"Who am I?" holds the key to awakening. Ramana Maharshi had his first taste of enlightenment by way of it and is revered for refining his experience into a blueprint for the rest of us to follow. The story goes that in his teens Ramana was one day gripped by an overwhelming fear of death so debilitating that he retired to bed to confront and solve it for once and all. He asked himself the ultimate question, "Who am I?," and responded in the "neti, neti" (not this, not this) fashion of Jnana yoga with each answer. One by one he shut down his senses: "Who am I? Am I this seeing, this hearing, this touching, etc.?" And to each he answered "no" and asked again "Who am I? Am I this body, this flesh, bone, blood, these bodily functions?" With every "no" he delved deeper and unwound layers of conditioning. He became rigid in his bed, simulating what he thought to be death. Bit by bit he annihilated everything we confuse and fabricate as a "self," until he arrived at mind and asked again "Who am I? Am I these memories and assumptions and expectations, this ceaseless fountain of thoughts? No." He opened into a kind of transcendental sense that, as Wei Wu Wei describes it, "can only be apprehended non-cognitionally, realized non-conceptually, not in thought which is knowledge, but in non-thought or absolute thought which is not thinking but pre-thinking--or spontaneous awareness that is unaware of awareness." Although he had broken through the shell, Ramana spent many years thereafter in meditation to stabilize within spontaneous awareness. Then he spent the remainder of his life reassuring us that we all have "it" or are "it," so to speak, and that when we finally awaken for good to its preeminence and abide there first and foremost, wearing the material, illusory world only as a loose garment, then we are enlightened.
No comments:
Post a Comment