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

Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi
your goal. Tears are often considered a sign of weakness. These
great persons were certainly not weak. These manifestations are
only passing signs of the great current carrying them on. We must
look to the end achieved.
D.: Can this physical body be made to disappear into nothingness?
M.: Why this question? Can you not find out if you are the body?
D.: Can we have disappearance from sight (antardhana) like the yogis
Vasishta or Viswamitra?
M.: These are only physical matters. Is that the essential object of our
interest? Are you not the Self? Why trouble about other matters? Take
the essence; reject other learned theories as useless. They who think that
physical disappearance counts in freedom are mistaken. No such thing
is needed. You are not the body; what does it matter if it disappears
in one way or another? There is no great merit in such phenomena. In
what does superiority or inferiority consist? Achievement of the Real
alone matters. The loss of the ‘I’ is the main fact, and not the loss of the
body. Identity of the Self with the body is the real bondage. Leave off
the false notion and perceive intuitively the Real. That alone matters.
If you melt a gold ornament before testing it to be gold, what matters
it how it is melted, whole or in parts, or of what shape the ornament
was? All that you are interested in is if it is gold. The dead man sees
not his body. It is the survivor that thinks about the manner in which
the body is parted from. The realised have no death with or without
the body, the realised man is equally aware and sees no difference. To
him the one state is not superior to the other. To an outsider also the
fortunes of a liberated one’s body need not be of any concern; mind
your business. Realise the Self; after realisation there will be time to
think of what form of death is preferable to you.
It is the false identity of the Self with the body that causes the idea
of preference, etc. Are you the body? Were you aware of it when
you were fast asleep last night? No! What is it that exists now and
troubles you? It is ‘I’. Get rid of it and be happy.
Talk 33.
A visitor: “The Supreme Spirit (Brahman) is Real. The world (jagat)
is illusion,” is the stock phrase of Sri Sankaracharya. Yet others
say, “The world is reality”. Which is true?
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