Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Verse Six

Continued from Verse Five

6. The world is nothing more than an embodiment of the objects perceived by the five sense-organs. Since, through these five sense-organs, a single mind perceives the world, the world is nothing but the mind. Apart from the mind can there be a world?

Commentary: The world is what perceived by the senses, but the senses are themselves cognized by the mind (the deeper sheaths within that five-sheathed body/mind). The world is, as we know it, put together, organized, synthesized by the mind. The raw sense data are put together into this thing we call experience only because of the mind.

We cannot imagine a world without a body-mind there to perceive it. Everything we know about the world comes through our senses brought together through the mind. The idea of a world apart from our ideas about it, that is, apart from the organizing function of the mind, is literally inconceivable. Every possible idea of what the world could be like without the mind would have to first be filtered through the mind’s categories. In other words, we have no evidence, capacity, or justification for believing in a world that is entirely independent of mind.

This is not necessarily to say that any one individual mind creates all of reality. There may be a global mind which integrates all the individual minds into a common reality. We can call that global mind God. Regardless, the point is that one way or another, the world is always mind-dependent.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.

Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Verse Five

Continued from Verse Four

5. The body is a form composed of the five-fold sheath; therefore, all the five sheaths are implied in the term, body. Apart from the body does the world exist? Has anyone seen the world without the body?

Commentary: The five-fold sheath is a Vedantic idea that understands the body-mind to be a complex which includes five layers, like an onion. Each layer in some sense is the product of the layers within it, and in some sense produces the layers outside it. The outer-most layer is the physical organs. Then comes the prana, or physiological energy. Then is said to be the seat of the emotions. Then, within that is our ability to reason and to decide. And finally within that is the ego, the sense that “I am.” Note that this sense, too, is actually just a layer, just as insentient as all the other layers. It claims to be conscious, claims to be deciding and feeling and all the other layers, but it can no more do those things than a piece of paper can actually think and feel. It is only when the light of consciousness hits that insentient “I am” thought that the reflected consciousness appears to experience the world.

The body, however, is a kind of instrument for seeing the world, much like a novel is an instrument for experiencing a fictional universe. When readers read a book, they project an imaginary landscape peopled by imaginary people. Both the reader and the book are required for this to happen.

So the body establishes boundaries and mental concepts which are the tools by which everything else seems to be experienced. The world as we know it is always the world as perceived and cognized by the body (where the body is understood to include all the mental and emotional instruments together).

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.

Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Verse Four

Continued from Verse Three

4. If one has form oneself, the world and God also will appear to have form, but if one is formless, who is it that sees those forms, and how? Without the eye can any object be seen? The seeing Self is the Eye, and that Eye is the Eye of Infinity.

Commentary: A form is a boundary. If you have a form, it means that you have a boundary. Other things, like the world and God, are contrasted to that boundary. They are the not-you. It is by the creation of mental boundaries that we have experiences. Without a form, without those boundaries, there is no way to differentiate self and other. There is therefore no way to use concepts, no way to use language, no way to say “individual,” “world,” “God.”

The eye is the form of the instrument of knowing, and it differentiates things into forms with boundaries. This eye can be regarded both as physical or as metaphorical — i.e. as the egoic mind, the mind which says “I” and “not-I.”

But in reality what sees is no physical or even mental I. Rather, the Self sees, and that Self is infinite — meaning boundless, meaning formless. There is no actual space in it for I and not-I. For that Eye, the true Eye, its Seeing is no seeing. Ordinary seeing can be understood. But the Seeing of that Eye, when inquired into, leads straight into the silence of the incomprehensible. It stuns the mind into silence.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.

Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Verse Three

Continued from Verse Two

3. 'The world is real.' 'No, it is a mere illusory appearance.' 'The world is conscious.' 'No.' 'The world is happiness.' 'No.' What use is it to argue thus? That State is agreeable to all, wherein, having given up the objective outlook, one knows one's Self and loses all notions either of unity or duality, of oneself and the ego.

Commentary: The questions of philosophy about the exact relationship of the world to consciousness are impossible to answer in language. That’s because language & concepts are themselves based on the idea that the ego is real, that is, that the sense that “I am separate” is true. Only when you say “I am in here and separate” can you look out at the world and say “out there is not me,” and then divide the not-me into names and forms. From these names and forms we get language, and from language we get philosophical debates about the nature of the world. It all starts with that me/not-me distinction.

But the problem is that the very base assumption of the ego that “I am in here and separate” is incorrect. That is merely a thought, whereas what you actually are is beyond thought; you are the unthinkable Reality. That Reality is cannot be said to be in here, cannot be said to be separate, cannot be said to create any kind of boundary by which names and forms may be drawn.

Since the base assumption of the ego is incorrect, then “I am not in here and separate.” So all the stuff out there is not the not-me, and so all the names and forms based on those assumptions are in some profound sense incorrect — or, more accurately, meaningless. This is because names and forms are based on boundaries, but the original boundary that would allow them — again, the me/not-me boundary — is invalid.

This makes language, in a very certain and deep sense, meaningless, and that then makes philosophical debate about these concepts ultimately meaningless as well. Even ‘meaningless’ is too meaningful a word to be used, technically. It too is a child of language.

A philosophical framework can be useful provisionally for a seeker, but ultimately it has to be realized that Reality cannot be proven in language one way or another, since what is being indicated is beyond language.

From a practical standpoint, it’s wise not to get too bogged down in philosophical debates about the exact status of the world. The key point is that if there is abidance without the ego — that is, without the “objective outlook” to which Ramana refers, since the ego enables us to experience objects by assuming it is itself the subject — that is happiness. That state is beyond concepts of either unity or duality, beyond the concepts of the self and ego. All that vanishes, or rather, more than vanishes: whether it is there or it isn’t there is itself seen to be a meaningless point.

“Ego” and “existence,” are themselves concepts, and saying that they are false is also a concept. There is something beyond concepts, which can only be pointed to by language, but not actually described.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.

Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Verse Two

Continued from Verse One

2. All religions postulate the three fundamentals: the world, the soul, and God, but it is only the one Reality that manifests Itself as these three. One can say, 'The three are really three' only so long as the ego lasts. Therefore, to inhere in one's own Being, where the 'I', or ego, is dead, is the perfect State.

Commentary: Religions tend to assume three basic divisions. First there’s the world of objects, then ones who see them (those are individual souls), and finally there’s the God who creates, maintains, and destroys the whole system. But this is all only from the standpoint of thought — which is the standpoint of the ego. The ego is that which says “I am in here, separate from out there. I experience the world and my thoughts and feelings.” The ego is that sense of distinction that arises from and is mixed with the body and mind.

It’s only when the light of Reality appears to be split through the prism of ego that there seems to be this thing called the experience of changing objects, and it’s only from that experience that religions then put forth the self-world-God system.

But this ego is a kind of illusion. It is the thought that says that “I am a thought.” But that thought is wrong. The true I — Reality — is not a thought. The egoic I is a kind of illusion that drives and is driven by a cycle of identification with the body and mind, and the actions based on desires and fears that come from that identification. When we feel that “I am” — that’s the ego at work. And this ego is what enables normal perception. Without the sense that “I am,” we cannot have the sense “out there are the things I experience, which I am not.”

If that ego is dead and we are without that sense of differentiation, of ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ — that’s the perfect State. That’s the contemplation of Reality.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.

Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Verse One

Continued from Invocatory Part Two of Two

1. From our perception of the world there follows acceptance of a unique First Principle possessing various powers. Pictures of name and form, the person who sees, the screen on which one sees, and the light by which one sees: one oneself is all of these.

Commentary: When we see the world, logic dictates that the world itself arises from something which possesses the power to create that seeming seeing. That power itself appears to be split into the various objects of the world, the seer, the act of seeing, awareness itself, and so on. These are all nothing other than Reality, however, and Reality is what you actually are — not any of these divisions.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.

Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Invocatory Part Two of Two

Continued from Invocatory Part One of Two

ii. Those who know intense fear of death seek refuge only at the feet of the Lord Who has neither death nor birth. Dead to themselves and their possessions, can the thought of death occur to them again? Deathless are they.

Commentary: All fear is rooted in the fear of death. But death can only afflict what is born, that is, what is changing: that is, what is thought. We have just seen that what is Real is unchanging, and that what is Real is us.

The Lord who has neither birth nor death is none other than this very Reality, the Heart. This Lord may go by many other names — Shiva or Vishnu or God or the Goddess, for example. But ultimately they all refer to this unchanging Reality.

In order to take refuge at the feet of this Lord, all else must be given up. This giving up is a kind of death. By dying to what is changing — to what one thought one was, but in fact is not — one realizes oneself to actually be the unchanging. What seems mortal has in fact never been born to begin with, and what is immortal cannot die. And the thought of death cannot occur to the immortals, which are those who have given up their stake in everything changing.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.

Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Invocatory Part One of Two

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a commentary on Ramana Maharshi’s seminal Forty Verses, verse by verse.

Introduction

Forty Verses is one of Ramana Maharshi’s most famous works. It is one of his own chief and briefest summaries of his teachings, compiled at the request of one of his devotees. It explains the philosophy and the essence of that true knowledge which is beyond the changing things of the world, knowledge of the real Self.

It goes by other names as well: Ulladu Narpadu, Sad-Vidya, and Truth Revealed. The translation of the text is taken from The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi.

Invocation

i. If Reality did not exist, could there be any knowledge of existence? Free from all thoughts, Reality abides in the Heart, the Source of all thoughts. It is, therefore, called the Heart. How then is one to contemplate it? To be as it is in the Heart, is Its contemplation.

Commentary: This invocation, which has two parts, starts before the forty verses themselves. Reality means that which is unchanging, whereas knowledge of existence is always in thought (or feeling, or perception, etc., which are all forms of thought). Reality is that which permits thought, that which is aware of it. Thought always implies a background which is itself not simply a thought. That which is beyond thought is beyond change, since changes are themselves in thought — in order to say something has changed, you have to think and make a comparison. In other words, changes are always cognized. Without concepts, you cannot say that something has changed. So the knowledge of existence — which is thought — implies something which is beyond change, and which is that which is aware of thought. That awareness which is beyond change we call Reality.

This background to thought — though phrasing it this way is of course itself a thought, and that’s inevitable, since any language that talks about Reality is going to have to use thought, and so be imprecise and imperfect — shines in what Ramana calls the Heart. While Reality is an abstract concept, the Heart is simply the ground of our own awareness. It is the background of thoughts that each of us can access. It does not refer to the physical heart. It refers to the background of thought that we can seek by turning our attention towards whoever it is that is witnessing all our experiences. That witness is “inside” all the other experience, which is on the “outside.” That inmost point is called the Heart. When this inmost “point” is reached, it turns out not to be a point at all, and to be entirely beyond the distinctions of inside and outside.

What we call Reality, which is a grand word which seems to be “out there” and “universal,” is equally in us. It is not merely in us, actually, but rather we are it.

It is the grand concept of Vedanta and of Ramana that the unchanging essence of the “out there” is also none other than the unchanging essence that is “in here.” When stripped of the inessential & the changing, which stuff is actually just a bunch of thoughts of those things, the out there and the in here are not merely similar — they are exactly one and the same.

This Heart is what is behind thought, and it is that from which all thought comes, and to which it all returns. So it is not itself a thought. But only thought can be the object of contemplation. So how are we to turn our attention towards the Heart? We simply have to just be the Heart. Which of course we already are.

“To be as it is in the Heart” means that we are to be just and only as it is in the Heart, meaning to be without thought. It means we have to abandon our delusions of being in thought — of having things to do, goals, doings, experiences. To turn away from thought, to stop pretending to be anything other than the Heart, is the way to contemplate it.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.

'If your right hands offends thee' -- the structural method for seekers dealing with desires & fears

Spiritual seekers find inevitable resistance of various kinds to their self-inquiry and surrender. These resistances are based in attachments to their personal identity and the associated desires and fears.

I'm usually not a fan of overpowering our desires and fears. Where these are strong, I find that is futile. In particular, ideas of laziness and willpower are almost entirely useless. Resistance must be engaged in dialogue, and our feelings shown into the light of awareness.

That said, the ancient method of dealing with desires and fears was structural -- eliminate the circumstances which caused them. Where the desires and fears are relatively weak compared to the strength of the spiritual desire, this can still be useful.

Interview by Gary Haskins

Gary Haskins interviewed me on nonduality, Ramana Maharshi, and the practice on his Youtube channel The Conscious Perspective.