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

Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi
overpowers you? ‘I’ is ever constant. So also must its seat be. If
the head bends at one time and is erect at another time how can it
be the seat of ‘I’? Your head is laid flat in sleep. When awake it is
raised up. Can it be the ‘I’?
D.: Which is it then?
M.: ‘I’ comes from within. When asleep there is no ‘I’. Just before
waking there is ‘I-thought’.
D.: The heart-knot is said to be between the eyebrows.
M.: Some say “between the eyebrows”; others “at the coccyx”, and
so on. All these are from the standpoint of the body.
The body comes after the ‘I-thought’.
D.: But I cannot divest myself of the body.
M.: So you admit that you are not the body.
D.: If there is pain in this body, I feel it; but not if another body is
injured. I cannot get over this body.
M.: This identity is the cause of such feeling. That is the hrdaya
granthi (heart-knot).
D.: How is this knot to go?
M.: For whom is the knot? Why do you want it to go? Does it ask
or do you ask?
D.: It cannot ask; I am asking.
M.: Who is that ‘I’? If that is found the knot will not remain.
D.: The knot is concomitant with the body. The body is due to birth.
How is rebirth to cease?
M.: Who is born? Is the Self born? Or is it the body?
D.: It is the body.
M.: Then let the body ask how its rebirth may cease.
D.: It will not ask. So I am asking.
M.: Whose is the body? You were without it in your deep sleep. After
the ‘I-thought’ arose the body arose. The first birth is that of ‘Ithought’.
The body has its birth subsequent to ‘I-thought’. So its
birth is secondary. Get rid of the primary cause and the secondary
one will disappear by itself.
316