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Sri Ramana’s service to humanity consisted in showing clearly that perpetual dhyana (meditation) is only abidance in the Self.
“You think you were born one day and will die some day. Consider who is born and is to die. Do such thoughts occur in dreamless sleep? During this thought-free state you existed without thoughts and without the world.
When you wake up thought and the world appear. Why, how and whence did this world appear? You remain the same whether asleep or awake, and with or without the world. The projected picture, the beholder, the light and the screen – all these are yourself.
You are not this body. Like the indivisible and boundless sky above, you are pure awareness and can neither come nor go. This is the truth, but you find it difficult to conceive it and even more difficult to experience it. Anyhow practise remembering the real Self whenever you think of yourself as the body. All that is needed is sraddha (faith) and more sraddha.
Does an ornament exist apart from the gold of which it is made? Where is the body apart from the Self? He who considers the body to be himself is an ignorant man. He who regards himself as the Self is the Enlightened One who has realized the Self.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
There is no more monstrous superstition in the history of mankind than our obsessive identification with the body. As long as we are helpless victims of this primeval ignorance – called “Avidya” in the Vedanta tradition, “the Fall” in the Jewish-Christian tradition – we cannot help living on the physical level, on the ego level, as feverish fragments in a world of feverish fragments. As long as we believe that we are the body, the Buddha reminds us, which is subject to change, we cannot escape the last great change called death.
Source: The above excerpt has been taken from an essay written by Sadhu Natanananda, in the magazine: Sri Ramana Jyoti Souvenir, 1969.
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