Skip to main content

Lightnings. Ramana Maharshi. Who am I?

I am pleased to include here the opening excerpt from Ramana Maharshi's Nan Yar (Who Am I?). Ramana, along with Nisargadatta and Aurobindo, are the greatest representatives of Advaita Vedanta in the 20th century.


 

 Who Am I?
(Nan Yar?)

As all living beings desire to be happy always, without misery, as in the case of everyone there is observed supreme love for one’s self, and as happiness alone is the cause for love, in order to gain that happiness which is one’s nature and which is experienced in the state of deep sleep
where there is no mind, one should know one’s self. For that, the path of knowledge, the inquiry of the form “Who am I?”, is the principal means.


1. Who am I ?
The gross body which is composed of the seven humours (dhatus), I am not; the five cognitive sense organs, viz. the senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell, which apprehend their respective objects, viz. sound, touch, colour, taste, and odour, I am not; the five cognitive sense-
organs, viz. the organs of speech, locomotion, grasping, excretion, and procreation, which have as their respective functions speaking, moving, grasping, excreting, and enjoying, I am not; the five vital airs, prana, etc., which perform respectively the five functions of in-breathing, etc., I am not; even the mind which thinks, I am not; the nescience too, which is endowed only with the residual impressions of objects, and in which there are no objects and no functioning’s, I am not.


2. If I am none of these, then who am I?
After negating all of the above-mentioned as ‘not this’, ‘not this’, (neti, neti)that Awareness which alone remains - that I am.


3. What is the nature of Awareness?

The nature of Awareness is existence-consciousness-bliss (Satchitananda)


Comments

Em said…
Beautiful, thank you Oscar. I am awareness wearing many masks.

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

Masks and Ego

  The ego is the force of psychic centroversion, that which establishes points or frames of reference. Without the coordinate point (0,0), we cannot orient ourselves or act. The ego is the force that builds an unlimited number of references, of centers around which different formations of the Soul will appear. In Sanskrit, it is called Ahankara. Aham means “I”, kara is “the process of doing or carrying out”. As a compound word, Ahankara means “the process of making or uttering the ‘I’ ( aham ).” The ego is an action, a force that establishes or says the “I”, that lays a fundamental reference stone with respect to another action. For example, the human organism spontaneously performs the physiological action of seeing, the organ of sight is set in motion automatically, and automatically, a force also appears that assigns another action to the function of vision: the action that says “I ”. The synthesis is “I see.” It also happens in animals, for the acti...

Matriarcal or Uroboric Incest

Let us discuss some basic aspect of ego formation: its appearence out of the uroboric round. The uroboric round is the realm of the primordial waters (you can listen to my Podcast on the Primordial Waters). I really recomend you the book: The Origin s and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann. (Princeton University Press). Neumann was a friend of Jung and member of the Eranos Group. We could understand the appearance of the ego from the unconscious through the myth of the emergence of an island from the primordial waters. Its appearance, however, is not permanent and definitive, especially at the beginning. The tides of the unconscious rise and the island is once again covered by the waters. Only a progressive systematization of consciousness leads to its permanence. To keep consciousness awake, a force of determination is necessary, which requires a display of psychic and physiological energy. For the appearance of consciousness it is necessary to exert an energy that moves...