From ‘Be As You Are. The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi.’ Edited by David Godman

…..the peace of mind which permeates the saint’s atmosphere is the only means by which the seeker understands the greatness of the saint.

His words or actions or appearance are no indication of his greatness, for they are ordinarily beyond the comprehension of common people.



Worshipping the formless reality by unknown thought is the best kind of worship. But when one is not fit for such formless worship of God, worship of form alone is suitable.



Q: What are the marks of a real teacher [sadguru]?

A: Steady abidance in the Self, looking at all with an equal eye unshakeable courage at all times, in all places and circumstances



This flow of power from the Guru can be received by anyone whose attention is focused on the Self or on the form of the Guru; distance is no impediment to its efficacy. This attention is often called sat-sanga, which literally means ‘association with being’. Sri Ramana wholeheartedly encouraged this practice and frequently said that it was the most efficient way of bringing about a direct experience of the Self. …..He said that the most important element in sat-sanga was the mental connection with the Guru; sat-sanga takes place not only in his presence but whenever and wherever one thinks of him.



Q: How can silence be so powerful?

A: A realized one sends out waves of spiritual influence which draw many people towards him. Yet he may sit in a cave and maintain complete silence. We may listen to lectures upon truth and come away with hardly any grasp of the subject, but to come into contact with a realized one, though he speaks nothing, will give much more grasp of the subject. He never needs to go out among the public.



Meditation is sticking to one thought. That single thought keeps away other thoughts. Distraction of mind is a sign of its weakness. By constant meditation it gains strength, that is to say, the weakness of fugitive thought gives place to the enduring background free from thought. This expense devoid of thought is the Self. Mind in purity is the Self.



He did ….speak highly of the practice of nama-japa (the continuous repetition of God’s name) and he often advocated it as a useful aid for those who were following the path of surrender…… In its early stages the repetition of the name of God is only an exercise in concentration and meditation, but with continued practice a stage is reached in which the repetition proceeds effortlessly, automatically and continuously. This stage is not reached by concentration alone but only by completely surrendering to the deity whose name is being repeated.



The only physical changes he ever sanctioned were dietary. He accepted the prevailing Hindu theory of diet which claimed that the type of food consumed affected the quantity and quality of one’s thoughts and he recommended a moderate intake of vegetarian food as the most useful aid to spiritual practice.



If a man has a strong desire for the higher life then the sex tendency will subside.



…..accustom yourself to sattvic foods. However, once you have attained illumination it will make less difference what you eat, as, on a great fire, it is immaterial what fuel is added.



Q: Even plants have life.

A: So too the slabs you sit on!



…..tobacco is a poison……also not good for meditation practice.



Sri Ramana never advised his devotees to practice kundalini yoga since he regarded it as being both potentially dangerous and unnecessary. He accepted the existence of the kundalini power and the chakras but he said that even if the kundalini reached the sahasrara it would not result in realization. For final realization, he said, the kundalini must go beyond the sahasrara, down another nadi (psychic nerve) he called amritanadi (also called the paranadi or jivanadi) and into the Heart-centre on the right-hand side of the chest. Since he maintained that self-enquiry would automatically send the kundalini to the Heart-centre, he taught that separate yoga exercises were unnecessary.



Sri Ramana tended to play down the importance of most spiritual experiences and if they were reported to him he would usually stress that it was more important to be aware of the experiencer than to indulge in or analyse the experience.



….sleep only moderately. To prevent too much sleep, we must try and have not thoughts or chalana [movement of the mind], we must eat only sattvic food and that only in moderate measure, and not indulge in too much physical activity. The more we control thought, activity and food the more we shall be able to control sleep …. Sleep is the first obstacle, as explained in all books, for all sadhaks.



Q: ….signs….of…progress towards Self-Realisation?

A: The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measures to gauge the progress.



Q: Is the individual capable of spiritual progress in an animal body?

A: Not impossible, though it is exceedingly rare. It is not true that birth as a man is necessarily the highest, and that one must attain realization only from being a man. Even an animal can attain Self-Realisation.



…following classification which was used by Sri Ramana is common to many Hindu schools of thought:

1 Sanchita karma The store of karmic debts accumulated from previous births

2 Prarabdha karma That part of one’s sanchita karma which must be worked out in the present life. Because the law of karma implies determinism in human activities, prarabdha is often translated as destiny.

3 Agami karma New karma accumulated in the present lifetime which is carried forward into future lives

Sri Ramana accepted the validity of the laws of karma but said that they were only applicable as long as a person imagined that he was separate from the Self. ….He occasionally even said that every act and experience in a person’s life is determined at birth and that the only freedom one has to realize that there is no one acting and no one experiencing. However, once one realizes the Self there is no one left to experience the consequences of actions and so the whole structure of karmic laws then becomes redundant



Whatever this body is to do and whatever experiences it is to pass through was already decided when it came into existence.

From ‘Einstein's God. Conversations about science and the human spirit’ by Krista Tippett

…..opening line of Reinhold Niebuhr’s twentieth-century theological classic The Nature and Destiny of Man: “Man has always been his own most vexing problem.” ….Einstein’s dismayed observation, as chemists and physicists became eager purveyors of mid-twentieth-century weaponry, that technology in his generation was like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old…. Einstein came to understand his contemporary, Mahatma Gandhi, and other figures such as Jesus, Moses, St. Francis of Assissi, and Buddha, as “spiritual geniuses” – “geniuses in the art of living ….more necessary to the sustenance of global human dignity, security and joy than the discovers of objective knowledge.”



….. St. Augustine …..the reverence for the human physical experience…..

Men go forth to wonder at the heights of
mountains, the huge waves of the sea,
the broad flow of the rivers, the vast
compass of the ocean, the courses of the
stars: and they pass by themselves
without wondering.



…….concise description by Einstein of his quintessential “faith”:

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves …. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.



…quote….attributed to Philo of Alexandria ….. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”



….Darwin…. quote of Francis Bacon that he put opposite the title page of The Origin of Species:

Let no man …think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works …. but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both.



Einstein said this funny thing, that only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And then he said, “I’m not so sure about the universe.”



Jane Kenyon: “We try a new drug, a new combination of drugs, and suddenly I fall into my life again.”



Sir John Polkinghorne …..Genesis stories … he points out that these are lyrical, theological writings. There were not composed as scientific texts. The early Christians, he says, knew this, and only in the later medieval and Reformation times did people begin to insist on literal interpretation. To read a work of poetry as a work of prose, he analogizes, is to miss the point.



….a passage in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison where he’s reflecting on that in the mid-twentieth century. He writes that if God is consigned to the unknowable and we’re learning more and more, then God is always being pushed further and further out of human experience.

From ‘Motiba's Tattoos. A Granddaughter's journey into her indian family's past’ by Mira Kamdar

To be an exile is to endure the unstoppable pain of separation from a land to which one is forbidden to return. To be the descendant of exiles is to be even more completely severed from “home.” With the passing of generations, the homeland becomes a mythic place outside real time or place, the abode of unknown ancestors longed for, yet fundamentally unknowable. Nothing remains of the ancestors’ world or, worse, faint traces, tantalizing hints, uninterpretable signs that point in vague directions as tracks half effaced in the sand that double back on themselves. The children of exiles are the trustees of a home they can never know.



Lo, soul, seest thou not
God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d,
connected by network,
The races, neighbours, to marry
and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d,
the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together
- Walt Whitman


Kali Yuga ......
Property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation; and woman will be objects merely of sensual gratification. Earth will be venerated but for its mineral treasures, dishonesty will be a universal means of subsistence, presumption will be substituted for learning …. Thus in the Kali age shall decay constantly proceed, until the human race approaches its annihilation

- Vishnu Purana

From ‘The Anti Guru. A Selection of his Greatest Talks’ by U. G. Krishnamurti

The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breast bone. When you come into your natural state, sensations are felt there. …. They are just a thud. If there is a movement outside of you in your field of vision, that movement is also felt in the thymus.



But by practicing not blinking one will not arrive in this state, one will only strain the eyes. Once you are in your natural state, by some luck or some strange chance, all this happens in its own way.

From ‘Mahatma Gandhi. Essays and Reflections’ by Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

John Haynes Holmes …….

Gandhi’s pre-eminence in this age is nothing that is ordinarily accounted genius or glory. He commands no armies and conquers no territory. He is not a statesman in high office, ruling the destinies of nations. He is not a philosopher or sage – has written no great books or poems. He does not even possess those elements of conspicuous and dominant personality which make a man outwardly at least an impressive leader. His genius lies where he would have it – in the realm of the spirit. It is his “soul-force” which has raised him to a position of unparalleled influence and leadership, and achieved things beyond the reach and range of all but a few of the greatest characters of history.

Ayam nijo paro veti ganana laghucetasam

Udaracaritanam tu vasudhaiva kutumbakam,

“Only base minds reckon whether one be kin or stranger. Men of noble conduct take the whole world for their home.”

Dil-i-shah larza girad zi gada-i-be-niaze.

“The heart of a King trembles at the sight of a begger who begs not.”

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

From ‘UG Krishnamurti a life’ by Mahesh Bhatt

‘A real guru, if there is one, frees you from himself.’



‘When you know nothing you say a lot, when you know something there is nothing to say.’



I had heard intriguing stories about U.G.’s walks with king cobras …..U.G. replied: The cobra would only strike if it sensed fear. A frightened being emits odours …..



In the year 1961, U.G. landed in London, alone and penniless. ‘There was no will to do anything. I was like a leaf blown here, there and everywhere.’ His friends saw him going headlong on a downhill course. But, according to U.G. all that he did at that time seemed perfectly natural to him. The mystic phrase, ‘the dark night of the soul’ has been used to describe those years of U.G.’s wanderings. U.G. disagrees. In his view, ‘There was no heroic struggle with temptation and worldliness, no soul-wrestling urges, no poetic climaxes but just a simple withering away of the will.’



Then one day, he had a very strange experience in the meditation room.

…..in my mind there was nothing – there was only blankness – when I felt something very strange: there was some kind of movement inside my body. Some energy was coming up from the penis and out through the head, as if there was a hole. It was moving in circles in a clockwise direction and then in a counterclockwise direction…….I was a finished man. Somebody was feeding me, somebody was taking care of me, there was no thought of the morrow. ….



‘The search must come to an end before anything can happen’



The question disappeared. The whole thing was finished for me and that was all. From then on, never did I say to myself, ‘Now I have the answer to all those questions.’ …. The question disappeared, finished. It is not emptiness; it is not blankness; it is not the void; it is not any of those things; the question disappeared suddenly and that’s all.



Everything in the head had tightened …. These vasanas (past impressions) or whatever you call them, they do try to show their head sometimes, but then the brain cells are so ‘tight’ that the vasanas have no opportunity to fool around there any more.



…..following the ‘explosion’…. The changes began. For seven days, every day a change occurred. U.G. discovered that his skin had become extremely soft, the blinking of his eyes had stopped and his senses of taste, smell and hearing had undergone a change.



He says he no longer spends his time in reverie, worry, conceptualization and other kinds of thinking that most people do when they are alone. His mind is only engaged when it is needed…. When it is not needed, there is no mind there, there is no thought. There is only life.



‘The uniqueness of the individual cannot express itself because of the stranglehold of the experiences of others.’



U.G. explains that thought had controlled his body to such an extent that when that control loosened, the whole metabolism went agog….. Certain hormonal changes started occurring in his body. Now he didn’t know whether he was a man or a woman. Suddenly there was a breast growing on the left side of his chest. It took three years for this body to finally fall into a new rhythm of its own.



Since there is nobody here who uses thought as a self-protective mechanism, thought burns itself up. It undergoes combustion, ionization. Thought is, after all, a vibration. So, when this ionization of thought takes place, it throws out, and sometimes it covers the whole body with, an ash-like substance…. There is tremendous heat in the body as a result of this.



The incredible physiological changes continued to occur for years. U.G. was so bewildered by what had happened to him that he did not speak for a year after the ‘calamity.’ He had to practically learn to think and talk all over again, so complete was his mutation. After a year or so, he regained most of his communicative powers. …..This thing happened without my volition and despite my religious background. And that is a miracle. It cannot be used as a model and duplicated by others.



….the problem lies in our psyche. We function in our thought-sphere and not in our biology. The separative thought structure, which is the totality of man’s thoughts, feelings, experiences and so on ….is creating the disturbance. That is what is responsible for our misery; that’s what continues the battle that is going on there…..This interloper, the thought sphere, has created your entire value system. The body is not in the least interested in values, much less a value system. It is only concerned with intelligent moment-to-moment survival, and nothing else. Spiritual ‘values’ have no meaning to it. When through some miracle or chance you are freed from the hold of thought and culture, you are left with the body’s natural functions and nothing else. It then functions without the interference of thought.



The hungry dog chews on a lean, dry bone; and doing so hurts his gums and they bleed. The poor dog imagines that the blood that he’s savouring comes from the bone and not from himself … Whatever you experience is created by you; and these experiences, however intense and great they may be, do not last.



‘I go to the Master, not to hear him speak, but to watch him tie his shoelaces,’ said a Zen pupil.



‘You think when you don’t want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don’t think!’



The body handles all your despair, all your frustrations in its own way. It doesn’t need any help from your intellect. There is no pain or pleasure that can take permanent root in this body. Your pleasures and pains have a permanent existence only in that thing called the experiencing structure, which is your intellect.



I begin to discover that I am, and will always be, a stranger in the story of my life.

From ‘Stopped in our Tracks. Stories of U.G. in India’ by K. Chandrasekhar (from the notebooks of)

….. U. G. who says, “If a thought enters my head, it has to take effect,” …..



“On whomsoever I bestow my grace, him I shall rob of all that he has,” ……



There is no moksha, no jivanmukti, and no Atman. And there is no such thing as self realization. Those are all lies. There is only the ‘natural state’. I don’t like to use your terms such as enlightenment, jivanmukti, nirvana or moksha to refer to this state. Those terms suggest some other meanings. They sound weird to me. When I talk about the ‘natural state’, it is not the state of someone who has attained self realization or God realization. It is not something created through self effort. This natural state is always living and spontaneous. This happens to one in a billion, accidentally. It does not result from your effort. It is acausal. And why this natural state happens to that one and not anyone else, I don’t know.”

Q: When did this happen to you?

U.G. In my forty ninth year.



Once the barriers within your consciousness are broken – not because of any act of will or volition on your part – once the flood gates are open, everything will be washed away, all experiences – good and bad, sacred and profane, divine or demonic ….. After that your past will never stick to you, or bother you, and that will be the end of you.



As a matter of fact, all these questions are others’ questions, not your own. If there is a question that you can call your own, it won’t let you rest for one minute. There is no question apart from the questioner. The two are the same. If the question goes, the questioner goes with it. Because you don’t want to come to an end, you hang on to your question forever. That’s why you cannot stop the question even if you know there is no answer to it.



When U. G. talked about the Calamity that happened to him, and told us about the irreversible chemical changes that occurred in his body during the following six days, describing the colours that surfaced on his skin in the places where there are ductless glands [inside the body] ….. There is no spiritual or metaphysical content in this. This is purely biological and physical.”

“If the endlessly continuing thought process is cut off even once, even for a thousandth of a second, then thoughts can never be linked again. That break will create tremors throughout the body like a terrible earthquake…. it will shake, move and burn every nerve and blood cell in the body. With that the thinker is gone. The senses start functioning independently of each other. From then on all bodily processes are carried on automatically, like a machine. Only the ‘you’ who you think runs the machine is not there.”



….he admonished me not to open my eyes during the headstand.

The truth that U. G. finally realized from his own experience was that Yoga does more harm than good to the body. U. G. says that the movements the body goes through spontaneously as it is coming out of the state of ‘death’ are closer to Tai Chi movements than to the postures of Yoga. Also, U.G. says that it’s a mistake to perform the ‘Corpse Posture’ (Savasana) at the end of the Yoga practice. He insists that it should come at the beginning.



When I saw him walking with shoes even inside the house, I thought it must be a habit he had acquired in the West. I was surprised when he said it was not the case, but that if he put his bare feet on the ground, he would be bothered by the electromagnetic energy transmitted from the ground.



“To satisfy my curiosity, U.G. showed me the colours that appeared on his skin at the base of his neck, on his chest and around his navel. The common opinion is that the energy centres called Nadi Chakras, which Kundalini Yoga talks about, are merely psychological ….. U.G. explained that at precisely the same locations as the Nadi centres there are some ductless glands, and that when and if the mechanism of thought comes to a stop, all the energies that are dormant in those glands become active and bring about biological and chemical changes, and that the result was indeed the Natural State.



I felt that Kalyani must have had some extrasensory powers. U.G. says that they are commonly found in crazy people.



“This Ajna Chakra plays a major role in the functioning of the body. The yogis call it the Ajna Chakra, but I say it is the pineal gland. That gland which is beyond the forehead between the eyebrows becomes very active in the Natural State. It controls all the functions that the body performs. That is why they call it the Ajna [command] Chakra,” says U.G.



“…If someone blames me, I too am pained just like you. But as soon as there is a division in the awareness saying, ‘This is pain’, that feeling burns itself out. The pain does not continue. Its existence is for that moment only. There is no thinking about it. There is no reaction in me. There is only the response.”