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As this is a work in progress, I have some additions and changes to incorporate. Please visit from time to time for periodical updates.] you can ever hope to enjoy ! otherwise knowledge is incomplete.... WE ARE ALWAYS NOTHING BUT THE SELF , but associating ourselves with the ignorance of limitation, with an ego, we forget the Seer and identify ourselves with the seen. But what can we do about it? The habit is so long-standing, birth after birth has been imagined, century after century has been fabricated by the mind, which has thus involved itself more and more in ignorance, that it now finds itself disinclined and, even if willing, almost unable to disentangle itself from the thralls of the play-world it has created." - SADHU ARUNACHALA (Major A.W.Chadwick,O.B.E.) From his INTRODUCTION to TALKS WITH SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI, Published by SRI RAMANASRAMAM, TIRUVANNAMALAI, INDIA NB All italics, bold type, upper case and spacing in the foregoing quotation are entirely mine. If you wish to profit from this site,you must be prepared to try to rise above your little self. All of us have some seemingly insurmountable problems, thanks to our little selves : unwarranted fears, doubts, uncertainties and misgivings, ingrained prejudices, intolerance, groundless suspicions, silly assumptions, negativities, littlenesses, stupidities, affectations, hypocrisy, useless conventions, baseless beliefs, preconceived notions, borrowed opinions and values, misconceptions, jealousy, hatred, narrow-mindedness, closed-mindedness... But we can transcend all of this - if only we really want to. Yes. Transcend. Remember that magic panacea. I promise you that there will be no mortal combat with the ubiquitous Devil, no teeth-gnashing struggle with your 'sinful nature'. Now what is transcending? The story appeared in the Reader's Digest some years ago. The first person account of a brutal rape that happened in South Africa. Even as she was undergoing the terrible ordeal, the girl thought to herself: "This is happening only to the body, not to me. I'm not the body." Call it whatever you like - intuitive knee-jerk reaction or divine help or grace, psychological defense mechanism, even autoscopic hallucination. What really matters is that she was convinced that this 'disidentification' with the body did help her immeasurably and saved her from losing her sanity. She was able to deal with the dreadful trauma. The great Tibetan mystic Milarepa was in agony on his deathbed. Someone remarked:"You are in great pain." Milarepa answered:"No. But there is pain." Those two examples are of the highest or extreme kind, which many of us would not be able to emulate. Even at a lower level, in everyday life, we can try to avoid becoming neurotics plagued by obsessive-compulsive behavior and so on. In touch-typing, instead of English I often find I've typed Englsih! Hæ nugæ ad seria ducunt. These trifles lead to serious matters. Indeed, they can develop into serious mental blocks or hang-ups, if you try to fight them or get disgusted with yourself. Luckily, I've learned to accept them as normal and I take them in my stride. The frequency of such typing errors has gone down appreciably. I don't worry too much if I go back to check again if I've pulled out the plug during a thunderstorm. Transcending is the trick here. We are always primarily, basically, in essence, only The Self. Instead of the word The Self, you could use words like the soul and spirit, but let's stick to The Self, which nobody can quarrel with. Everybody is aware of himself, one cannot deny oneself, and even to deny oneself one has to be there! Only secondarily are we the body and the mind. So we are always The Self, transcending the body and the mind. The dead are considered dead only in the body, there is general belief in the continuance and continuity of the individual as the soul.
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