Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi Complete ... - BrahminVoice.org

Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi
1st January, 1936
Talk 122.
A crowd had gathered here during Christmas.
D.: How to attain Unity Consciousness?
M.: Being Unity Consciousness how to attain it? Your question is its
own answer.
D.: What is Atman (Self), anatman (non-self) and paramatman
(Supreme Self)?
M.: Atman is jivatman (the individual Self) and the rest are plain. The
Self is ever-present (nityasiddha). Each one wants to know the Self.
What kind of help does one require to know oneself? People want
to see the Self as something new. But it is eternal and remains the
same all along. They desire to see it as a blazing light, etc. How
can it be so? It is not light, not darkness (na tejo, na tamah). It
is only as it is. It cannot be defined. The best definition is ‘I am
that I AM.’ The Srutis speak of the Self as being the size of one’s
thumb, the tip of the hair, an electric spark, vast, subtler than the
subtlest, etc. They have no foundation in fact. It is only Being, but
different from the real and the unreal; it is Knowledge, but different
from knowledge and ignorance. How can it be defined at all? It is
simply Being.
Again Sri Bhagavan said that in the whole Thayumanavar
literature, he preferred one stanza which says: “Ego disappearing
another ‘I-I’ spontaneously manifests in full glory,” etc. Again
he cites Skandar Anubhuti: “Not real, nor unreal; not darkness
nor light, it is.”
One man said, that a siddha of Kumbakonam claimed to overcome
the defects in Sri Sankara’s system which deals only with
transcendentalism and not the work-a-day life. One must be able
to exercise super-human powers in ordinary life, that is to say, one
must be a siddha in order to be perfect.
Sri Bhagavan pointed out a stanza in Thayumanavar which
condemns all siddhis. Further he said that Thayumanavar mentions
mouna (silence) in numerous places but defines it in only one verse.
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