Explore the deep spiritual insights of Ramana Maharshi in our latest "Beyond the Book" series. This video delves into the essence of self-inquiry and the path to inner peace as taught by the revered Hindu guru in 'The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi'.
In this episode, we uncover the teachings of Ramana Maharshi in a book that guides seekers through a journey of self-discovery and enlightenment.
The discussion starts with a personal story of my sister's transformative experiences in India, particularly at Maharshi's ashram. We dive into the philosophy of identifying the true self - the self beyond our names, bodies, and societal roles.
The narrative intertwines with fascinating references, including Carl Jung’s perspectives and the classic "The Razor's Edge," revealing the interconnectedness of Western and Eastern spiritual thoughts.
We look to demonstrate Maharshi's simplistic yet profound approach to realizing the 'self' and how this realization can lead to a life of peace and fulfillment. Join us as we explore these timeless spiritual teachings and their relevance in our modern lives.
For more enlightening discussions and to join a community of like-minded seekers, visit: https://Kishar.org
Explore the deep spiritual insights of Ramana Maharshi in our latest "Beyond the Book" series. This video delves into the essence of self-inquiry and the path to inner peace as taught by the revered Hindu guru in 'The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi'.
In this episode, we uncover the teachings of Ramana Maharshi in a book that guides seekers through a journey of self-discovery and enlightenment.
The discussion starts with a personal story of my sister's transformative experiences in India, particularly at Maharshi's ashram. We dive into the philosophy of identifying the true self - the self beyond our names, bodies, and societal roles.
The narrative intertwines with fascinating references, including Carl Jung’s perspectives and the classic "The Razor's Edge," revealing the interconnectedness of Western and Eastern spiritual thoughts.
We look to demonstrate Maharshi's simplistic yet profound approach to realizing the 'self' and how this realization can lead to a life of peace and fulfillment. Join us as we explore these timeless spiritual teachings and their relevance in our modern lives.
For more enlightening discussions and to join a community of like-minded seekers, visit: https://Kishar.org
How do you come to know there's great power inside of you? This book we're discussing today, which is “The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi” can show you the way. It lays out the path from where you are to a place that's both nothing and everything. This is your true path. And even if this path may not be for all of us, because we each have our own unique spiritual path in a way that we're going to go, this wisdom is going to resonate with most of us in some way. This incredibly powerful work can give you this detailed map in only 135 pages. Years ago, my sister spent almost a year in India and she saw the Bodhi tree of Buddha and she waded through the Ganges during a religious pilgrimage. She lived in a hut by the ocean and she saw all these amazing things. And she spent several weeks at the Ashram of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. And all these amazing things that she saw and experienced, She tells me that her deepest and greatest spiritual experience was at Ramana Maharshi's ashram. And I love the synchronicity of the universe. one of my dad's favorite movies is The Razor's Edge. It's based on this famous book by a guy named Somerset Maugham, and I just recently discovered that the guru depicted in this book and movie is based on Ramana Maharshi. So this ashram that my sister visited was for this same spiritual person that this movie was based off of. It's also one of Bill Murray's best dramatic roles and one of his earlier movies. the copy I read of this was the book that my sister brought back from her time in India at Maharshi's Ashram there have been multiple versions of this book printed. And the one that I have has an introduction by the famous psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Jung. I definitely recommend that you try to find this version if you can find it, But if you can't, don't let that stop. You just read any version that you can get your hands on. But this one with the introduction by Carl Jung is an excellent opening to Ramana Maharshi's work. Young was a really important figure in bringing together Western science, Eastern philosophy, Western philosophy, metaphysics into this single stream of consciousness and study. It's had this huge impact on how you and I see our world today. And he really and truly understands the great and truly important work that was done by Maharshi.
Jung said of Ramana Maharshi:
in India, he is the widest spot in a white space. That's a powerful quote. I think that if you if you really think about all of the deep, meaningful religious and spiritual traditions in the subcontinent and someone like Carl Jung saying, you know, this is one of the best things that you could read from there, that's powerful stuff. And after reading this, I believe that I understand what he's saying. This book has real power, and its actual power lies in its simplicity. I think there's something beautiful to that. Let's look at the simplicity and complexity of truth. Sometimes the simplest things are the most powerful and can move you the most. Ramana Maharshi teaches that self inquiry will lead to knowing and understanding the self. And when I say the self, I mean the real self. That self with a capital S, that's the higher consciousness inside of each of us. It's the divine. The Hindus called the Brahman. It could be God, the universe, Christ nature. It has all these names that we have from around the world in all these different cultures. But it's all saying very similar things. it's interesting to look at the religions and faiths all around the world and see what they say about finding the Divine. Maharshi tends to do this in the simple, most straightforward way. He understands the journey to achieve. Knowing this self, that self with the capital s is complex and it can take a long time. But the actual path is this very short one and it's one that's easily traversed, if you could only see it. But seeing it is that hard thing. That's the hardest part, is being able to see that this, this path to ourselves is so short and simple. It's not like you have to find it. It's already there and maybe there's a wall between where we are and where we want to go or where we need to go. And even though this wall might be self constructed by us, we still have to get through it. We still have to get around it or over it, any way that we can get through the obstacle, The title of this book could have also been Who Am I? This is the whole distilled concept of his teachings. Ask that question. Who am I? Are you your name? Are you your body? Are you your job? Are you your hobbies? Are you your possessions? Are you your talents? I know there's a lot of questions, but stick with me here. Are you your desires? Are you your relationships? Are you your emotions? Are you your thoughts? Are you your mind? That creates these thoughts? Are you your ego that drives the mind? And these thoughts? Are you your individual consciousness? These are all the things that make up this world and reality that we all share together that you walk through every single day. But they aren't you. They are not your true identity or your essence. That thing deep inside of you. So beyond all of that, who are you? As we read this work, we come to understand that we're something amazing, that the thing beyond our human form, behind our consciousness, part of the universal everything going back to what the Hindus called the Brahman or the universe, as you think about the question of who am I, I'll quote Maharshi here. If I am none of these, then who am I? After negating all of the above mentioned as not this, not this, that awareness which alone remains that I am. So he's saying we're none of those things. But when you take it all away, when we strip all of this stuff that we think we are, or that people or society or culture has told us we are. That's who we are. It's this essence behind all of that. It's this universal essence. Before we move on, please subscribe by hitting the watermark in the lower right hand corner. And if you think any friends or family might benefit, please share this video with them. Mari Maharshi says We see glimpses of the divine of ourself every single day. Happiness is derived from our true self. It's where the truth resides. It's peace and joy. And he strikes me as a bit of a universalist or an ominous. He sees Christianity in much the same way as he sees his own belief and this specific brand of yoga that he teaches. And he'll describe things differently and make comparisons that may make many Christians uncomfortable. But his analysis rings true to me, and I think it would ring true to people of any religion or faith. Our mind and ego are always active. They're always thinking. They're always doing. It's always manifesting something. It's always trying to put thoughts and emotions and feelings and all this stuff and noise in our head. If we can tame the ego and we can, we can then quiet the mind. We clear ourselves of thought. And if we set all this stuff aside, we can see the true self. We can become one with our consciousness. And we're free. At this point, we find peace regardless of whether you subscribe to this exact thought or system of belief. Ask yourself if you can see the truth of this, or at least a variant of this in your life. Can you look at your totality of experiences and see that this can kind of ring true in the way that you live and the way that you see your own being, your own experience, your own true self? Don't we feel the divine We have this connection with all other things out in nature and including our fellow humans. We see and feel the beauty of the world all around us. It's all connected. It's simple. And yet it may be hard to describe. And the thing is, I might not be doing the best job of it. And he definitely does a better job of explaining it more beautifully in this book. And it contains these instructions on self inquiry, finding the self, the true self in each of us, realizing the self in each of us. So it's not just finding it, but it's realizing it. So, okay, here it is. Do I realize this is me? He mostly does this by asking questions and then providing the answers to his disciples. It's a script between his followers and him that's kind of recorded in this book. It's simple and easy writing. It's super easy to understand. It's about accepting who you are not in your physical body, not in your mind, and not what you're thinking, that you're something much greater, something much simpler, something very pure. The ‘I’ is the ego. Ask yourself who am I? You may go through that whole series of questions from earlier in the episode, ask the question and then answer even through a series of multiple things you think you may be go back to. Who am I? And ponder this question and keep asking it. You can ask it as this mantra. Okay. I've asked the question. Now I'm going to try to find the answer when I'm to tell myself who I think I am. And it can lead to this incredible place. And we don't need books or all these things to tell us this. It's all just there, right inside of us. But books or even videos like this one can help illuminate the path, right? Like, that's why we read books. That's why we watch videos. Because maybe there's something that somebody says or somebody writes that that gives us that moment where we're like, okay, I get this. I can use this and I can go forward in my own life and, you know, move forward with that exploration and it can be this really beautiful thing. So I encourage you all to be curious and to go explore yourselves. And there are many paths to seeing the beyond. Maharshi's method is about ultimate realization and finding that self within and beyond where you have this permanent relationship with this thing beyond us and there's other methods that we know of that take us to this point beyond there's deep breathing exercises of the Hindus and Buddhists, as well as other mystics around the world that can take us to this really enlightened state. There's psychedelics that can take us there. And for many, and maybe not everybody, but for most of us, if we use these other things, they're shortcuts to the divine. And it's this temporary sight where we have this this link to the beyond. But we we have a hard time staying there just with psychedelics or just with deep breathing. Baba Ram Dass famously wrote and be here now about this exact experience that he used psilocybin psychedelics with Timothy Leary at Harvard and they saw beyond they saw what they described as the universal oneness or like God of everything, not like a humanistic God, but the God of the universe. And they kept taking more psychedelics, psilocybin, LSD. And they saw the universe, they saw everything. They kept seeing the divine beyond their true self, but they couldn't make it last. They kept trying to come up with compounds, chemical compounds, scientific compounds that would make it last and continue the experience. But they couldn't hold on to that universal connection of oneness. And that's when Ram Dass left Harvard quit his job and he went to India and he found the true way, the path of ultimate realization that is this more permanent thing. And this is the way that is taught by Ramana Maharshi in this book. And that's where you asked yourself the question, Can I believe in this end state? the tricks to actually believe that you have truth and peace within yourself, that it's going to grant you greater joy and give you more happiness than you could ever think that you could achieve or accomplish, and that that's going to be bigger than any worldly thought that you could have or experiences you could have or possession that you have, that this this thing beyond this connection to it is going to be bigger than than ideas or money or hope of something bigger that you're always wishing for it, but never get. And that sounds simple, but you know, it can be this treacherous path if it's not approached with this certain perspective that you can understand that this is easy. But believing in this whole other matter, that actually believing is being committed to something, not committed to some ideology or religion or faith, it's really being committed to yourself. It's similar to what a lot of religious and spiritual beliefs around the world teach. And that's that's about surrender and release and letting go. You don't have to see this in a Christian way. As far as a surrender of Christ on the cross. It's okay if you see it that way. But the idea of surrender release letting go, it's present everywhere and most philosophies and most spiritual constructs in most religions, it's usually some truth that comes up in those teachings. And it's really the ultimate trust fall. But you're not falling back and hoping that this group of people catch you. You're falling backwards knowing, not thinking, but knowing that you will catch yourself and that the universe will catch you because you are the universe. So if you take that trust, fall into yourself, you're surrendering to yourself. You're finding this deep thing, this deep true thing inside of you. And I love this idea of being true to ourselves, where you're true to yourself. Shakespeare probably had a right when he said, to thine own self be true. And that quote came to me as I read this book. And that quote comes to me as I read other really meaningful spiritual and religious books and spiritual philosophies from around the world. The journey of Maharshi disciples are also important in this work. Many people traveled to meet with him. They traveled great distances from all over the world, and some of them stayed for a long time. Months at a time, years at a time. Some stayed for just a matter of hours. And as I read through this process of the questions from his disciples and his followers, and then I absorbed Maharishi answers, it struck me that the disciple was were kind of preoccupied with learning or finding the answer to what was on the other side. They wanted to know what it was like on on the side that Maharshi saw the enlightened side. And so what was that like? And Maharshi couldn't describe it because it's everything. This is the idea of This is everything. This is the universe. How do you explain to someone what everything is and to understand what it is, we just have to walk through this wall and see ourselves. Because again, we're that divine. We're the Brahman. We're the everything. And so I'll repeat again, this is the kind of book that can change your life in only 135 pages. It can bring you to tears of reflection when you're reading it and thinking about the love of someone like Ramana Maharishi and his love for the world and his message that he wants to share with people. What are your thoughts on this concept of Who am I? Are you familiar at all with Ramana Maharishi? Do you see this as the path to the beyond, to yourself? I'd really like to know what you think, and if you hit me up in the comments, let's, you know, have a discussion. I will absolutely get back with you and please read this book. It's easy. It's easy to read. It's it's really short. This is an easy five star review. And I definitely wouldn't pass up on the chance to kind of be able to go read this thing that could possibly change your life for a peaceful and open minded community where we can share journeys and be ourselves and have conversations just like this. Please visit Kishar.org. Please like this video, if you'd like us to keep making content just like this. And until next time, I wish you peace on your journey.