https://www.davidgodman.org/bhagavan-and-thayumanavar/
… when touching songs were recited or read out before him, or when he himself was reading out to us poems or passages from the lives or works of famous saints, he would be moved to tears and find it impossible to restrain them. He would be reading out and explaining some passage and when he came to a very moving part he would get so choked with emotion that he could not continue but would lay aside the book. To quote a few instances, such a thing happened when he was reading and explaining some incidents in Sundaramurti Nayanar’s life in connection with the Tiruchuzhi Mahatmyam, and also when he was reading out ‘Akarabuvanam-Chidambara Rahasyam’ in Thayumanavar’s works, and came to the twenty-fourth verse:
Conceiving you as everything from earth to space,
I shall record my thoughts on the large page of my mind,
and looking at that image ever and again, I shall cry out:
‘Lord of my life, will you not come?’
Repeatedly believing myself to be You,
I am unable to fix my attention on anything else.
Lamenting in this way, like one whose heart is wounded,
dissolving inwardly, so that tears pour down in floods,
uttering deep sighs, unaware even of my body, I stand transfixed.
His [Bhagavan’s] eyes were so filled with tears and his throat so choked with emotion [as he read these words] that he had to put aside the book and break off his discourse.
( My Recollections of Bhagavan Sri Ramana, Devaraja Mudaliar, pp. 45-6, 1992 ed.)
.......
Question: What is satsang?
Bhagavan:
Satsang = Atmasang
Satsang means only Atma sang [association with the Self].
Only those who cannot practise that are to practise being in the company of realised beings or sadhus.
Question: When does one get the company of sadhus?
Bhagavan: The opportunity to be in the company of a Sadguru comes effortlessly to those who have performed worship of God, japa, tapas, pilgrimages etc for long periods in their previous births. There is a verse by Thayumanavar that points out the same thing:
For those who, in the prescribed manner,
have embarked upon the [pilgrim] path
of divine images, holy sites and holy tanks,
a Sadguru, too, will come to speak one unique word,
O Supreme of Supreme! ( ‘Paraparakkanni’, verse 156)
Only he who has done plenty of nishkamya punyas [austerities performed without any thought of a reward or consequence] in previous births will get abundant faith in the Guru.
Having faith in the Guru’s words, such a man will follow the path and reach the goal of liberation.
(Living by the Words of Bhagavan, 2nd ed., pp. 220-1.)
........
The ‘unique word’, summa iru, uttered by a qualified Guru, has an immediate and liberating impact on those who are in a highly mature state.
For the vast majority, though, hearing this word from the Guru’s lips is not enough. Bhagavan discussed this in the following dialogue, which he illustrated with more verses from Thayumanavar.
A young man from Colombo asked Bhagavan, ‘J. Krishnamurti teaches the method of effortless and choiceless awareness as distinct from that of deliberate concentration. Would Bhagavan be pleased to explain how best to practise meditation and what form the object of meditation should take?’
Bhagvan:
Effortless and choiceless awareness is our real nature.
If we can attain it or be in that state, it is all right.
But one cannot reach it without effort, the effort of deliberate meditation.
All the age-long vasanas carry the mind outward and turn it to external objects.
All such thoughts have to be given up and the mind turned inward.
For that, effort is necessary for most people.
Of course, every book says ‘Summa iru‘,
i.e. ‘Be quiet or still’.
But it is not easy.
That is why all this effort is necessary.
Even if we find one who has at once achieved the mauna or supreme state indicated by ‘Summa iru‘, you may take it that the effort necessary has already been finished in a previous life.
So, that effortless and choiceless awareness is reached only after deliberate meditation.
That meditation can take any form which appeals to you best.
See what helps you to keep away all other thoughts and adopt that method for your meditation.
In this connection Bhagavan quoted verses 5 and 52 from ‘Udal Poyyuravu’ and 36 from ‘Payappuli’ of Saint Thayumanavar. Their gist is as follows.
‘Bliss will follow if you are still.
But however much you may tell your mind about the truth, the mind will not keep quiet.
It is the mind that won’t keep quiet.
It is the mind which tells the mind “Be quiet and you will attain bliss”.’
Though all the scriptures have said it, though we hear about it every day from the great ones, and even though our Guru says it,
we are never Quiet,
but stray into the world of maya and sense objects.
That is why conscious deliberate effort is required to attain that mauna state or the state of being Quiet.
( Day by Day with Bhagavan, 11th January, 1946)
Sam: That conscious, deliberate effort = Tapa.
What else?
......
In order to teach me to discern the truth
of how all these woes, impossible to measure –
which spontaneously accumulate, multiplying bundle by bundle –
were insubstantial, like the spectacle of a mountain of camphor
that disappears entirely at the touch of a flame,
he associated with food, sleep, joy, misery, name-and-place,
and wearing a bodily form similar to my own, he came as the grace-bestowing Mauna Guru
to free me from defilement, in just the same way that a deer
is employed to lure another deer.
(‘Akarabuvanam-Chidambara Rahasyam’, vv. 15-17)
............
The Master appears to dispel … ignorance. As Thayumanavar puts it, he appears as a man to dispel the ignorance of a man, just as a deer is used as a decoy to capture the wild deer. He has to appear with a body in order to eradicate our ignorant ‘I am the body’ idea.
(Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, talk no. 398)
Coming thus, he claimed my body, my belongings, my very life
as his possessions, and teaching the path of rejection, he declared:
‘The five senses, the five elements, the organs of action, and all the rest,
you are not. You are none of these.
Nor are you any of the qualities that pertain to these.
You are not the body, nor are you knowledge and ignorance.
You are chit, the real, which is like a crystal,
reflecting the qualities of whatever is placed before it,
and yet having no connection with it.
It is my inherent nature to enlighten you
when I find that you are ripe for it.’
‘If you desire to gain the vast, supreme reality
that is the temple of refreshing grace,
inseparable from all that is, becoming pure consciousness
and obtaining the indestructible state whose nature is bliss,
listen as I explain to you the proper means:
May you live long, winning in your heart
the reality that is devoid of all qualities!
May you attain the state of bliss-consciousness,
so that all the dense accumulation of ignorance disappears!
May you liberate yourself from bondage!’
Through his grace, he imparted to me the state of mauna,
the true knowledge in which bondage is abolished:
‘For that state, there is no thought,
no “I” sense,
no space, no time, no directions, no pairs of opposites,
nothing lost, no other, no words,
no phenomena of night and day,
no beginning, no end, no middle, no inner or outer.
Nothing is.’
‘When I say: “It is not, it is not”, this is not a state of nothingness.
It is pure identity.
It is the nature that eternally endures.
A state that cannot be expressed in words.
It is the swarupa which engulfs everything.
So that neither ‘I’ nor anything else appears.
As the day consumes the night, it consumes ignorance entirely.
Easily overcoming and swallowing up your personal consciousness,
it transforms your very self, here and now, into its own Self.
It is the state that distinguishes itself as self–luminous silence.’
‘Other than the nature that is its own Self,
it allows nothing else to arise.
Because there is no other consciousness.
Should anything attempt to arise there it will, like a camphor flame, vanish.
The knower, devoid of both knowledge and objects known, falls away,
without falling, since it still remains.
But who can tell of its greatness, and to whom?
By dint of becoming That, one exists only as That.
That alone will speak for itself.’
‘If we call it “That”, then the question will arise, “What is That?”
Therefore did Janaka and the other kings
and the rishis, foremost among whom is Suka,
lived happily, like bees intoxicated with honey,
entirely avoiding any mention of “That”.
Remain in this state.
’Thus did he speak.
Grant me the abundance of your grace
so that, in the nirvikalpa state of total tranquillity,
I may know and attain the condition of supreme bliss,
in accordance with your rule.
I shall not sleep or take up any other work until I attain this state.
(‘Akarabuvanam-Chidambara Rahasya’, vv. 18-23)
.........
‘Is it possible to gain knowledge without the blessings of a Guru?’ asked a devotee. Even Rama, who was like a dullard in his early life, became a realised soul only with the help of his Guru.’
‘Yes, said Bhagavan, ‘how can there be any doubts?’ The grace of the Guru is absolutely necessary. That is why Thayumanavar praised his Guru in his hymns.
(Letters and Recollections of Sri Ramanasramam, p. 26)
In January 1742 Thayamanuvar withdrew into his hut and left the following message pinned to the outside of the door:
Dear friends,
Withdraw the mind from the senses and fix it in meditation.
Control the thought-current. Find out the thought-centre and fix yourself there.
Then you will be conscious of the divine Self.
You will see it dancing in ecstasy. Live in that delight. That delight-consciousness is the God in you. He is in every heart.
You need not go anywhere to find Him.
Find your own core and feel Him there.
Peace, bliss, felicity, health – everything is in you.
Trust in the divine in you. Entrust yourself to His Grace.
Be as you are!
Off with past impressions.
He who lives from within an in-gathered soul is a real sage, even though he may be a householder.
He who allows his mind to wander with the senses is an ignoramus, though he is learned.
See as a witness, without the burden of seeing.
See the world just as you see a drama.
See without attachment. Look within.
Look at the inner light unshaken by mental impressions.
Then, floods of conscious bliss shall come pouring in and around you from all directions. This is the supreme Knowledge.
Realise! Aum! Aum!
(The Silent Sage, by Dr B. Natarajan, published by The Himalayan Academy, 1978)
....
The state of the Self
This first section begins with a discussion that centred on experiences that Tennyson, the famous 19th century English poet, induced in himself:
In continuation of yesterday’s conversation about Tennyson, the relevant passage was found in a footnote to the English translation of Upadesa Saram.
It was not in a poem but in a letter to B. P. Blood.
Bhagavan asked me to read it out, so I did:
‘…a kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone.
This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being. This is not a confused state.
But the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest.
Utterly beyond words, where death was a laughable impossibility.
The loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.’
Reworded: The loss of individuality was realised to be the only true existence.
There was not the slightest trace of it being viewed as something that was dwindling away into extinction.
Bhagavan said:
‘That state is called Abidance in the Self.
It is described in a number of songs.’
.........
He took up Thayumanavar and it opened at the very page he was looking for… (Day by Day with Bhagavan, 17th June, 1946)
Mauna Guru, you who declared:
‘The state in which there is neither merging nor separation,
no pairs of opposites, no expansion or contraction,
no qualities, no coming or going,
that leaves no lasting trace;
that is free of the three defilements;
that cannot be conceived
in terms of having a top, bottom or sides;
that in which there is neither bindu nor nada,
and in which the five elements,
variously constituted, do not exist;
that in which the knower and his knowledge are not;
that which is without decay;
that which, moreover, it is not one and not two,
and is without voice and without mind;
that which is free, even, of the ecstatic seeking,
wherein the devotee tastes with his lips,
and drinks from the ocean of bliss
that is the eternally enduring
supreme and all-pervading reality –
that is the enduring state.’Siddhanta Mukti’s Primal Lord!
Dakshinamurti, enthroned in glory upon the lofty Siragiri!
Guru, you who are pure consciousness’s form! (‘Chinmayanandaguru’, verse 8)
Bhagavan quoted two other Thayumanavar verses on this occasion, but they are not really expressions of what the Self is like.
They are, instead, pleas from a disciple who wants to attain this state.
Bhagavan mentioned them because he said that they both contained references or allusions to the sahaja nishta, the natural state of Abidance in the Self.
(Day by Day with Bhagavan, 17th June, 1946)
Reality, pervading everywhere!
Like a supplicant who seeks the favour of a benefactor
begging him, in a manner free of all reproach,
to show compassion and grant his petition
[I apply to You]. Hear my plea! O Transcendent Supreme!
Listen to the petition of one
whose heart is of wood and show pity.
[My plea is] to dwell in mauna
in the fullness of your ethereal grace,
the state of sahaja nishta.
( ‘Asaienum’, verse 2)
…Well indeed does your divine mind know
how my heart melted in tender love,
how I languished,
hoping that I might clearly apprehend this state.
If I try to abide in this state for a while,
then my ignorance, a foe posing as a friend, comes and makes my mind its home.
Shall defiling maya and karma return again?
Shall births, in unbroken succession, assault me? These thoughts fill my mind.
Lend me the sword of true steadfastness [sraddha],
give me the strength of true jnana so that my bondage is abolished;
guard me, and grant me your grace!Consummate perfection of bliss, whose abundant fullness reigns,
without exception, everywhere I look!
(‘Paripurnanandam’, verse 5)
......
Question: How are the three states of consciousness inferior in degree of reality to the fourth? What is the actual relation between these three and the fourth?
Bhagavan:
There is only one state, that of consciousness or awareness or existence.
The three states of waking, dream and sleep cannot be real.
They simply come and go. The real will always exist.
The ‘I’ or existence that alone persists in all the three states is real.
The other three are not real and so it is not possible to say that they have such and such a degree of reality.
We may roughly put it like this.
Existence or consciousness is the only reality.
Consciousness plus waking we call waking.
Consciousness plus sleep we call sleep.
Consciousness plus dream, we call dream.
Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go.
The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it.
Because by long habit we have been regarding these three states as real, we call the state of mere awareness or consciousness as the fourth.
There is, however, no fourth state, but only one state.
In this connection Bhagavan quoted verse 386 of ‘Paraparakkanni’ of Thayumanavar and said that this so-called fourth state is described as waking sleep or sleep in waking – meaning asleep to the world and awake in the Self.
Sam: Jagrit in Sushupti.
As also, Sushupti in Jagrit.
(Day by Day with Bhagavan, 11th January, 1946)
O Supreme of Supreme!
To remain,
free of sleep,
beyond thoughts’ corruption, is this the pure state of grace?
Pray, speak!
( ‘Paraparakkanni’, verse 386)
.....................end..........................
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