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( Series – 1 )
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“Show me your mind! I will strike it down.” Sri Bhagavan said to a visiting devotee who sought help from him to subdue the mind. “Whose mind”? “Mine”. ”who are you?” There was confusion in answering Bhagavan’s question. So he said find out “who am I” first. Then you will discover there never existed an entity called mind.
The confusion was due to taking it for granted that one was the body as he had already identified himself with the body. The veil of ignorance had hidden his original identity as there was nothing or nobody yet to point out this error and remove the veil. Here the sadguru entered in his life in the form of Bhagavan to guide him and show him the truth. The sadguru is nobody but the personification of compassion, god, reality, Brahman, heart or whatever label you want to give him. The very substratum of the universe itself is bliss, compassion, love in its purest form from which all the manifestations were born taking names and forms like a child would blissfully look at his toys and name them. It is said a sadguru comes half the way out of compassion, concern, to help a being who is in search of him.
Many a time I have wondered, and became depressed, way back, when I looked at me and found me existing as a clone, like the ones you see in movies some scientists love to create for their vested interests. Billions and billions of clones, created and destroyed, programmed to play some role, all of which finally end up in a waste dump. At one point I found that taking the food repeatedly day after day, cleaning oneself, sleeping and engaging with mundane matters of the day to day living became utterly meaningless and without purpose. Even living with relatives like everyone else and pretending to be happy superficially did not strike me as something meaningful. There was a lack of purpose in everything. Billions of others were following the same pattern of life all over the world and I felt that my life didn’t matter at all to anybody or served any special purpose in this world. Like a swarm of flies or worms that is created and destroyed time and again human society also followed suit I thought. I wondered how a single worm or bee or ant would have felt left to itself.
The beauty of life itself revealed to me not until I faced the same question from Sri Bhagavan. Alas! suddenly everything changed. That moment onwards I found meaning and purpose in every movement of life in this world. And I stood astounded as I realized the beauty in life, of love, like when the peacocks in Sree Ramanasramam danced under a thunder shower. The colors held meaning and everyone I met mattered to me. The space suddenly revealed depths.
Of course stories and ideas instill faith in one very much. Ramayana, Bhagavatham, Mahabharatham, Bible, the Vedas and upanishad literature etc etc all create faith, character, instill confidence in one to live fearlessly and help in understanding the one supreme power and its omnipotent presence. But this is purely an intellectual happening to create model moulds. One understands and gathers knowledge and is happy that one’s store or armory or archives is fully loaded and kept ready for use.
Once sri u.g.krishnamurthy somewhere in his twenties landed up in sree Ramanasramam and found himself sitting directly in front of sri Bhagavan. He doubted the existence of ‘Enlightenment’ or was ignorant what it meant and how to go about to be enlightened. So he put forth questions reluctantly to Bhagavan. He asked three questions to him. The first was “Bhagavan, is there something called enlightenment?” to which Bhagavan’s answer was simply “Yes”. The second question was “Can I become enlightened? “ Sri Bhagavan replied “Yes, of course”. The third question was “Can you give me enlightenment?” Sri Bhagavan then said with a gesture “Of course I can give enlightenment to you. Here it is. I am giving it to you. You can take it.”
Sri u.g.krishnamurthy later said he was perplexed not knowing what to do then and wondered how to receive the enlightenment given to him by sri Bhagavan. It was only after about twenty years or so, he says, he could understand thankfully what was that Sri Bhagavan gracefully gave to him that day which he could not receive in its fullness at that particular moment. The moment of self discovery dawned on him only after that important meeting with Sri Bhagavan.
I remember two middle aged persons from a temple town I used to know, who were literate, very well into bhakthi and jnana yoga, who could give lectures on the scriptures and guide people, but went into a never ending litigation for decades hating each other. I understood what the word “experience” meant as compared to intellectual knowledge. Both had taken for granted that god was with both of them. It reminded me of Mahabharatham which was a living story of fights between two respected groups of kings who upheld values to their last moments in life. It was Lord Krishna who gave enlightenment to Arjuna in the battle field before the famous Kurukshethra war began. The only one that reached the Altar of truth was king Yudhishtira because he was a true seeker of truth and never even uttered a word of untruth except for once when he was convinced and forced to spell out a twisted truth, a half lie, by Krishna the lord himself to weaken their opponent. It is interesting to see that, later for this half lie he had to resort to, to save values, he had to face the sword of truth but managed unscathed to reach his goal all alone sacrificing his dearest kith and kin he had to leave behind.
The focus here is that mere intellectual knowledge does not give one the experience of his original identity, The “I” “I” Sri Bhagavan instruct seekers to search for by entering into one’s heart cavity in silence and one pointedly like diving deep into a well watching one’s breath and searching for a lost thing and retrieving it.
But the first hurdle shows up here as one’s inability to concentrate, focus one pointedly on anything. The surging flow of thoughts carries away one with its swirling currents. The flow of thoughts has to be controlled or stopped to focus on anything at all. One says here feebly “I can not control my mind. I find innumerable thoughts emerging in my mind as an unstoppable stream. What am I to do now?”
Sri Bhagavan directs a seeker at this point by saying “find out the person for whom the mind exists”. The mind is only a bundle of thoughts. Without thought there exists no mind. He said “be still”. I can’t but quote here a sentence, mentioned as a means for watching the mind to control it, which I liked so much, from a book titled “Meditations” by sri A.R.Natarajan, president, Ramana Maharshi Centre for Learning, Bangalore, one of his early publications, which reads as “like laying a siege to the fortress of inherent tendencies” watch the emergence of every single thought and destroy it by being it’s observer or witness. An aid to become the witness is also suggested as “by watching the breath”. It is explained by bhagavan as “prathyavekshna pranayama”. That is, by simply watching the inhalation and exhalation of breath and at the same time asking oneself “who am I?” dive deep into one’s inwardness or heart cavity and find out the knower of the mind, the “Aham sphurana” or the “I” which is understood as a vibration by the seeker. One is instructed by Sri Bhagavan to hold on dearly to this vibration and not let it go away from one’s focus at any time or at any cost.
Mind and breath, says Sri Bhagavan, in “Upadesasaram” are two branches of the one Prana. By watching the breath one can control the mind and vice versa.
