An Aye for An `I'

A R NATARAJAN





The vision of the self and awareness of it as the abidance in the heart -where the unbroken awareness of one's existence can be felt spontaneously as the `I-I' -has been described by Ramana Maharshi. What obstructs one's awareness of the fullness of existence is the ego: the mind's wrong identification with a particular body , mistaking it to be the `I', or the subject. Hence the destruction of ego, or its merging with the source, the only way to experience the joyous and uninterrupted throb of `I-I'.Like the diver diving deep, searching for pearls on the ocean floor, Ramana says we have to explore within, with keen intellect as one would do to recover a thing that has fallen into a deep well. Similarly , the core of the mind, too, is only consciousness; it is the false notion resulting in its identification with a particular body that has caused the limitation.
`I'-consciousness cannot be the body or the mind because both are different or non-existent' as in dream and deep sleep respectively . Once this false notion is negated, one is off the mental movement. Only the search for the source of the mind can end its restlessness. The object-oriented world in which it is now caught up can never give peace to a mind because “there is no place like home“.
Self-enquiry is the search for the source of the mind by the mind. In Arunachala Pancharatnam, Ramana says, “If one enters within, enquiring, `Wherefrom does this `I' arise?' he dissolves in his own true nature and merges in you, Arunachala, as a river in the ocean.“