This is an article I assembled in 2008 and posted on my blog. It was a response to several readers who were discussing Bhagavan’s teachings on renunciation.
Through Knowledge or Through Practice
I wrote this article in 2008 in response to online discussions about whether knowledge of Vedanta was a prerequisite for Self-realisation. One school of Vedanta was claiming that Ramana Maharshi couldn’t be enlightened because he hadn’t studied Vedanta properly. I found this proposition to be so absurd, I wrote this article as a kind of refutation of this point of view.
Desire for the Self
There was a lively debate on my blog a few years ago about whether it was necessary to desire the Self to attain liberation, or whether even that desire should be given up. One of the readers following the debate asked me to contribute and to restrict my citations to what Bhagavan himself had said on this topic.
Reincarnating Jnanis?
This is an article I wrote on my blog many years ago in response to a query about whether jnanis, liberated beings, ever incarnated again.
Bhagavan’s letter to Ganapati Muni
Ramana Maharshi usually never replied to letters that were addressed to him, but in 1931, at the request of Ganapati Muni, he dictated a letter to T. K. Sundaresa Iyer that responded to several philosophical points that Ganapati Muni had raised in a letter.
The authenticity of Bhagavan’s recorded teachings
This is a slightly updated and revised version of an article that appeared on my blog. In it I explain why I believe that some texts that record Bhagavan’s teachings are more reliable than others.
Swami Siddheswarananda’s views on Bhagavan’s Teachings
In this article I take issue with the views of Swami Siddheswarananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Order who taught in Paris for many years. He made a few comments on Bhagavan’s teachings on creation that I felt obliged to contest.
The qualifications needed to do self-enquiry
B. V. Narasimhaswami started to edit a collection of dialogues with Bhagavan around 1929. After he left Ramanasramam around 1930 the project was abandoned and was not published until a few years ago. In this article I discuss one of the claims that his manuscript contained: that certain qualifications are necessary in order to do self-enquiry.