Who is this I? It is neither the body nor the mind. If you remain as the Self, there is neither body nor mind. So what is this I ? Enquire into it and find out for yourself.
When you see the rope, what happens to the snake? Nothing happens
to it because there never was a snake. Similarly, when you remain as the Self,
there is a knowing that this I never had any existence.
All is the Self. You are not separate from the Self. All is
you. Your real state is the Self, and in that Self there is no body and no
mind. This is the truth, and you know it by being it. This ‘I am the body’ idea
is wrong. This false idea must go and the conviction ‘I am the Self’ should
come to the extent that it becomes constant.
At the moment this ‘I am the body’ idea seems very natural for
you. You should work towards the point where ‘I am the Self’ becomes natural to
you. It happens when the wrong idea of being the body goes, and when you stop
believing it to be true, it vanishes as darkness vanishes when the sun appears.
This life is all a dream, a dream within a dream within a dream.
We dream this world, we dream that we die and take birth in another body. And
in this birth we dream that we have dreams. All kinds of pleasures and
suffering alternate in these dreams, but a moment comes when waking up happens.
In this moment, which we call realising the Self, there is the understanding
that all the births, all the deaths, all the sufferings and all the pleasures
were unreal dreams that have finally come to an end.
Everyone has experienced dreams within dreams. One may dream
that one has woken up from a dream, but that waking up is still happening
within a dream. Our whole lives are dreams. When this dream life ends and a new
one begins, there is no knowledge that both dreams are happening in the
underlying dream of samsara.
Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharishi has instructed us in Who Am I?
To see the whole world as a dream. When realisation comes, nothing will affect you
because you will have the firm knowledge that all manifestation is an unreal
dream.
The mind that we use for self-enquiry is the pure mind, the
sattvic mind. By using this sattvic mind we do self-enquiry to remove the
impure mind, which is rajas and tamas. If you keep on doing self-enquiry with
the sattvic mind, ultimately, this sattvic mind will be dissolved in the Self.
Annamalai Swami