Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
people through that process. For someone that has gone through
that process, either through AHAM or just naturally on their own,
or what have you, and has arrived at a state of awareness and
wakefulness, perhaps not permanently abiding in their true
Beingness, but significantly so. Is there a time, Ramana, when
that process of Self inquiry, and I'll use the word should with
quotes around it, but “should” or could be let go into a sort of
deeper faith where one no longer allows one's self to sort of revisit
this once useful process of a kind of verbalized self inquiry or what
have you, to a place where you just going to put all that down and
just say, you know what, I'm done, I'm finished. I've let it go. How
do you feel about that, that idea of stopping yourself at some point
from engaging in sort of that practice of self inquiry and simply
acknowledging to yourself that you're finished, you're done, you
know, don't even go there, stop the thought?
A. RAMANA: Our teaching in AHAM brings one to that place if
they stay with the inquiry, that's the whole purpose of inquiry,
that's the intention is to awaken to the true nature of the Being
that we actually are. And the real process is to every time a
thought arises, which comes up from the conditioned mind, it's the
conditioning of the mind that keeps one identified with the body,
and with the world of time and space. And when one withdraws
attention into the pure awareness, eventually staying in the pure
awareness constantly, consistently returning attention into the
pure awareness and remaining in the pure awareness, and
functioning from the pure awareness of the self, the conditioned
patterns of the mind eventually become neutralized. And as they
become neutralized, one begins to recognize for themselves that
the entire mind really is, as Bhagavan Ramana used to say, it's a
bundle of thoughts, the first and primary thought being the Ithought.
But all other thoughts together would comprise the “I”,
the sense of I, as a seeming individual, as a separate entity living in
time and space, which is not what we are, we are the pure
awareness, we are spirit, consciousness. And when we withdraw
our attention into it, and remain in it, then the mind ultimately
will dissolve leaving only the pure Being of the Self without there
being a sense of “I” at all. The pure awareness has no sense of “I”,
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