Annamalai Swami -2

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Annamalai Swami: If the intensity to know yourself is strong enough, the intensity of your yearning will take you to the Self.

Question: But still, I must keep up with the enquiry.

Annamalai Swami: If you remain in the Self, enquiry will not be necessary. 

If you move away from the Self and go back to the mind, you then have to enquire again and go back to your Self

Question: To whom does this intensity to realise the Self arise? It has to arise to the T that ultimately has to disappear.

Annamalai Swami: Who is this T? It is neither the body nor the mind. If you remain as the Self, there is neither body nor mind. So what is this T ? Enquire into it and find out for yourself.

When you see the rope, what happens to the snake? Nothing happens to it because there never was a snake. Similarly, when you remain as the Self, there is a knowing that this T never had any existence.

All is the Self. You are not separate from the Self. All is you. 

Your real state is the Self, and in that Self there is no body and no mind. 

This is the truth, and you know it by being it. 

This ‘I am the body’ idea is wrong. 

This false idea must go and the conviction ‘I am the Self’ should come to the extent that it becomes constant.

At the moment this ‘I am the body’ idea seems very natural for you. 

You should work towards the point where ‘I am the Self’ becomes natural to you. 

It happens when the wrong idea of being the body goes, 

and when you stop believing it to be true, 

it vanishes as darkness vanishes when the sun appears.

This life is all a dream, a dream within a dream within a dream. We dream this world, we dream that we die and take birth in another body. And in this birth we dream that we have dreams. 

All kinds of pleasures and suffering alternate in these dreams, but a moment comes when waking up happens.

 In this moment, which we call realising the Self, there is the understanding that all the births, all the deaths, all the sufferings and all the pleasures were unreal dreams that have finally come to an end.

Everyone has experienced dreams within dreams. 

One may dream that one has woken up from a dream, but that waking up is still happening within a dream. Our whole lives are dreams. When this dream life ends and a new one begins, there is no knowledge that both dreams are happening in the underlying dream of samsara.

Bhagavan has instructed us in Who Am I? to see the whole world as a dream.

 When realisation comes, nothing will affect you because you will have the firm knowledge that all manifestation is an unreal dream.

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...had a peaceful experience.......No matter how much I try, I never feel that I am getting any closer to it. How can I get this experience back?

Annamalai Swami: 

By constant self-enquiry. 

‘Who had the experience, and who lost it? 

Who has the yearning to regain it?

 Who has all these thoughts about it?’ 

If you follow this approach, you will ultimately realise who you really are.

The experience you had didn’t come from somewhere else. It is already within you. Find out who had the experience.

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........He told me to read Sivananda Lahari, Ellam Ondre, Upadesa Saram and his other writings. He also told me to do parayana [chanting of scriptural works]. All this was very helpful in keeping my mind on the Self during work......

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Then, one day in the hall, Bhagavan turned to me and said, ‘Your karmas are over’.

I had this great opportunity to surrender to a Guru like Bhagavan, to trust him and to serve him. It didn’t happen through my own efforts. This kind of thing happens very rarely, for beings such as Bhagavan don’t appear very often. If you want to learn, you have to go to school. If you want jnana, you have to go to a jnani.

I want to speak some more about the grace of the Guru. Bhagavan told me that the Guru is the Self who is within. The Self manifests in a form and pushes the minds of devotees towards the Self. At the same time the Guru resides within us as the unmanifest Self. From the inside, he is pulling us towards him. This pushing and pulling is the Guru’s grace.

For the Guru’s grace to work on us, we have to surrender. 

We have to give up all the things of this world, and all other worlds, and direct all our attention towards the Self. 

If we want anything in this world or the next, our energy will be dispersed in these desires, and to fulfil these desires we shall have to reborn again and again.

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Bhagavan says, ‘You are always the Self. It is just your notion that you are not the Self that has to be got rid of.’ How does this happen?

Annamalai Swami: The Self is peace and happiness. Realising peace and happiness within you is the true realisation of the Self. You cannot distinguish between peace, happiness and the Self. They are not separate aspects. 

You have this idea that peace and happiness is within you, so you make some effort to find it there, but at the moment it is still only an idea for you.

To replace this 'idea' by 'experience.':

So, ask yourself, ‘To whom does this idea come? Who has this idea?’

You must pursue this line if you want to have the idea replaced by the experience. 

Peace is not an idea, nor is it something that comes and goes. 

We are always That. 

So, remain as That. 

You have no birth and no death, no bondage and no freedom. 

It is perpetual peace, and it is free from all ideas. 

The ‘I am the body’ idea is what is concealing it. This is what has to go.

......

Question: So the notion of being the body and the mind comes back and covers the experience?

Annamalai Swami: Yes, yes. 

This idea, ‘I am the body’, is not there during sleep. Everyone enjoys sleeping, and the reason we enjoy it is because there are no thoughts there. It is the thoughts that arise subsequently that cause us all our trouble. There is no separate entity during sleep because no thought has arisen to create the image of one.

 When waking comes, this first rising thought, ‘I am the body’, brings separation, doubts and confusion. If you can be without it in the waking state there will be the knowledge, ‘I am Ramana, I am Arunachala. Everything is myself.’ Ram, Krishna, etc., are all you. It is just this limiting ‘I am the body’ thought that keeps this knowledge, this awareness from you.

In the waking state, the jnani has no limiting thoughts, no ego that identifies with a name and a form. His state is crystal clear. Ramana Bhagavan had no ego, no limiting thoughts, which is why he knew himself to be this peace, this happiness.

.......

Annamalai Swami: Bhagavan watched me very closely in the years that I served him in the ashram. One time I went to the Mother’s temple where many people were talking about worldly matters.

Bhagavan called me back, saying, ‘Why should you go to that crowd? Don’t go to crowded places. If you move with the crowd, their vasanas will infect you.’

Bhagavan always encouraged me to live a solitary life and not mix with other people. 

That was the path he picked for me. 

Other people got different advice that was equally good for them. But while he actively discouraged me from socialising, he also discouraged me from sitting quietly and meditating during the years that I was working in the ashram. In this period of my life, if Bhagavan saw me sitting with my eyes closed he would call out to me and give me some work to do.

On one of these occasions he told me, ‘Don’t sit and meditate. It will be enough if you don’t forget that you are the Self.

 Keep this in your mind all the time while you are working. 

This sadhana will be enough for you.

 The real sadhana is not to forget the Self.

 It is not sitting quietly with one’s eyes closed.

You are always the Self.

 Just don’t forget it.’

Bhagavan’s way does not create a war between the mind and the body. He does not make people sit down and fight the mind with closed eyes. Usually, when you sit in meditation, you are struggling to achieve something, fighting to gain control over the mind. 

Bhagavan did not advise us to engage in this kind of fight. 

He told us that there is no need to engage in a war against the mind, because mind does not have any real, fundamental existence.

 This mind, he said, is nothing but a shadow. He advised me to be continuously aware of the Self while I did the ordinary things of everyday life, and in my case, this was enough.

If you understand the Self and be that Self, 

everything will appear to you as your own Self. 

No problems will ever come to you while you have this vision. 

Because you are all and all is the Self, choices about liking or disliking will not arise. If you put on green-tinted glasses, everything you see will appear to be green. 

If you adopt the vision of the Self, everything that is seen will be Self and Self alone.

So these were Bhagavan’s teachings for me: 

‘If you want to understand the Self, no formal sadhana is required.

 You are always the Self. 

Be aware of the Self while you are working. 

Convince yourself that you are the Self. Not the body or the mind. 

Always avoid the thought, “I am not the Self’.’

Avoid thoughts that limit you, thoughts that make you believe that you are not the Self.

I once asked Bhagavan: ‘You are at the top of the hill. You have reached the summit of spiritual life, whereas I am still at the bottom of the hill. Please help me to reach the summit.’

Bhagavan answered, ‘It will be enough if you give up the thought, “I am at the bottom of the hill”. If you can do this, there will be no difference between us. It is just your thoughts that are convincing you that I am at the top and you are at the bottom. If you can give up this difference, you will be fine.’

Don t adopt attitudes such as these that automatically assume that you are limited or inferior in any way.

On another occasion I asked Bhagavan: ‘Nowadays, many people are crossing big oceans by plane in very short periods of time. I would like Bhagavan to find us a good device, a jnana airplane that can speedily transport us all to moksha.'

This time Bhagavan replied, ‘We are both travelling in a jnana airplane, but you don’t understand this.’

In his answers to me Bhagavan would never let me fall into the false belief that I was separate or different from him,

or that I was a person with a mind and a body who needed to do something to reach some exalted spiritual state. 

Whenever I asked him questions that were based on assumptions such as these, he would show me the error that was implicit in the question and gently point me back to the truth, the Self. 

He would never allow me to entertain wrong ideas.

...

...This is the teaching of Bhagavan, my Guru. I am passing it on to you.

You must understand who you are and what you are, and then you must remain as that. 

If you can manage this, this itself will suffice.

 Right now you are under the impression that you are your body and your mind, but the truth is, you are the Self.

 Let go of the T that you imagine yourself to be and catch hold of the real ‘I’, the Self.

What do you hope to gain from your pilgrimage, from going here and there in an external journey? You are holding onto the idea that you are your body and your mind. 

Having assumed this, you are now looking for an external God so that you can worship him.

 Though such worship may be beneficial, it will not take you beyond the realm of the mind. 

While you hold onto the idea that you are a person inside a body, whatever you see will be a manifestation of your own mind. 

You cannot transcend the mind by worshipping your own external projections. 

All these external appearances that you see in front of you are maya. 

They have no fundamental abiding reality. 

To find the Self, to find what is true and real, you have to look inside yourself.

 You have to find the source, the place where all these mental projections arise.

You are looking for satisfaction in the outside world because you think that all these objects you see in front of you are real. 

They are not. 

The reality is the substratum in which they all appear.

 This is what you should be seeking, 

instead of looking for external gods in different pilgrimage places.

An elephant is made out of wood. If we see it as wood, it is wood. But if we get caught up in the name and form, we will see only an elephant and forget that its underlying nature is wood.

All is your own Self. 

This form is different; that form is different. 

This is more powerful; this is worse.

 These are all judgements you make when you see separate objects instead of having the true vision that all is an undifferentiated oneness. 

There may be different varieties of light bulbs, but the current that activates and sustains them is the same.

  You must learn to become one with this activating current, the unmanifest Self,

 and not get caught up in all the names and forms that appear in it.

Here is another verse from one of the Siddhas:

‘Because of your ego you are going to the forest to look for spiritual light. You are looking for this darshan of light in Badrinath and other Himalayan pilgrimage places. These things are the illusion of the mind. They depend on the states of the mind and the functioning of the mind. That which you are searching for is within yourself.’

Bhagavan wrote in Ulladu Narpadu, verse eleven: 

‘Knowing all else without knowing oneself, the knower of objects known, is nothing but ignorance. How instead can it be knowledge?’

All the information the mind accumulates and all the experiences it collects are ignorance, false knowledge. Real knowledge cannot be found in the mind or in any external location. The mind sees through coloured glasses, and what it sees is tinted and tainted by that colour. If your mind is in a spoiled and disturbed condition, the entire world will appear to be in a spoiled and disturbed condition. If your mind is crystal clear, everything will appear to you to be clear and peaceful.

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Your most important objective must be realising the Self. 

If you have not done this, you will spend your time in ignorance and illusion.

 You, your mind, this world - they are all maya. Don’t become a slave to this maya. Instead, realise the Self and let maya become your servant.

I have just remembered another verse from the Siddhas:

‘Many people have struggled years together to realise the Self. Millions and millions of people have struggled, looking for the light outside themselves. If these millions and millions of people have 

died without understanding the Self that is within them, it is because they didn’t understand the real path.’

You must find someone who has followed the right path, someone who has discovered this inner truth for himself, and who stabilised himself there.

 Such a one will give you good advice. 

He will not send you out on unproductive adventures in the outside world. 

Following the advice of someone who has not reached this state is simply a case of the blind leading the blind. 

Neither knows the right path and both will eventually fall into a big hole.

You may find a fruit that is very bitter and decide to improve its flavour. You could take it to all the holy rivers in the country and wash it in each one, but when you come home, the fruit will not be any less bitter than the day you started. You can carry your mind to every comer of the country, visiting all the famous pilgrimage places on the way, bathing in all the holy rivers, doing pujas at all the sacred shrines, but when you return your mind will be in the same state as the day you started. 

Mind is not improved by long journeys to far-flung places. 

Instead, make an internal pilgrimage. 

Take the mind back to its source and plunge it into the peace-giving waters of the Self. 

If you once make this pilgrimage, you will never need to go looking for happiness or peace in any other place.

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Question: Is it not good to remember God and to repeat his name?

Annamalai Swami: 

The Ribhu Gita advises us to remember at all times, ‘I am the Self; all is the Self’. 

The entire universe is ‘I’. 

If you can keep this permanently in your mind, millions and millions of punyas will come to you.

 There were many books that Bhagavan liked, but Ribhu Gita was definitely one of the best. He once said that Ribhu Gita is a book for one’s last life.

You must have read Hanuman’s story in the Ramayana. Hanuman’s mind was completely lost in the name of Ram, and because of this he accumulated great powers. He was able to jump across the ocean because of his full and complete devotion. I advise doing japa to the Self, either by repeatedly thinking about it or by repeating affirmations such as ‘I am the Self’. This affirmation is the greatest mantra of all. If you can do it continuously, without interruption, you will get results very quickly. There is no greater japa, no greater sadhana than this.

The one who is seeking is also that which is sought. 

The seeker and the sought are both Self..

 If you are not able to find this Self within yourself, you will not find it anywhere else. 

Searching on the outside and visiting holy places will not help you.

Many people are visiting swamis, temples and holy places. Doing these things will not yield any good fruit. For real and lasting results you have to look inside yourself and discover the Self within. You can do that anywhere.

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Try to avoid unnecessary activities. Less work is good. 

Devote yourself to your sadhana all the time.

 You dissipate your desire for the Self by undertaking all kinds of useless activities that waste your time and lead to attachments. 

You think that your life is endless and that you can put off meditation till a later date. With this kind of attitude, you will die filled with regrets, not filled with peace.

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Whatever kind of thought arises, have the same reaction: ‘Not me; not my business.’ It can be a good thought or a bad thought. Treat them all the same way. To whom are these thoughts arising? To you. That means that you are not the thought.

You are the Self. 

Remain as the Self.  Don’t latch onto anything that is not the Self.

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If you remain as the Self, no vasanas and no karma will touch or affect you. If you remain in the mind, thoughts of one sort or another will bother you all the time.

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If the thoughts ‘I should meditate’ or ‘I should realise’ arise, ask yourself, ‘To whom are these thoughts arising?’ Why do you need to think about your body and your mind so much? If you are the light, there is no darkness. If you are the Self, there is no thought, no body, and no mind to give you any trouble. Any number of thoughts may come. Let them. 

But remember all the time, ‘I am the Self’. 

You are not the vasanas, you are not the thoughts, you are the Self. 

Keep that awareness and don’t worry too much about what is going on in your mind, and what it means.

Don’t allow any identifications to settle on you. 

Don’t think, ‘I am sitting in Bhagavan’s shrine’. Don’t think, ‘I am doing, I am acting, I am sitting’.

You are the Self, not the body. Even your vasanas are the Self. All is your Self. There are no distinctions, no differences in the Self. Nothing is separate from the Self. You cannot find a single atom, a single thought that is apart from the Self. All is the Self.

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All these doubts that are troubling you arise simply because you are enmeshed in the ‘I am the body’ thought and all the confusing consequences that it brings. 

It is more productive to keep the awareness ‘I am the Self’ than to be analysing the usefulness of effort. 

Sadhana, effort and practice, and any ideas you may have about them, are concepts that can only arise when you believe that you are not the Self, and when you believe that you have to do something to reach the Self.

Even the sequence, ‘To whom has this thought come? To me,’ is based on ignorance of the truth. 

Why? Because it is verbalising a state of ignorance; it is perpetuating an erroneous assumption that there is a person who is having troublesome thoughts.

 You are the Self, not some make-believe person who is having thoughts.

If you remain in the Self, as the Self, no harm can come to you.

 In that state, whatever comes to you will not be a problem. 

There is no duality when you remain as the Self. No thoughts about what you should or should not do, and no thoughts about what can be done or what can’t be done. 

The main thing is not to go out of the Self

 When you have switched on the light, darkness cannot come, not even if you desire it.

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If you abide as the Self, you will see the world as the Self. 

In fact, there will be no world at all. 

No world, no maya, no mind, no distinctions of any kind. It is like the state of seeing only wood in the carved elephant, only threads in the dyed cloth. In that state of being and knowing the Self, ideas of right and wrong, things to do and things to avoid doing, will vanish. 

You will know that they were just mental concepts. In that state you will know that mind is the Self, bondage is the Self, everything is the Self. With that vision, nothing will bind you; nothing will cause you misery.

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If you go to a physical Guru and ask him how to realise the Self, 

he will probably tell you that you are already the Self, and that you should just hold onto the Self that you already are. 

If you can manage that you will be with the true Guru all the time.  You will not need the physical form of the Guru to keep reminding you of who you are. 

In that state you will be living with Bhagavan, staying as the Self, holding onto the real ‘I’ at all times.

If you go to the physical form of the Guru and ask about Self- realisation, you will not be told about the importance of the physical form of the Guru. 

You will be told to hold onto the real ‘I’.

 You will be told that you should not fall into the trap of believing that the Guru is just a body. 

The Guru is inside you as the Self and outside you as a physical form that has manifested in the Self. 

If you follow the advice that the physical Guru gives, you will discover that the inner and outer Gurus are one and the same.

However, very few people can manage this by themselves.

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Initially, abidance in the Self may not be firm and irreversible. Vigilance may be needed at first to maintain it.

There is a verse from Kaivalya Navaneeta that Bhagavan often quoted. 

It speaks of the need for vigilance even after the Self has been experienced for the first time. In the verse the disciple is speaking to his Guru:

‘Lord, you are the reality remaining as my inmost Self, ruling me during all my countless incarnations! Glory to you who have put on an external form in order to instruct me. I do not see how I can repay your grace for having liberated me. Glory! Glory to your holy feet!’

The Guru replies:

‘To stay fixed in the Self without the three kinds of obstacles [ignorance, uncertainty and wrong knowledge] obstructing your experience, is the highest return you can render me.’

The Guru knows that without vigilance, an initial experience of the Self may slip away.

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Grace is always present, always available, but for it to be effective, one must be in a state to receive it and make full use of it. If you want to take a full cup of water from a lake, you have to fully immerse the cup first. If you want to fill your mind with grace, submerge it fully in the Self. In that place the grace will manifest in you as peace and happiness.

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