Beauty ＆ Pure 48

Ramana Maharshi is not the frail, old, dying body that I saw reclining on a chair, but the Unimaginable, egolessness, pure radiance, and the body, however much we may have loved its appearance, was merely like a glittering diamond reflecting the light that he really was.

I did not understand all this, when I first arrived. To me, he was something like a divine person, and I was inclined to compare him with Jesus or the Buddha. But Jesus or the Buddha were images in my head, formed on the basis of the belief in which I had been brought up, and on stories heard and read later on.

And Sri Ramana Maharshi, from the first second I saw him, was anything but an image in my head. He was a bomb, exploding the myth of my life until then, within a few minutes, and without a word. His famous, to some, notorious question, “Who Am I?” immediately got a totally new colour. For several years, at home, I had been meditating on it, and it had something of a mystical, yogic and philosophical ring about it.

Now it turned into, “Who on earth do you think you are, that you should be so important as to cultivate a garden full of problems and questions”? And this was not by way of condemning my ‘self’, my ego as it is usually called in Vedantic circles — but the question took this form in a sphere of utter astonishment: how, boy, tell me, how have you been so misled as to think that you or your ego had any importance? Instead of seeing that an ego is a mere stupidity or the belief in a fantasy, you have been cherishing it and even cultivating it by feeding it with important questions and problems. Your life until now was led by the belief in something totally imaginary