Self-enquiry must be done continuously. It doesn’t work if you regard it as a part-time activity. You may be doing something that doesn’t hold your interest or attention, so you think, ‘I will do some self-enquiry instead’. This is never going to work. You may go two steps forward when you practice, but you go five steps backward when you stop your practice and go back to your worldly affairs. You must have a lifelong commitment to establish yourself in the Self. Your determination to succeed must be strong and firm, and it should manifest as continuous, not part-time effort.
For many lifetimes you have been immersed in ignorance. You
are habituated to it. All your deeply rooted beliefs, all your patterns of behavior
reinforce ignorance and strengthen the hold it has over you. This ignorance is
so strong, so deeply enmeshed in all your psychological structures, it takes a
massive effort over a long period of time to break free from it. The habits and
beliefs that sustain it have to be challenged again and again.
Ignorance is ignorance of the Self, and to remove it Self-awareness
is required. When you come to an awareness of the Self, ignorance vanishes. If
you don’t lose contact with the Self, ignorance can never arise.
If there is darkness, you remove it by bringing light.
Darkness is not something real and substantial that you have to dig out and
throw away. It is just an absence of light, nothing more. When light is let
into a dark room, the darkness is suddenly no longer there. It did not vanish
gradually or go away piece by piece; it simply ceased to exist when the room
became filled with light.
This is just an analogy because the Self is not like other
lights. It is not an object that you either see or don’t see. It is there all the
time, shining as your own reality. If you refuse to acknowledge its existence,
if you refuse to believe that it is there, you put yourself in an imaginary
darkness. It is not a real darkness. It is just your own willful refusal to
acknowledge that you are light itself. This self-inflicted ignorance is the
darkness that has to be banished by the light of Self-awareness. We have repeatedly
to turn to the light of the Self within until we become one with it.
Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharishi spoke about turning inwards to
face the Self. That is all that is needed. If we look outwards, we become
entangled with objects and we lose awareness of the Self shining within us. But
when, by repeated practice, we gain the strength to keep our focus on the Self
within, we become one with it and the darkness of Self-ignorance vanishes.
Then, even though we continue to live in this false and unreal body, we abide
in an ocean of bliss that never fades or diminishes.
This is not going to happen in a moment because lifetimes of
wrong and ignorant thinking have made it impossible for most of us to focus
intently and regularly on the Self within. If you leave your house and start
walking away from it, and if you continue this habit over many lives, you will
probably be a long, long way from home when you finally decide that you have
had enough and that you want to go back to where you started from.
Don’t be discouraged by the length of the journey, and don’t
slacken in your efforts to get home. Turn 180° to face the source of your
outward journey, and keep moving back to where you started. Ignore the pain,
the discomfort, and the frustration of seeming not to get anywhere. Keep moving
back to your source, and don’t let anything distract you on the way. Be like
the river on its journey back to the sea. It doesn’t stop, take diversions, or
decide to flow uphill for a while. It doesn’t become distracted. It just moves
slowly and steadily back to the place its water originated from. And when the
river dissolves in the ocean, river is no more. Only ocean remains.
Jiva [the individual self] came from Shiva and has to go
back to Shiva again. If there is a big charcoal fire, and one burning ember
jumps out, the fire in the ember will soon go out. To reignite it, you have to
put it back into the fire, back into its burning source.
There is no happiness in separation. The jiva has no
happiness, contentment or peace so long as it remains a separate being. The
separate being comes from the Self. It has to go back there and end there. Only
then will there be eternal peace.
The energy of the mind comes from the Self. In the waking state
the mind functions as a separate entity. In the sleep state it goes back to the
source. Again and again it comes out and goes back. It does this because it
doesn’t know the truth of what it really is. It is Self and Self alone, but its
ignorance of this fact makes it miserable. It is this feeling of separateness
that gives rise to desires, suffering and unhappiness. Keep the mind in the Self.
If you can do this, you can live in peace both while you are awake and also
while you are asleep. In deep sleep all differences are dropped. If you keep
the mind in the Self during the waking state, there will also be no
differences, no distinctions. You will see everything as your own Self.