‘If you move with the crowd, their desires will infect you.’ Annamalai Swami experience
Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharishi always encouraged Annamalai
Swami to live a solitary life and not mix with other people. That was the path Sri
Ramana Maharishi picked for Annamalai Swami.
Other people got different advice that was equally good for
them. But while he actively discouraged me from socializing, he also discouraged
me from sitting quietly and meditating during the years that I was working in
the ashram. In this period of my life, if Bhagavan saw me sitting with my eyes closed,
he would call out to me and give me some work to do.
On one of these occasions, he told me, ‘Don’t sit and
meditate. It will be enough if you don’t forget that you are the Self. Keep this
in your mind all the time while you are working. This sadhana will be enough
for you. The real sadhana is not to forget the Self. It is not sitting quietly
with one’s eyes closed. You are always the Self. Just don’t forget it.’
Bhagavan’s way does not create a war between the mind and the
body. He does not make people sit down and fight the mind with closed eyes.
Usually, when you sit in meditation, you are struggling to achieve something,
fighting to gain control over the mind. Bhagavan did not advise us to engage in
this kind of fight. He told us that there is no need to engage in a war against
the mind, because mind does not have any real, fundamental existence. This
mind, he said, is nothing but a shadow. He advised me to be continuously aware
of the Self while I did the ordinary things of everyday life, and in my case,
this was enough.
If you understand the Self and be that Self, everything will
appear to you as your own Self. No problems will ever come to you while you
have this vision. Because you are all and all is the Self, choices about liking
or disliking will not arise. If you put on green-tinted glasses, everything you
see will appear to be green. If you adopt the vision of the Self, everything
that is seen will be Self and Self alone.
So these were Bhagavan’s teachings for me: ‘If you want to understand
the Self, no formal sadhana is required. You are always the Self. Be aware of
the Self while you are working. Convince yourself that you are the Self, and
not the body or the mind, and always avoid the thought, “I am not the Self’.’
Avoid thoughts that limit you, thoughts that make you
believe that you are not the Self.
I once asked Bhagavan: ‘You are at the top of the hill. You have
reached the summit of spiritual life, whereas I am still at the bottom of the
hill. Please help me to reach the summit.’
Bhagavan answered, ‘It will be enough if you give up the thought,
“I am at the bottom of the hill”. If you can do this, there will be no
difference between us. It is just your thoughts that are convincing you that I
am at the top and you are at the bottom. If you can give up this difference,
you will be fine.’
Don t adopt attitudes such as these that automatically
assume that you are limited or inferior in any way.
On another occasion I asked Bhagavan: ‘Nowadays, many people
are crossing big oceans by plane in very short periods of time. I would like
Bhagavan to find us a good device, a jnana airplane that can speedily transport
us all to moksha.'
This time Bhagavan replied, ‘We are both travelling in a
jnana airplane, but you don’t understand this.’
In his answers to me Bhagavan would never let me fall into the
false belief that I was separate or different from him, or that I was a person
with a mind and a body who needed to do something to reach some exalted
spiritual state. Whenever I asked him questions that were based on assumptions
such as these, he would show me the error that was implicit in the question and
gently point me back to the truth, the Self. He would never allow me to
entertain wrong ideas.