mind on ourselves. First of all we should take all this more seriously. Usually people talk about desires as something that "happens" to them but desires are simply the manifestation of our will. Our desires are not part of our destiny. We are not victims of our desires, but their source, so we should just seriously consider what we want.
It is also very helpful to understand that everything we experience as ego is a dream. Literally, not metaphorically. That is, the friends who encourage us to party are a manifestation of our own inclinations to party. They do not appear in our lives from outside. We create this world and fall victim to our own creation which is nothing more than the play of our thoughts. Understanding this helps in overcoming desires, anger, jealousy, etc. because if all this happens in one mind, other people have no intentions towards us and do not think anything about us. If you refuse to go to a party, no one will think "what a loser". No one will think anything about you. The only problem is: what do we really want?
There is a saying "don't feed the troll". Anyone who has participated in an internet discussion knows how hard it is to ignore aggressive and useless comments. It is similar with atma-vichara. All we have to do is do nothing and not react to anything. When we try to fight desires, we feed them with our attention and after a while we find ourselves overwhelmed by them. That is why neti-neti was never intended as a spiritual practice. We can overcome desires only if we try to keep our mind on what we are and ignore what we are not.
Sir, the story is told in our house with a slight variation. A saint came to the house of a poor peasant and asked for some food. Before the farmer could make some kind of porridge the sanyasi went back into the samadhi. The farmer everyday dutifully prepared some food for the sanyasi and ate the same food as prasada in the evening as the saint had slipped into meditation. After a few hundred years, this sanyasi in his samadhi state was found. The local people informed the king of the country. The king poured milk on the saint and made him regain consciousness. When the saint opened his eyes, he immediately realised that the king is none other than the farmer! He also understood that because he offered food to him and consumed the food as prasada, he went to swargalokha and now has turned into a king.. This story is told in our family to illustrate the merits obtained by annadhana. Just thought that I would share this variation of the story with you.. thanks.
The only "problem" with this radical advaita of Sri Ramana is that it is super rare for anyone to want to follow this path or even be able to understand it. How can such a narrow path be a "direct path for all"? The answer to this question is what makes this path so narrow. I mean the teaching that there is only one soul, one ego, one dreamer. This makes the advaita of Ramana ridiculously difficult for the masses to accept but at the same time it solves the problem of this narrowness because to save all, only one soul has to be saved and that soul is you. Something similar happened when I was studying different versions of Christianity a long time ago as a young boy. I wanted to know "true Christianity" because the Catholic Church did not seem to follow what Jesus taught. So I studied Protestantism and began to reject different versions of Protestantism until I began to sympathize with such small branches of Christianity that at some point I realized that if I continued in that direction I would be the only soul who would be saved. The same thing happened with my study of Advaita but at the end I met Bhagavan who explained to me that all this is a dream dreamed by one mind. That is why in my search I always end up alone. I was neither egocentric nor lost, I just discovered something that is discovered when the truth is sincerely sought. That is why Jesus said: "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." I think it is impossible to take any spiritual path seriously if we think we are following "one of many paths". It is like saying "yes, I fell in love with this woman but she is just one of many women and if I had not fallen in love with her I would have fallen in love with some other woman". Someone who says that doesn't sound like someone who is truly in love with his woman. Christian saints would probably not have a positive opinion of Islam. Great Sufis like Ibn Arabi, Rumi and others were convinced that Islam is the purest religion. It is not "fanaticism" as long as we do not harm anyone. If we consider our path to be the best and follow it sincerely then it is simply love for the truth. Ramakrishna, while practicing Islam, forgot the Goddess and even developed an aversion to images and sculptures of deities. This is because whenever Ramakrishna practiced something, he took it seriously. This was very different from promoting the idea of religious tolerance That is why some Puranas say that Vishnu is the supreme God and all others are just his manifestations and other Puranas say the same about Shiva. This helps in awakening love for a particular form of God. When we worship all forms of God as equal to each other we do not love any of them. For those who follow Bhagavan - Jesus, Buddha and Ramakrishna are just manifestations of Ramana. That is why Bhagavan did not create any "universal prayers" because that only makes our mind branch out in all directions and each of those branches is weak. Bhagavan wrote hymns to Arunachala, the still and silent aspect of Shiva, that aspect which is not particularly popular even among the Shaivas. He wrote about this aspect as something supreme. Sri Ramana's mission was only one: to reveal to the world the path of atma-vichara, using iron logic, and to show, through his own example, how someone who has attained self-knowledge by following this path lives. This path is so rare that in the scriptures of various religions it is mentioned either in a few words, or indirectly, or metaphorically. Despite this, Sri Ramana is one of the most famous spiritual sages in the world. This is proof that in order to save everyone it is not necessary to create a "universal religion". The thing is that many paths have different goals. Most religious people want to go to Heaven after death. This is true even in Buddhism. For these people, moksha means going to Heaven after death. On the path of jnana, moksha means experiencing our own consciousness in isolation from all phenomena. To experience this, we must turn our full attention to ourselves and ignore everything else, including a personal God. In this sense, atma-vichara is the only way to be saved. If one follows this path, one should adopt the attitude "this method is the only right one, all others lead somewhere else." Without adopting this attitude, the mind will always wander outward.
As far as I remember Krishna used the word "atma" which means "oneself" but people often translate it as "Self" or "the Self" and still others thinking that Self = God translate it as "on me" because Krishna is God. People always find a way to twist something.
It was similar with Jesus who allegedly said "no one comes to the Father except through me" but the same Jesus said "before Abraham was, I am" which means Jesus is "I am" which means following Jesus is directing our attention to "I am".
Ignorance is believing your appearance is a reality that separately has existence as, i am, the body ego identity. There is existence and that is nothing. Nothing alone is the reality. The I thought, is only a concept in consciousness. If we listen and talk to people here on social media, its in imagined earths false reality. But without you there is no reality, you alone are the blissful reality being existence . Where does everyone else appear from? If it’s a dream, when did the dream appear? If you are the dreamer, how does it start? If you are watching the dream, who is the one dreaming of you are part of the dream did watching begin? There are no answers there is no questioner. There is no ego there is nobody here. When ego is imagined there is still nobody. There is only you, nothing or nobody exists separately. That’s the I thought imagining that you are an individual soul. But your being is eternally perfectly everywhere. Unlimited unimagined. Before the beginning, there is nothing, alone blissful existence being. In the beginning, the I thought rises from the deep. The witness of these thing is I am thought. I am able to witness the others that appear in my reality, with me. Seeing is believing, Unseeing is grace. cx
Are we the creators of this dream or is God the creator? The ego, or the "I am the body" consciousness, is the direct "First Cause". The moment we become aware of the body we become simultaneously aware of the world and this world exists as long as we are aware of the body. When we are aware of the body we always consider ourselves as the doer of the action that the body is doing. We have no control over the fruits of our actions because we identify only with the doer of the action and with the body which is only a fragment of the world experienced in our mind. The fruits of our actions appear according to destiny or according to the will of God. Whatever happens to us in life is beyond our control. However, we experience any phenomena only when our attention wanders outward to experience phenomena and this outward-going mind is always guided by its likes and dislikes. We could not experience anything in this world if we did not have a desire to experience something or a desire to avoid something. For example, I was mugged and my wallet was stolen. This does not mean that this event was created by my hidden desire to be robbed. However, if I had not reacted to it in any way, if I had neither liked it nor hated it, I could not say that anything had happened at all, because an event becomes a specific event only when we color it with our likes and dislikes. In this sense, whatever happens to us is simply a direct projection of our likes and dislikes. We cannot decide what we will experience and what we will not, but there is no power that can force us to be aware of any of these experiences. It only depends on whether we want to be aware of the world or aware of ourselves in isolation from any phenomena. Basically this world is two things: our identification with the body and our vasanas, i.e. likes, dislikes, hopes, fears, attachments etc. These two things always occur simultaneously. When we are aware of the body we are aware of our vasanas. When we act under the sway of our vasanas, we only act as a body. The ego identifies with only one body and this one ego is the only dreamer. Here we come to a critical point which, when touched, causes even the saints to go into a fit of rage. This is because we are discovering the scale of this deception and are getting very close to unmasking the deceiver who is behind it all. People react to this "does this mean that my family and friends are mindless zombies?". It is really very simple. If I identify with the body and think that my body is conscious, then I have to accept that other bodies are also conscious. However, on the path of self-investigation I question the belief that my body is conscious, so I automatically question the belief that other bodies are conscious. If it turns out that my body is unconscious and I exist as pure consciousness without a body, then automatically all other beings will be reduced to the same pure consciousness that I am. In this way it becomes possible for me to "love my neighbor as myself". This is how a true guru sees us.
there're billions of personal, individual view points in this world and ONE ego. how ego identifies simultaneously and at the same time ,,you're that,,?
Just as it happens in a dream. In a dream, one ego identifies with one body and through this identification projects in its imagination other bodies and imagines that in these bodies there are other minds and other points of view. There is only one point of view. The ego does not identify with the body and the true self at the same time. The ego identifies only with the body. This same ego, when it directs its attention to itself instead of the world, turns out to be pure consciousness. Either we know ourselves as we really are and see only ourselves, or we identify with the body and see the world. We cannot experience both simultaneously because we see the world only when we are in ignorance.
In deep sleep you are aware only of yourself and nothing else. In dreams you are aware of being a body and aware of the world. The dream you are experiencing now you call the waking state. "Dreams" you call those dreams which you called the waking state when you experienced them. The mind always convinces itself in some way that the state you are experiencing now is different from dreams. In practicing atma-vichara we turn our attention inward, seeking the place from which the ego arose. Where did the ego arose? From deep sleep. So we try to keep the mind in this state, not allowing it to go out to experience phenomena. We reach the goal when the last desire to experience anything other than ourselves disappears. This is called the "fourth state" although it is the same state we experience in deep sleep, but we never arise again to experience the world.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
A clearer audio copy of this video can be listened to on Sri Ramana Teachings podcast (ramanahou.podbean.com) or downloaded from ramanahou.podbean.com/e/without-investigating-oneself-how-to-achieve-self-annihilation and a more compressed audio copy in Opus format (which can be listened on the VLC media player and some other apps) can be downloaded from mediafire.com/file/nb5w9s5osy2cbid
There are so many gems and clarifying explanations in this, as usual. Many thanks.
1:09:15: Michael: ‘If we understand Bhagavan correctly, nothing else is necessary.’
Namo Ramanaya
🙏🙏🙏
THANK You
You are giving so much ❤
Thank You! 🙏
So grateful ❤
Propounded very deep understanding in this session by Sir Michael James
Om namoh bhaghavate Sri arunachala ramanaya 🙏🌹❤️
It's rare to hear about love. Bhagawan Love Faith. These are instructions for life. Sinking-in is my proof of faith. ❤❤❤
🙏
❤❤❤
❤
My main problem with practising is that I am doing it for 2, maybe 3 weeks and am very calm and peaceful, but after a few weeks of intense practise my vasanas go so strong and I go to local pub, drinking with friend and people from neighbourhood. That inclination is so strong that it feels like I am not in control of myself, like dr. Jekyll and mr. Hide story almost. After I drink for two or three days I again go back to practise for two or three weeks, and this goes on for about a year and a half or two maybe, always in the same intervals. I was praying for this not to happen, but somehow it seems that depth that I go into practise is proportional to strength of vasanas prompting me to go outside and hang out drink and staff. I am starting to think that the deeper I go into practise the more strong will vasanas become. I always thought that the deeper we go the less vasanas will be in my will.
I am a beginner but I will try to answer this. First of all, the purpose of atma vichara is not to try to achieve peace of mind. Peace of mind is just a side effect of atma vichara. The purpose of yoga is peace of mind and the purpose of atma vichara is to know who we are. By controlling the breath the mind can be calmed but this peace of mind cannot kill even one superficial desire. When you try to keep your attention on the consciousness of "I" you automatically calm the mind but when you try to achieve peace of mind this peace is simply something you like and desires are something you dislike. Our likes and dislikes are simply vishaya vasanas. To overcome vishaya vasanas we have to stop paying attention to them and try to turn the mind on ourselves thereby cultivating sat vasana or love for the state of pure being. The only solution is to try to keep the mind on ourselves. First of all we should take all this more seriously. Usually people talk about desires as something that "happens" to them but desires are simply the manifestation of our will. Our desires are not part of our destiny. We are not victims of our desires, but their source, so we should just seriously consider what we want.
It is also very helpful to understand that everything we experience as ego is a dream. Literally, not metaphorically. That is, the friends who encourage us to party are a manifestation of our own inclinations to party. They do not appear in our lives from outside. We create this world and fall victim to our own creation which is nothing more than the play of our thoughts. Understanding this helps in overcoming desires, anger, jealousy, etc. because if all this happens in one mind, other people have no intentions towards us and do not think anything about us. If you refuse to go to a party, no one will think "what a loser". No one will think anything about you. The only problem is: what do we really want?
@@LieutenantBoreyko very good answer, thnx.
@@markocvrljak3681 No problem. I struggle with my own desires and used your comment to help myself.
There is a saying "don't feed the troll". Anyone who has participated in an internet discussion knows how hard it is to ignore aggressive and useless comments. It is similar with atma-vichara. All we have to do is do nothing and not react to anything. When we try to fight desires, we feed them with our attention and after a while we find ourselves overwhelmed by them. That is why neti-neti was never intended as a spiritual practice. We can overcome desires only if we try to keep our mind on what we are and ignore what we are not.
Sir, the story is told in our house with a slight variation. A saint came to the house of a poor peasant and asked for some food. Before the farmer could make some kind of porridge the sanyasi went back into the samadhi. The farmer everyday dutifully prepared some food for the sanyasi and ate the same food as prasada in the evening as the saint had slipped into meditation. After a few hundred years, this sanyasi in his samadhi state was found. The local people informed the king of the country. The king poured milk on the saint and made him regain consciousness. When the saint opened his eyes, he immediately realised that the king is none other than the farmer! He also understood that because he offered food to him and consumed the food as prasada, he went to swargalokha and now has turned into a king.. This story is told in our family to illustrate the merits obtained by annadhana. Just thought that I would share this variation of the story with you.. thanks.
God Bless You Michelangelo
Ha I’d say closer in appearance to leonardo davinchi : )
@tekniikanihmelapsi
Closer in appearance to leonardo davinchi : )
@@beejumittahb8527 might be an auto-complete mistake
The only "problem" with this radical advaita of Sri Ramana is that it is super rare for anyone to want to follow this path or even be able to understand it. How can such a narrow path be a "direct path for all"?
The answer to this question is what makes this path so narrow. I mean the teaching that there is only one soul, one ego, one dreamer. This makes the advaita of Ramana ridiculously difficult for the masses to accept but at the same time it solves the problem of this narrowness because to save all, only one soul has to be saved and that soul is you.
Something similar happened when I was studying different versions of Christianity a long time ago as a young boy. I wanted to know "true Christianity" because the Catholic Church did not seem to follow what Jesus taught. So I studied Protestantism and began to reject different versions of Protestantism until I began to sympathize with such small branches of Christianity that at some point I realized that if I continued in that direction I would be the only soul who would be saved. The same thing happened with my study of Advaita but at the end I met Bhagavan who explained to me that all this is a dream dreamed by one mind. That is why in my search I always end up alone. I was neither egocentric nor lost, I just discovered something that is discovered when the truth is sincerely sought.
That is why Jesus said:
"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."
I think it is impossible to take any spiritual path seriously if we think we are following "one of many paths". It is like saying "yes, I fell in love with this woman but she is just one of many women and if I had not fallen in love with her I would have fallen in love with some other woman". Someone who says that doesn't sound like someone who is truly in love with his woman. Christian saints would probably not have a positive opinion of Islam. Great Sufis like Ibn Arabi, Rumi and others were convinced that Islam is the purest religion. It is not "fanaticism" as long as we do not harm anyone. If we consider our path to be the best and follow it sincerely then it is simply love for the truth. Ramakrishna, while practicing Islam, forgot the Goddess and even developed an aversion to images and sculptures of deities. This is because whenever Ramakrishna practiced something, he took it seriously. This was very different from promoting the idea of religious tolerance
That is why some Puranas say that Vishnu is the supreme God and all others are just his manifestations and other Puranas say the same about Shiva. This helps in awakening love for a particular form of God. When we worship all forms of God as equal to each other we do not love any of them. For those who follow Bhagavan - Jesus, Buddha and Ramakrishna are just manifestations of Ramana. That is why Bhagavan did not create any "universal prayers" because that only makes our mind branch out in all directions and each of those branches is weak. Bhagavan wrote hymns to Arunachala, the still and silent aspect of Shiva, that aspect which is not particularly popular even among the Shaivas. He wrote about this aspect as something supreme.
Sri Ramana's mission was only one: to reveal to the world the path of atma-vichara, using iron logic, and to show, through his own example, how someone who has attained self-knowledge by following this path lives. This path is so rare that in the scriptures of various religions it is mentioned either in a few words, or indirectly, or metaphorically. Despite this, Sri Ramana is one of the most famous spiritual sages in the world. This is proof that in order to save everyone it is not necessary to create a "universal religion".
The thing is that many paths have different goals. Most religious people want to go to Heaven after death. This is true even in Buddhism. For these people, moksha means going to Heaven after death. On the path of jnana, moksha means experiencing our own consciousness in isolation from all phenomena. To experience this, we must turn our full attention to ourselves and ignore everything else, including a personal God. In this sense, atma-vichara is the only way to be saved. If one follows this path, one should adopt the attitude "this method is the only right one, all others lead somewhere else." Without adopting this attitude, the mind will always wander outward.
Chapter 6 of the Bhagavad Gits says to keep the mind absorbed in 'Me' - I'm not sure we can say that this is an endorsement of self enquiry?
As far as I remember Krishna used the word "atma" which means "oneself" but people often translate it as "Self" or "the Self" and still others thinking that Self = God translate it as "on me" because Krishna is God. People always find a way to twist something.
It was similar with Jesus who allegedly said "no one comes to the Father except through me" but the same Jesus said "before Abraham was, I am" which means Jesus is "I am" which means following Jesus is directing our attention to "I am".
Ignorance is believing your appearance is a reality that separately has existence as, i am, the body ego identity.
There is existence and that is nothing. Nothing alone is the reality. The I thought, is only a concept in consciousness. If we listen and talk to people here on social media, its in imagined earths false reality. But without you there is no reality, you alone are the blissful reality being existence . Where does everyone else appear from?
If it’s a dream, when did the dream appear? If you are the dreamer, how does it start? If you are watching the dream, who is the one dreaming of you are part of the dream did watching begin?
There are no answers there is no questioner.
There is no ego there is nobody here. When ego is imagined there is still nobody. There is only you, nothing or nobody exists separately. That’s the I thought imagining that you are an individual soul. But your being is eternally perfectly everywhere. Unlimited unimagined.
Before the beginning, there is nothing, alone blissful existence being.
In the beginning, the I thought rises from the deep.
The witness of these thing is I am thought. I am able to witness the others that appear in my reality, with me.
Seeing is believing,
Unseeing is grace. cx
Are we the creators of this dream or is God the creator? The ego, or the "I am the body" consciousness, is the direct "First Cause". The moment we become aware of the body we become simultaneously aware of the world and this world exists as long as we are aware of the body. When we are aware of the body we always consider ourselves as the doer of the action that the body is doing. We have no control over the fruits of our actions because we identify only with the doer of the action and with the body which is only a fragment of the world experienced in our mind. The fruits of our actions appear according to destiny or according to the will of God. Whatever happens to us in life is beyond our control. However, we experience any phenomena only when our attention wanders outward to experience phenomena and this outward-going mind is always guided by its likes and dislikes.
We could not experience anything in this world if we did not have a desire to experience something or a desire to avoid something. For example, I was mugged and my wallet was stolen. This does not mean that this event was created by my hidden desire to be robbed. However, if I had not reacted to it in any way, if I had neither liked it nor hated it, I could not say that anything had happened at all, because an event becomes a specific event only when we color it with our likes and dislikes. In this sense, whatever happens to us is simply a direct projection of our likes and dislikes. We cannot decide what we will experience and what we will not, but there is no power that can force us to be aware of any of these experiences. It only depends on whether we want to be aware of the world or aware of ourselves in isolation from any phenomena.
Basically this world is two things: our identification with the body and our vasanas, i.e. likes, dislikes, hopes, fears, attachments etc. These two things always occur simultaneously. When we are aware of the body we are aware of our vasanas. When we act under the sway of our vasanas, we only act as a body.
The ego identifies with only one body and this one ego is the only dreamer. Here we come to a critical point which, when touched, causes even the saints to go into a fit of rage. This is because we are discovering the scale of this deception and are getting very close to unmasking the deceiver who is behind it all. People react to this "does this mean that my family and friends are mindless zombies?". It is really very simple. If I identify with the body and think that my body is conscious, then I have to accept that other bodies are also conscious. However, on the path of self-investigation I question the belief that my body is conscious, so I automatically question the belief that other bodies are conscious. If it turns out that my body is unconscious and I exist as pure consciousness without a body, then automatically all other beings will be reduced to the same pure consciousness that I am. In this way it becomes possible for me to "love my neighbor as myself". This is how a true guru sees us.
there're billions of personal, individual view points in this world and ONE ego. how ego identifies simultaneously and at the same time ,,you're that,,?
Just as it happens in a dream. In a dream, one ego identifies with one body and through this identification projects in its imagination other bodies and imagines that in these bodies there are other minds and other points of view. There is only one point of view. The ego does not identify with the body and the true self at the same time. The ego identifies only with the body. This same ego, when it directs its attention to itself instead of the world, turns out to be pure consciousness. Either we know ourselves as we really are and see only ourselves, or we identify with the body and see the world. We cannot experience both simultaneously because we see the world only when we are in ignorance.
In deep sleep you are aware only of yourself and nothing else. In dreams you are aware of being a body and aware of the world. The dream you are experiencing now you call the waking state. "Dreams" you call those dreams which you called the waking state when you experienced them. The mind always convinces itself in some way that the state you are experiencing now is different from dreams. In practicing atma-vichara we turn our attention inward, seeking the place from which the ego arose. Where did the ego arose? From deep sleep. So we try to keep the mind in this state, not allowing it to go out to experience phenomena. We reach the goal when the last desire to experience anything other than ourselves disappears. This is called the "fourth state" although it is the same state we experience in deep sleep, but we never arise again to experience the world.