The one who sees

The true transmission

Everything we see strikes us as curious and wondrous. Yet the most astonishing thing is the very one we overlook: that single, boundless Power by which all these things, and the very sight that beholds them, exist at all.

Don't fasten your attention on these things as they replace one another – on life, on death, on the flicker of events. Don't even rest on the act of seeing itself, on the way you perceive. Hold your thought only on That which sees it all. On That which stands behind everything.

At first this will seem almost impossible – but little by little something begins to change. It takes years of steady, daily practice – this is how a master is grown. Give it at least a quarter of an hour a day. Try to keep the mind turned, without wavering, toward That which sees. It is within you.

Don't expect to find some object, some clear image for the mind to seize. There will be none. And though it takes years to truly find It, the fruit of such concentration shows within four or five months. It shows of itself – in sudden, unbidden insights, in a quiet peace of mind; hardships grow easier to bear, and a calm strength gathers around you. And always – the strength that comes of its own accord, without any effort.

I pass this to you in the same words, the very words a teacher speaks to his closest students. From this day, in contemplation, let your whole thought rest not on how you look, nor on what you see, but motionless – on That which sees.

Look into your own true nature. Eyes open or closed, everywhere there is only the One. Look at the one who looks within you: this is the I – not "I, Ramana," not "I, so-and-so," but that very life which, within you, is aware, before any thought of self. When this recognition of yourself arrives, none of your old notions of the world will remain.

When you sit in a room, you are the same person, in the same state, whether the windows are open or closed. Just so: if you are established in Reality – in what truly is, beneath all thought – it is all the same to you whether your eyes are open or closed, whether there is bustle around you or everything has gone still.

Let go of the ego – that "I" which takes itself to be a separate body, a separate little person with its own name – and beneath it a true foothold in yourself opens. Your pride was only the pride of that "I." While you cling to it, you see others too as separate, as strangers – and then pride, grievance and comparison have room to play. Let it go within yourself, and in others the "separateness" falls away too, and pride simply finds nothing left to grasp.

As long as a sense of separateness lives in a person – as if he were on his own, cut off from the whole – thoughts will not release him; he is forever pulled and tugged. But the moment he finds again the original Source and this sense of separateness grows still, peace arrives.

Look at the waters of the ocean. They evaporate, gather into clouds, the wind carries them off, they thicken and fall as rain. The waters run down from the heights as streams and rivers – and flow on until they return to their beginning, to the ocean. And there, at home, they grow still.

So you will see the law: where there is a sense of being torn from the Source, there is anxiety, agitation, ceaseless motion – and so it stays until that separation dissolves. It is the same with you. Right now you take yourself for the body and think you are separate, on your own. You need to return to your beginning – and only then can this false "I am only this body" finally fall away, and you can be happy.