Self realized souls lived here, as great examples to mankind!

In this world, everyone wants to remain happy and joyful. None wants grief or pain at any point of time. Also, everyone wants to know about everything. The third wish is that everyone wants to remain alive forever. Bearing a few people, most of us have this grand aim in this world. Why people seek always happiness? The answer is simple. He parted from Eternal Bliss. It is his fundamental legacy and right. It is not a sin to desire for perennial Joy and happiness. Only the way chosen by man is not correct. He thinks that he can derive happiness from external things and persons. He is unaware that he is the source of happiness and his happiness really originates from his inner self! Likewise, we are all children of Immortality but we identify ourselves with the perishable body and confuse ourselves when the bodies perish after a time. The fact is that the Self is immortal and is known as “Sath”, the ever existing one. We can automatically infer that since the Self is Ever existing, it is not created by anybody or product of anything. It is the most fundamental entity even when there is no creation as such. It is the primordial One. From the Self, mind emanated and creation ensued. Hence, mind is the real cause of creation and without the mind, none can perceive the world or the things. The third foremost quality of the self is it is full knowledge. It has not acquired the knowledge and it is verily ‘Knowledge”. Hence, the three things by which we can realize the self is 1. It is immortal and ever existing and it was not created by any and this presupposes that there was no second entity other than the Self. 2. It is full of knowledge or Wisdom. This implies that the Self is all knower and none can know the Self. 3. It is full of Eternal Bliss! There is no diminution of the Bliss on any account. We mortals experience joy as a temporary phenomenon since our joy comes through the fleeting senses!

Having said thus, let us think about the ways and means to gain our innate bliss. All the scriptures point out to the one fact that one has to internalize his vision. One needs to withdraw the senses from the visible world and focus on the inner Self. For that, we have to develop perfect faith in the immanence of the Self everywhere. In fact, there is no place where the Self is absent. It is all pervading and fills up the creation and cosmos. One analogy is that the fish lives in water and it is surrounded on all sides by water. Likewise, the entire creation too is enveloped by the Self and there is nothing beyond it. When we are confirmed in our faith, the only aim of life then is to reach for the Self and merge in it.

There lived in South India, one great saint named “Ramana Maharishi”, who always remained one with the Self. He never had body conscious, and whatever happened to the body, he ignored it completely. He knew intuitively that He is the indestructible Self and not the perishable body. He had a proof of it when he was hardly fourteen years old. One day, he was lying in the terrace of the house. A sudden feeling of ‘death’ enveloped him. He had no fear but want to feel it. Hence closed his eyes, stopped breathing and thought “now the body has died’, people will carry it to the burning ghat and put the body on fire. What will happen to me? Whether I will survive the death of the body? Then intuitively he realized that he will survive ‘death’. His body will perish but He won’t suffer death. He was established in the Truth that he is not the body, mind, intellect or the senses. He is the eternal Self, eternal witness of the drama of creation and destruction! The moment, he realized this truth; he was no more interested in living among the family!

Once somebody had told him that there is a place called “Thiruvannamalai’. His only thought now is “how to reach the place? He had an old atlas from which he came to know that it is near Villupuram. Fortunately, on that day, he received Rs.5/- as payment of school fees for his brother. He wrote a small letter in which he said, “This is in search of my Father. This has engaged in a noble task and hence do not search for this. He even avoided mention as ‘I’ since he knew that “I” represents the SELF and not the body. He went by train to Villupuram, alighted there and purchased some food to satisfy his hunger. He had some coins left. He thought of walking the remaining distance but somehow he swooned in front of a pundit’s house. Finding that he was a Brahmin boy, the Pundit revived him and asked him to eat some sweets since that day way the birthday of Krishna. Ramana had a pair of gold ear rings which he pawned with the Pundit and obtained some money. He said he will retrieve it later but he never returned to the place again!

He travelled to the place called Tiruvannamalai. First he went to the temple tank. Somebody asked him whether he want to tonsure his head? He accepted and after that there was heavy pour of rain and he was bathed by providence. He removed his sacred thread and thrown it away. Now he had no more attachments. He went straight into the temple and stood before the sanctum. “I have come to you, saying this he was absorbed in himself. After some time, the priest wanted to close the doors. Hence he asked Ramana to come out. He gave him some food which was offered to the deity. Ramana listlessly moved to an underground cellar and he was oblivious of anything was absorbed completely in his Self. He sat there for six months. Cockroaches have eaten his posterior skin and blood was oozing and pus formed. But he never moved and not eaten. Only God has saved the boy Ramana from death since many poisonous creatures were creeping freely.

We saw from the above that a sudden experience of death has given him Self-knowledge and he was the one example who lived the remaining forty and odd years as a fully realized soul. When he passed during 1950, a star was seen raising high from the place and ascended to the hill top. He was a rarest soul on earth. Paul Brenton has written a beautiful book on him!