In the last segment, we saw how devotees often complain that practising vichara becomes mechanical and uninspiring. The question “Who am I?” can lose vitality, leading many to abandon it. The remedy lies in rekindling curiosity, taking note of the tendency to habitually refer to “I,” yet remain unable to identify what it is. The paradox of living as though we know ourselves while remaining fundamentally ignorant can awaken a powerful “doubt sensation,” the starting point of real inquiry. What is this doubt and how can it be useful to us? It is recognising that there is a gap in our understanding of who and what we are. Reflecting on this gap can inspire us to do something about it. Bhagavan comments briefly on the interest for vichara in the past:
Over the centuries, the nature of the ‘I’ has had an irresistible fascination in the quests of deep-thinking minds.[1]
One reason we become fascinated with this “I” is that most, if not all of life’s trouble, seems to start with this I and yet, we are not clear what it is. The illusion created by the mind must be destroyed by the mind, says Bhagavan, after all, the bondage we suffer begins with the mind, “a bundle of thoughts” originating from the thinker, which “vanishes when sought”. [2]
The first thing we notice as we begin vichara practice is how invested we are in the thinking mind. Bhagavan tells us the thinking mind is not our home and yet, we seem to want nothing else:
Thinking is a vritti; Being is not a vritti. If we scrutinize “Who is thinking?” thinking will come to a standstill. [3]
In the last issue we saw how Bhagavan taught us that the “I”-thought is the root of all thoughts and becomes less and less opaque when we investigate it. Turning inward is a metaphor for looking below the thinking mind. Ego’s domain is visual and word-based. It thrives in tangibility and what can be grasped through thought. But while thought may appear as a feature of the inner life, it is actually outside us, part and parcel of the sense realm and its objects.
Two Modes
Bhagavan’s inquiry is interior, designed to shift the centre of gravity from conceptual thought to intuitive awareness. Perplexity born of questioning is a right-hemisphere function—quite distinct from the left hemisphere’s conceptual grasping. The bewilderment brought about by deep questioning is central for Ramana sadhana because it momentarily shifts our attention away from the visual and linguistic clarity that the conceptual mind revels in. If giving up the illusion of certainty is uncomfortable, it is because we instinctively resist any form of ambivalence. We are habituated to rest in what we think we know. Egoic certainty, though comfortable, is not our home, says Bhagavan.
The conceptual mind is related to task-completion and goal orientation, while Bhagavan’s jnana is spiritual knowledge—intuitive wisdom rooted in choiceless awareness. Both left and right hemispheres are necessary and the distinction between them is modal rather than spatial.[4] Yet we often confuse them and think that knowing means grasping in the mode of concepts whereas Bhagavan tells us that true knowing means sensing beyond words and labels in the domain of the Heart.[5]
Drawing on the image from the Upanishad, the Oxford neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist offers the image of a mother bird pecking at a tree to retrieve a worm. The bird’s left hemisphere, with its focused attention, is engaged in the task, while the right hemisphere, with its open awareness, simultaneously surveys the surroundings, listening for danger or the cries of her chicks. Both are active at once. Yet while open attention includes the pecking within its wider field, the task-oriented mind is aware only of the task at hand and not of the larger awareness operating alongside it.[6] Thus, we can say that the left hemisphere’s knowledge is mediated within a closed system and cannot really “break out” to know what lies beyond it. This is what gives the ego the illusion of certainty: it inhabits a confined space and, knowing its small territory well, mistakes its limits for the whole.[7]
Looking for the “I” requires intensive intuitive engagement which can be uncomfortable. Why? Because not knowing is distressing.[8] And yet, a still greater challenge must be met with, namely, our resistance to the inner world.
Why should we resist the inner world? Is not the spiritual Heart the core of us, our very own deepest self?
The Gem Buried Within
Fear of the Heart seems to be universal and is expressed in every culture. Children’s stories the world over tell of a hero who must descend a deep dark well or a cave or a lake on a dark moonless night to do battle with a five-headed monster in order to recover a priceless gem. The dark cavern is the Heart, the five-headed monster, a personification of the samskaras, vasanas, karmic accumulations, pitru dosas and psychic wounds. The gem is the Self, the divinity whose discovery is required for our fulfilment. Might the Divine be playing a trick on us? The Upanishad points to our predicament:
The Self-existent lies inside while the senses are pierced outwardly, causing us ever to look outside of us where the divine cannot be found. [9]
And yet, if we as Ramana devotees are made aware of this misdirection, why should we continue to be tricked again and again?
Early life conditioning, inherited patterns, deeply embedded vasanas, unresolved grief from pre-developmental childhood and samskaras passed down trans-generationally from our ancestors (pitru dosa) or from previous births (prarabdha karma) combine to make this work daunting.
Chillingly, these psychic fragments are not available to the conscious mind but are hidden. Preverbal and subcortical, implicit memories [10] crowd the Heart, veiling it in darkness, causing it to appear concealed and indistinct.
If the jiva is to cross the barrier to the Heart, it will have to confront the one demon it does not want to face, namely, the one I call myself.
We recall a line from Blaise Pascal: all of humanity’s problems stem from its unwillingness to sit quietly in a room alone.
Courage for inwardness thus involves facing the unknown and being willing to relinquish the egoic status quo, i.e. the identity we have come to depend on. A line from the Sufi tradition reads:
Do you think you shall enter the garden of bliss without having undergone the trials of those who have gone before you? [11]
Searching in the Wrong Place
An oft-quoted simile from Nasruddin, the 14th-century “wise fool”, comes to mind. Nasruddin was once found searching for a lost key under a streetlamp in front of his house. When asked where he had dropped it, he replied, “Near my front door.” “Then why search here?” they asked. “Because here there’s more light,” Nasruddin said, “over there, it’s very dark”.
Ego is cunning, even capable of appropriating Bhagavan’s vichara to serve its own ends. We can mislead ourselves by making use of an imitation inquiry. We may appear to be practicing vichara but all the while are subtly avoiding the transformative ground of the spiritual Heart. As long as our inquiry remains confined to the thinking mind, as long as it is mental and conceptual, the ego is safe. What had been designed to dissolve the ego can thus be reconfigured in its service.
Bhagavan spoke of the stick used to stir the funeral pyre, a metaphor for the function of the egoic mind in inquiry. At the conclusion of the cremation, the stick is tossed into the fire.[12] But in conceptual inquiry, we use the stick not to assure the samskaras get destroyed, but rather, to assure that they do not get destroyed.
This is why Bhagavan tells us that true inquiry has to be kept up right till the end, otherwise, ego will appropriate the ground gained for its own advantage, including performative inquiry.
Thought is a poor substitute for the life of the Heart, ever trapping us in the enclosure of the rational mind. In substituting thinking about Truth for a lived encounter with It, we seek to fill the gap left by an absent Heart. We imagine that meaning can be recovered through conceptual refinement. But cutting ourselves off from the deeper layers of experience, opting for mental abstraction, and seeking a mentally-derived spiritual ascendency—calling it Universal Truth—is window-dressing for a path denied.
This unsatisfactory state of affairs is partly known to us, so we increase our efforts and work tirelessly—quantitatively—to make up for the deficit. The cause is our unwillingness to greet the hidden Heart. The false hard way steps in as a compensatory manoeuvre, willing to sacrifice everything except the one thing that needs sacrificing. The false hard way means outward gestures of effort and cost in order not to have to give up something we are clinging to. It means fighting on the wrong battlefield.
The King
Let us imagine a king in the Middle Ages, and let us say—anachronistically—that this king is a Ramana devotee. The king’s advisors warn of the approach of the enemy, armed and ready for battle. The king rallies his soldiers and goes out to meet the aggressor. But he insists on challenging a small contingent of enemy forces in the nearby open field rather than heed his advisor’s warning about the larger more heavily-armed forces rapidly approaching through the nearby forest.
As it turns out, this smaller force is approaching on a battlefield the king has won battles on in the past and which he designated the “Bhagavan Sri Ramana Victory Field”.
The king goes out to the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Victory Field and wins a battle against this small enemy battalion. As he prepares to climb the ridge and cross the valley to return to the palace, he meets the distressed advisor who says, “Sire, why did you engage this small and insignificant battalion when the greater threat was approaching through the forest?”
The king insists, “The forest is too dark whereas the field under the open sky provides good light, and besides, is the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Victory Field where I’ve won earlier battles in Bhagavan’s name.”
“But Sire, did you not see the Living Bhagavan standing on the hilltop motioning you toward the forest?”
The king responds, “What, you mad fellow, what ‘living Bhagavan’ are you talking about? There’s only one Bhagavan and he is installed over here in the mantapam at the head of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Victory Field. Have you not read the plaque there commemorating earlier battles fought and won in Bhagavan’s name? Today I have gone out and won a great victory in Bhagavan’s name”.
With a heavy heart, the advisor then says, “Sire, enemy troops have overrun the palace, looted the royal treasury and the crown jewels, put your loyal guard to the sword, captured your majesty’s daughters, wife, mother, and all the womenfolk of the kingdom, and carried them off into captivity to be sold as slaves. The ramparts have been laid to waste; towns, villages, crops and fields have all been burned to ash.”
The king responds, “What is all that to me? I am not interested in kingdoms but only in Bhagavan Sri Ramana. Today I went out to the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Victory Field and won a great battle in Bhagavan’s name. That’s all that matters.”
Well, we might say this is a strange king, a strange devotee, and yet, we are a little like him, are we not?
We are willing to take up the battle that Bhagavan has assigned us, but only on our own terms and only in the place of our choosing, and not on the battlefield Bhagavan laid out for us.
If we have designated Bhagavan’s place in the world to suit personal preferences, if we have set up false Bhagavan’s according to convenience, pledging allegiance to mind-generated icons, we may be doing so in order to avoid true inquiry and thus maintain ego’s reign.
The king claims to be committed to Bhagavan. But any commitment held narcissistically in the safe domain of the conceptual mind is a subtle enclosure born of ignorance.
In a closed system where we seek to define, contain, and stabilize the chaotic conditions of inner and outer worlds, we risk making “Bhagavan” and “the Self” mental objects set apart from the rest of experience.
To absolutize Bhagavan in thought is to limit Him. The true Bhagavan is not an exclusion but a totality—embracing both the inner and outer without boundary. When we cling to an image, an idea, or even a devotional formulation, we are still operating within the realm of cognition.
Taking the “hard path” of giving up everything for Bhagavan may conceal a deeper avoidance: fear of entering the uncharted territory of the Heart through inquiry. The “dark forest of the Heart” is more demanding than any external renunciation. This is something the Maharshi repeated over and again.
Conceptual identities such as “devotee,” “seeker,” or even “one who is devoted to Bhagavan” have to be seen as constructs of the thinking mind. Even what we call “God” or “knowledge” can be subtly deceptive when held as mere mental objects.
Conclusion
The image we hold of Bhagavan cannot be the real Bhagavan because whatever we conceive of or cling to is an object within the field of thought. It arises in the “mind-door” like any other sense object—fabricated in time and thus not related to the Absolute.
The real Bhagavan is not available to sight nor known by the cognizing mind, is not an object of perception or thought. He abides as the Self in the depths of the Heart. The very act of our clinging signals duality—subject and object.
The true Bhagavan is beyond division, ever-present as the Self and not to be grasped, but to be realised through inquiry in the domain of the Heart. If this comes as bad news, the good news is that vichara—on its own—is capable of rescuing us from such pitfalls. —
(to be continued)
[1] Maharshi’s Gospel, p.72.
[2] Talks §347.
[3] “Eleven Verses on Self-enquiry”, v. 1 (atma-vichara patikam), Sadhu Om.
[4] Experts note that a healthy brain works through communication between both hemispheres, with functions distributed across the whole brain. So strict left-right mapping is oversimplified, though the contrast remains a useful way to describe two broad modes of functioning.
[5] “The Neuroanatomy of the Strategic Mind,” Saranagati, Feb 2021.
[6] The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, p. 74; also, from a talk by Iain McGilchrist at Oxford University, 10 Feb 2011.
[7] Ibid., p. 548.
[8] The left hemisphere values clarity, detail, and control, while the right apprehends reality more broadly, subtly, and less distinctly. Here lies the tension between strategy and faith: one trusts only what can be grasped, while the other opens to what is beyond certainty.
[9] Katha Upanishad.
[10] A form of long-term unconscious memory that enables us to carry out learned actions and recognize familiar patterns automatically, without deliberate recall.
[11] The Quran.
[12] Who Am I? §10. How will the mind become quiescent? By the enquiry ‘Who am I?’. The thought ‘Who am I?’ will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed. Then, there will arise Self-realization.
