Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
A. RAMANA: The best way to stay in this?
WIZARD: Yes.
A. RAMANA: Very simply is again to start with your own sense of
“I”. The sense of “I” is prior to anything that the “I” is aware of.
Whatever is going on in one's life that might be of a, let's say,
perhaps of an upsetting, fearful, worrisome nature, they cannot
have this fearful worrisome upsetting nature without the sense of
“I” that has the upset, whatever the upset might be. It doesn't
necessarily have to be upset; it can be a pleasant experience as
well. Every experience requires first the sense of “I” that is having
the experience.
So we can take a hold of our own attention by simply giving notice
to the sense of “I”, then holding on to the sense of “I” with one's
attention, withdraw the sense of “I” inward back to the point from
which the sense of “I” takes rise. There is stillness and silence
here, prior to the sense of “I”, so then one can just enter into, or
my teacher Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi used to say dive, dive into
this sense of awareness, this stillness and silence of pure being,
and just rest there, remain there. In fact what's very beneficial, if
one can do so, is to remain in it for the rest of one's life, that's
where I live Now. Okay.
TRIP: Yes. I've got some questions for you Ramana, but before I
get to kind of the ego driven, well I don't know if they're ego driven
questions, or questions that come up out of my persona. But I
think that very first time that someone experiences this awakening
to this ever present, I call it witnessing awareness, that the very
first time that happens you become aware there's something so
much greater than yourself, and this incredible joy being able to
release all of this tension that you have around being who you are
as a small identified person. What was it like for you the first time
that you had that awakening experience? I mean, did it bring you
to tears, or how did that experience go down for you?
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