In the last issue, we saw how Bhagavan frequently employed the dream metaphor to illustrate how a mistaken self-view leads to suffering and how true perception frees us. He emphasized that distress arises not from external conditions but from clinging to false self-images. Bhagavan explained that spiritual progress isn’t about acquiring new knowledge but removing ignorance, using the example of the sleeping dream to highlight the illusory nature of the waking dream.
Both the dream ‘I’ and waking ‘I’ are transient mental constructs, continuously replaced by new thoughts. The mind, likened to a thief, falsely claims identity with the body, obscuring the underlying substratum of pure, changeless awareness. This illusion is reinforced by biological mechanisms, particularly the brain’s salience network, which filters perceptions based on survival needs—functioning like a virtual reality headset[1]. The brain’s interface[2] optimises for successful interactions with the environment rather than accurate representations of Reality. Such processes maintain a false sense of continuity, reinforcing egoic assumptions and limiting access to spiritual breakthroughs. If, as suggested in the first segment, ego can be seen as a side-effect of salience filtering, side-stepping wounds of the Heart is related to the same filtering mechanism.
Awakening involves transcending biological conditioning and embracing broader awareness. Freedom emerges through realizing that both waking and sleeping dream states are projections within the silent, witnessing Self—the true foundation of consciousness.
We saw how the sleeping dream is like the waking dream. The protagonist of the sleeping dream—called the dream avatar—does not doubt its existence and serves as the central character of the dream narrative.
In deep sleep there is no dream subject or avatar. Bhagavan comments:
In deep sleep you do not say that you are sleeping or that you are going to wake up. But still, you are there. Only when you are awake you say that you have slept.[3]
Among the three states, deep sleep is closest to the Self. Bhagavan elaborates:
Waking is long and a dream short; other than this there is no difference. Just as waking happenings seem real while awake, so do those in a dream while dreaming. In dream, the mind takes on another body. In both waking and dream states thoughts, names and forms occur simultaneously.[4]
Therefore, the waking dream subject never doubts its centrality. Bhagavan concludes:
The jiva remains in the Heart in deep sleep and in the brain in the waking state… In deep sleep the world is not cognised; and so it does not exist for the sleeping man. Therefore, the world is a sequence of the ego. Finding the ego’s source is the final goal.[5]
In the sleeping dream, no question arises about the dream avatar’s reality. Only upon waking is its imaginary nature revealed. At that point, no one can convince us that the dream avatar was real. Bhagavan tells us this applies equally to the waking dream.
Yet, despite knowing that the waking dream is unreal, we persist in indulging the delusion. Knowledge acquired by the waking dream subject is known only by that same illusory identity. This parallels what Bhagavan says about the police chief we lodge our complaint to is himself the thief who robbed our house the night before. The ego is content if the waking dream subject learns more about the ego’s illusoriness, so long as the illusion continues. In other words, knowledge about ego’s illusoriness doesn’t bring freedom on its own if such knowledge is merely added to the dreamer’s intellectual repertoire. A spiritually informed dream subject highly versed in the scriptures, for example, may not come a hair’s breadth closer to freedom.
This is the grand illusion in the age of Rahu[6], where an increased volume of connectivity and information transfer is perceived as the path to freedom, as if data alone can overcome ignorance. Bhagavan recognised the illiterate person who sees through the waking dream as far superior to the erudite trapped in the dream, even if the former cannot articulate his experience. Bhagavan’s translation of Vivekachudamani offers the following:
Bubbles and waves are nothing but the sea. All that appears in a dream exists in the dreamer. Likewise, all that seems separate from me is in fact myself. This is the vision of resolving the effect into its cause (pravilapa drsti).[7]
Surrender
How does depth psychology, i.e. dream work and the work of enquiring into the unconscious, fit into Bhagavan’s teaching? The answer is surrender. Bhagavan completed his shadow work at the age of sixteen with his death experience. Afterward, intensive surrender was unnecessary as all the samskaras and shadows were resolved. His ripeness for this experience may well have developed in former births. In the period that followed, Bhagavan’s subsequent days under the iluppai tree, weeks in Patala lingam, and months at Guru Murtham—all in deep samadhi—were an extension of his surrender in the upper room at Madurai. Indeed, samadhi embodies surrender in a most profound way.
A misunderstanding among 21st-century seekers is equating meditation with attempting to achieve stillness by a force of the will. True meditation involves surrendering to inner conditions and using stillness to calm and purify them.
Ramana devotees are often eager to begin enquiry but want to avoid surrendering to the painful conditions within. Surrender and shadow work are murky, dark, and unsettling—most of us prefer to skip them. The central error of contemporary non-duality, sometimes called ‘neo-advaita’ is turning Bhagavan’s teaching into an intellectual, armchair exercise, where we only read about the path and reflect on what we read, instead of doing the work within. This is sometimes called the spiritual bypass.
Bhagavan may not have spoken of integrating fragmented psychic components, but he emphasized the importance of surrender. A life of non-surrender—a feature of the waking dream—negatively impacts the sadhaka who bypasses the hard work of engaging with inner fragments: discomfort, disappointment, frustration, resentment, remorse, anger, fear and early life wounding.
Lives are wasted imagining that surrender can be sidestepped. We may even convince ourselves we are surrendering when parroting phrases like “It’s all Bhagavan’s will.” No doubt it is all Bhagavan’s will, but are we truly willing to give our tender hearts over to it?
Resolution of the Human Eye
High-resolution vision in the human eye occupies only the area of a thumbnail held at arm’s length. At any given moment, only a small portion of our visual field is truly in focus. Yet we imagine that our entire field of vision is sharp and clear. In truth, most of what we see is blurred or incomplete; anything behind us, far away, or hidden within the micro-world of our bodies, hearts, and minds remains unseen. Most of what surrounds and indwells us is cloaked in darkness.
It has been said that faith is the evidence of things unseen.[8] The ego, however, craves clarity. It insists that what lies in plain sight is all there is. But the vision spoken of by the Rishis is not literal sight; it is knowledge of what cannot be seen, what is diffuse, subtle, and hidden—especially in the caverns of the Heart. Egoic vision is clear but imaginary, like a dream—a well-constructed illusion.
What makes the waking dream so alluring is our identification with what we see and the assumption that it represents the whole. This comforting illusion makes us believe everything is within our control, within our conceptual grasp. Thus, we feel no urgency to sift through the rubble of the heart or venture into the shadowy dungeons of the psyche. “We have all we need right here,” says the ego—and with that, the waking dream persists.
Bhagavan’s Surrender
Bhagavan’s surrender is not easy to understand. It involves moving away from the well-lit safety of the ego’s literalist clarity into the murky depths of the hidden heart. There, meditation becomes still and grounding. Enquiry serves as a digging tool that uncovers buried samskaras. Excavation can be triggering, awakening the anxiety of the non-surrendered state. That anxiety then drives us back toward the familiar comfort of egoic illusion. Bhagavan comments:
It is enough that one surrenders oneself. Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one’s being. Let us not delude ourselves by imagining the source to be some God outside us. The source is within. We must give ourselves over to That.[9]
An Irish philosopher[10] once recalled how, in his boyhood, his father would simply sit and listen to the cows chewing their cud. What greater form of contemplation and surrender could there be? If we learned this simple practice, we would need no additional meditation training.
Objective Clarity and Explicit Knowing
The longing for clarity in grasping external objects is a misplaced form of knowing. True clarity arises when we accept what cannot be seen with the physical eyes. Spiritual maturity involves trusting the unseen more than what appears obvious. If we try to possess Bhagavan’s teaching with objective clarity—putting it into a tidy conceptual box, routinising it, making it formulaic, i.e. reducible to a few philosophical, semantic or grammatical principals—we become unable to live it. The egoic mind wants to feign firm control over that which can only be surrendered to, i.e. lived into.
Fluid Compensation
Fluid compensation is the effort to make up for the sense of inner lack through outward activity. We imagine if we read enough books, memorize enough verses, watch enough videos, or scan the web long enough, we’ll eventually be full. But that day never comes. Instead, the need grows more insatiable.
Chasing clarity through the narrow bandwidth of physical seeing causes us to neglect the inner world. But the inner ramparts of the spiritual heart are not available to the physical eye or even to internal visual consciousness.
Fixation with Light
The waking dream is sustained by our infatuation with light. Most often, the pathway to freedom involves encountering darkness. This is borne out even in nature. Imagine a hornet trapped in a glass bottle with its base facing the sun. The hornet tirelessly circles the sunlit bottom, convinced that freedom lies in flying toward the light. It never escapes. Eventually, it collapses from exhaustion.[11]
Now imagine a common housefly in the same bottle. It flits aimlessly—left, right, up, down—bouncing off surfaces. But in its chaotic movement, the housefly inadvertently turns away from the light and discovers the dark end of the bottle where a small opening lies. In a few moments, it escapes into freedom. The housefly, unlike the hornet, is not fixated on light. It surrenders its failed strategies again and again, and in doing so, finds release. The hornet, locked into its linear logic and devotion to light, never surrenders—and perishes in the effort.
Stepping into the Invisible
Bhagavan’s surrender involves the willingness to give up the light to find the light. It resembles a 20th-century myth of the hero who must cross a chasm. An oracle has foretold that the hero must step into the void, placing his full weight over empty space, trusting that an invisible bridge will appear only once he has taken the decisive step. Unless he takes the step, the bridge will remain unseen. But the moment he entrusts himself to the unseen bridge, it reveals itself, enabling him to cross.[12] This is surrender. As a saying goes, we cannot cross a chasm in two small jumps.[13] But neither can we cross it by refusing to jump at all.
There may come times when our faith fails us as we later face chasms—times when we cannot go back yet cannot move forward. In such moments, we must be honest about inner and outer conditions and accept that our faith is sometimes insufficient for the task at hand.
The dream is pierced—what is unseen is real; what is apparent to the senses is not to be trusted. A true encounter with the dream world demands deep searching. We must know, despite what our senses report, that the invisible bridge exists. The leap of faith is mysterious—non-linear, non-literal, non-objectifiable, even irrational and paradoxical. The only map for this terrain is surrender.
Each moment of surrender helps us integrate new challenges unearthed by enquiry. Every level of uncovering awakens what lies buried—including latent demons that arise and attempt to dissuade us. In such moments, we may lose heart or feel we lack the courage to proceed. We are then invited to work with what enquiry has stirred up, to integrate it, and to make peace with freshly awakened fears. We alternate between breaking into deeper layers of samskaric sediment and embracing all that is frozen there, including the original fear that caused the stratification to begin with. As we sit with the uncertainty awakened by the latest excavation, we make every effort to return enquiry. The basic difference between an ordinary person and a spiritual warrior, it has been said, is that the former takes everything as a blessing or a curse while the latter takes everything as a challenge to be met.[14]
Enquiry and Surrender
Enquiry and surrender involve darkness. Like the housefly, we must turn from the light and trust that we’ll find our way even if we cannot visualise it. The dream of the small self is born of clinging to what can be seen and known through the egoic mind—explicit knowledge, Aristotelian logic, and rationality—at the expense of all that cannot be seen or known.
A heart fixated on a hyper-literalised view of the world—entranced by the hope that some newfound purity will free it of its burdens—can only be liberated through descent: embracing the burden within rather than wishing it away. Blake versified this theme saying, If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is—infinite.[15] Here the poet is speaking of the inner doors. Our mistake is confusing external physical light with inner illumination.
We try to escape the waking dream by clarifying its contents. But the urge for explicitness is rooted in insecurity—our need to grasp what we know and to be assured of its validity. These are the marks of a flat literalistic ego. We believe that by rooting out all that is vague and shadowy, we come closer to the Self. But the craving for certainty is as corrupting as any other selfish desire. “Who are we to pray for our own realisation?” says Bhagavan. Might we instead be willing to stand knee-deep—or even neck-deep—in our defilements, and release every notion that we can kill them off or pretend them away?
If we pretend them away, the waking dream tightens its grip, and the ego wins long-term job security. Where our defilements are, there our heart is—encased in them. Defilements cling to the heart and to nothing else. Our defilements are negative reflections of our resistances. We heal them not by fighting them, but by holding them neutrally.
Inflation
Stated in short, the brightness of egoic clarity appears as wakefulness. In reality, it is only dream-slumber born of delusion. If ego becomes swollen in its dream-like denial of the Self, it ever seeks its reflection in the measurable, i.e. what can be possessed and controlled—resulting in a flat quantitative view of the life-world.
In its quest for independence, the ego cuts itself off from the unconscious. If our hearts were once animated by divinity, they are now barren—a mirror of ego’s own inner void. The ego’s longing for transformation, vouchsafed by attrition through surrender, is thwarted by relentless clinging to illusions of power. Imagining itself as a hero, the ego becomes inflated and tyrannical, losing all contact with the Self. The grace of the Self, when refused, reappears not as light but as fragmentation. In rejecting what we fear, the ego seals its fate, pursued by the shadow it seeks to avoid which includes all that is hidden in the Heart.[16]
The Shadow
Bhagavan seldom spoke of karmic afflictions. Yet he stressed the importance of surrender—allowing things to be as they are without force or resistance.
Often, we want the Ramana path to serve as a shortcut, helping us bypass the messy regions of the heart. Failing that, we settle for spiritual pantomime—mechanical sadhana that avoids the tender places within.
Enquiry is not mechanical, intellectual, or philosophical. It is a direct encounter with what is hidden within—a sober look at what remains unintegrated. Depth psychology teaches that what we repress returns in fresh guises. The waking dream is built on repressing the unpleasant. If we imagine ourselves one step ahead of where we are, we may also imagine that what is unpleasant can be resolved by throwing it away. But it only festers in the sealed-off heart, menacing us in unexpected ways.
The Road to Humility
We choose the waking dream because reality is uncomfortable. By facing conditions honestly, we strive to be free of the dream, even if we have always clung to it like a child to its mother’s apron strings.
If the modern malaise is estrangement from the Heart, as Jung said,[17] it is because the Heart is divided—one part reaching upward toward the light, the other retreating into the shadows. Neither on its own is liberating. One seeks to escape the earthly by denying defilements and karmic burdens; the other recoils from the light, retreating into a cocoon. If either pole is denied, the waking dream persists.
Ramana in Hell
In 1896, Seshadri Swami urged his devotee Venkatachalam to enter the dark depths of Patala Lingam where the young Brahmana Swami sat in meditation. Coming from the glare outside and moving down into the darkness below, Venkatachalam initially couldn’t see anything. After a few minutes, however, he could make out a young face behind the lingam. But the sight gave him chills and he beat a hasty retreat.[18]
In the Western tradition, Jesus descends into hell, where he remains for three days before ascending to heaven. Patala—hell—is the realm of nagas and demons. When saints appear there, it signifies the dissolution of dualities—good and evil, matter and spirit, heaven and earth. The same applies to Siva doing tapas in the charnel grounds—the place of death, fear, and the unknown where transformation takes place. Bhagavan comments:
Samsara is full of likes and dislikes and the other opposites. Like a dream, it seems real but, on waking, it vanishes. Because the dream is negated on waking, we know it to be unreal, but the world persists, and we imagine it to be real. So long as the substratum—the non-dual Brahman—is not seen, the world seems real, like illusory silver in a piece of mother of pearl.[19]
The Dream of Opposites
The dream of opposites appears real only while we remain immersed in it. Its persistence does not confirm its truth. The illusion arises from ignorance of Brahman, the ever-present non-dual substratum. When Brahman is realized, Bhagavan tells us, the world is seen as a projection upon the Self—lacking independent reality. Bhagavan recalls the Upanishad:
Just as the spider spins its web out of itself and then withdraws it, so too does Brahman project and dissolve the universe.[20]
Hell reflects a psyche at odds with Spirit—a rational ego estranged from the Self—but it only threatens those who deny what is unwanted. If subterranean spirits, nagas, and demons represent unconscious fears and desires, they lose their power to disturb us when integrated.
In a puppet show, the villain is a cruel-faced puppet with a harsh voice. Children are frightened. But the puppeteer is not frightened. Behind the curtain, he pulls the strings and inflects his voice to animate the villain. To the enlightened mind, hell is like this—a scene in a puppet show. The liberated one is a witness to the waking dream but no longer fears its appearances. Therefore, Jesus prays for his persecutors, and Bhagavan jokes through surgeries without general anaesthesia and faces impending physical demise with serenity.
Light and dark, pleasure and pain, self and other—these sustain the illusion of the waking dream. Their resolution is symbolized in Arunachala as Ardhanarishvara (Siva-Parvati)—the half-male, half-female united as God. The solution for the polarities is opting for the pole we reject, like homeopathy treating illness by aggravating its symptoms, or curing snakebite with snake venom. The marriage of opposites is a symbol of all our longed-for “reunions up and down the scale of being”:
Emotion and intellect, matter and spirit, body and soul, the one and the many, male and female, human and divine, freedom and necessity—all the contradictions of our fractured existence are most marvellously woven together in the wedding of soul and spirit, which preserves our [apparent] two-foldedness right into the heart of the One.[21]
Surrender is under the sway of ego’s calculus by being weighed against what we believe we are entitled to. When things don’t go our way, we want Bhagavan to rescue us. But grace often shows up as loss—the Divine’s way of redirecting the heart. Painful as it is, loss becomes the ground for a deeper vision. In the crucible of adversity—when stripped of control—our hearts are transformed, and our prayers grow urgent like those of Gajendra, the Elephant King, who finds himself in the jaws of a mighty crocodile.[22] Only at such moments does real transformation take place. Bhagavan comments:
If you have surrendered, you must be able to abide by the will of God and not make a grievance of what may not please you. Things may turn out differently from what they appear. Distress often leads to faith in God. [23]
In these uncertain times, concern for the future can be used as an antidote to our head-in-the-sand apathy. In the era of an AI arms race, the dream intensifies, and the conventional challenges of daily life are compounded by unprecedented global developments which indeed make us feel like we are caught in the jaws of a crocodile. Our task is to hand everything over to Bhagavan. After all, surrender is the means for resolving the opposites—the portal leading us out of our glass-bottle prison.
The Gita tells us, He who sees darkness in light and light in darkness is truly wise. Further, it says, the illumined one sees the pairs of opposites equally. In non-dual awareness, the polarities are not actually opposed but arise from the same source. Awakening doesn’t mean choosing one over the other but holding both in awareness until the gap narrows. Release from the waking dream comes from relinquishing what we cling to and accepting what we oppose. It is not about seeking pure light or perfect ease but giving ourselves over to the conditions of our lives as they present themselves to us each moment, trusting that all will be as it should be if we remain steadfast and stay true to the path laid out by Bhagavan. —
(to be continued)
Footnotes and References
[1] ‘Headset’, from the cognitive scientist-mathematician Donald Hoffman.
[2] This is like the operating system on our laptop which gives a desktop view, rather than just 0’s and 1’s. Of course 0’s and 1’s are also an ‘interface’ for what more fundamentally are pulses of electricity.
[3] Talks, §46, 12th April 1935.
[4] Who Am I? §22.
[5] Talks, §29, 4th February 1935; Talks, §53, 15th June 1935.
[6] Jyotishis tell us that Rahu (one of the navagrahas or nine planets) governs pathways of information transfer, such as nerve fibre in the body, or telegraph wires, internet connections and ultimately neural networks and AI.
[7] Vivekachudamani, in the Collected Works, p. 259.
[8] Hebrews 11.1.
[9] Talks, §208, 18th June 1936.
[10] John Moriarty from an interview by RTE.
[11] From a talk by Roshi Bodhin Kjoelhede at Rochester Zen Center.
[12] A rare moment when Hollywood taps into archetypal wisdom is the following scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: <https://youtu.be/sBBbq2g7yf8?si=xRWUAa_6z8VWEWYF>
[13] Shunya Kjoelhede in a public talk.
[14] From Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan.
[15] From William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
[16] Adapted from Patrick Harpur’s The Philosopher’s Secret Fire.
[17] The Secret Tradition of the Soul, Patrick Harpur, p. 206.
[18] Saranagati, March 2025, p. 5, from Seshadri Swami of Tiruvannamalai, S.A. Subramanian, 1998.
[19] Atma Bodha §6 and §7, Collected Works, p. 199.
[20] Who Am I? §8; Mundaka Upanishad 1.1.7
[21] The Secret Tradition of the Soul, Patrick Harpur, p. 218-19.
[22] Srimad Bhagavatam, 10.88.8 says that when the Lord favours someone, He will gradually take away their blessings, causing even loved ones to turn away. Though painful, this drives the devotee to seek refuge in God alone, deepening inner growth. Gajendra’s story illustrates this: caught by a crocodile and helpless, he realizes no one can save him. In total surrender, he calls upon the Supreme as the only refuge from the serpent of time. His despair-born surrender becomes the gateway to freedom—grace revealed through loss.
[23] Talks §43, 28th March 1935.
