I would like now to address more fully the question of whether the ‘I-I’ experience, as defined by Bhagavan, is present after realisation takes place. Most devotees who are familiar with Bhagavan’s teachings would have no hesitation in asserting that this is so. If pressed to provide evidence to support their point of view, they would probably quote the verses from Ulladu Narpadu and Upadesa Undiyar that I have already cited, and probably add verse twenty of Upadesa Saram. They would be quite justified in doing so, for it is possible to translate and interpret all these verses in such a way that their meaning would be that the ‘I-I’ experience is a consequence and not a precursor of Self-realisation. To see how this is so, one must look at the verbs in these verses and examine what they mean in their original languages. For the sake of convenience I will give the verses again with the relevant verbs printed in italics.
- Questioning ‘Who am I?’ within one’s mind, when one reaches the Heart the individual ‘I’ sinks crestfallen, and at once reality manifests itself as ‘I-I’. Though it reveals itself thus, it is not the ego ‘I’, but the perfect being, the Self Absolute. (Ulladu Narpadu, verse 30)
- ‘Whence does this ‘I’ arise? Seek this within. This ‘I’ then vanishes. This is the pursuit of wisdom. Where the ‘I’ vanished, there appears an ‘I-I’ by itself. This is the infinite [poornam]. (Upadesa Undiyar, verses 19 and 20).
- Where this ‘I’ vanished and mergedin its source, there appears spontaneously and continuously an ‘I-I’. This is the Heart, the infinite Supreme Being. (Upadesa Saram, verse 20).
The third translation has been taken from The Maharishi’s Way, a translation of Upadesa Saram by D. S. Sastri, 1989 ed., p. 38. Quotes one and two are from the sources cited earlier in the article.
The first two italicised verbs, ‘sinks crest-fallen’ and ‘vanishes’ are translations of the Tamil phrase talai-sayndidum, which literally means, ‘will bow its head’. In ordinary usage it means ‘will humble itself’, ‘sinks crest-fallen’, or ‘will bow its head in shame’. However, in colloquial usage it can also mean ‘will die’. If this colloquial usage is preferred, both verses will have as their meaning that the ‘I-I’ will only manifest after the death of the individual ‘I’. Sadhu Om in his translations has preferred the colloquial usage ‘will die’, but other translators have opted for variations on ‘sinks crest-fallen’. This may seem like pointless pedantry, but a crucial distinction is at stake: if the verb chosen indicates a permanent extinction of the ego, then the ‘I-I’ arises as a consequence of Self-realisation; but if the chosen verb indicates that the ‘I’ had only temporarily subsided (e.g. ‘vanished’, ‘merged’, ‘disappeared’, etc.) then Bhagavan is indicating that the ‘I-I’ manifests before realisation. It is of course possible to have it both ways and say that the ‘I-I’ is experienced both before and after realisation. Adherents of this school of thought would probably say that the Upadesa Undiyar and Ulladu Narpadu verses describe the post-realisation ‘I-I’ experience whereas the Vichara Sangraham quotations refer to the aham sphurana experience which precedes it.
The third italicised phrase, ‘where the ‘I’ vanished’, is a translation of the Tamil word ‘ondru’ which means ‘where it merges’ or ‘where it becomes one with’. Since the union referred to in this verse can be dissolved by the re-emergence of the ‘I’, the term ondru does not imply a permanent extinction of the ‘I’. However, those who support the thesis that the ‘I-I’ manifests after the permanent eradication of the ‘I’ would probably point to Bhagavan’s Sanskrit translation of this verse. In it he uses the word nasa (for the fourth italicised verb, ‘vanished and merged’) where the word ondru is used in the Tamil original. This has been variously translated as ‘destroyed’, ‘annihilated’, and ‘perished’, all terms which indicate a permanent destruction of the ‘I’. It is quite permissible though to translate nasa as ‘disappear’ or ‘vanish’, and indeed several translators have done so. In addition to D. M. Sastri, two other published authors have translated nasa in verse twenty of Upadesa Saram as ‘vanished’: Swami Atmananda in Light on Religious Practices, p. 29 and Swami Bhoomananda Tirtha in Upadesa Sara of Maharshi Ramana, p. 11. Since one should select a meaning that is consonant with the idea expressed in the original Tamil, I feel that ‘vanish’ or ‘disappear’ is preferable. The implications of words such as ‘destroy’ or ‘perish’ are not present in the original text.
There are two other translations that can add a little evidence to this debate. In the 1920s Lakshmana Sarma translated Ulladu Narpadu into Sanskrit under Bhagavan’s supervision. He had to recast each verse several times in order to satisfy Bhagavan that his translation was completely accurate. When verse thirty was translated, Lakshmana Sarma translated talai-sayndidum as ‘bows its head in shame’ and received Bhagavan’s imprimatur on it. (Revelation by ‘Who’, 1980 ed., v. 35) Many years later, Major Chadwick translated Upadesa Saram into English and had his manuscript corrected by Bhagavan. In this version Bhagavan approved of the word ‘disappears’ as a translation of the Sanskrit word nasa in verse twenty. (The Poems of Sri Ramana Maharshi, by Major Chadwick, 3rd ed., p. 1)
To sum up this linguistic excursion: the verses on ‘I-I’ that Bhagavan wrote are open to two interpretations. They can be taken either to mean that the ‘I-I’ is experienced as a consequence of realisation or as a precursor to it. My own view, and I would stress that it is only a personal opinion, is that the evidence points to it being a precursor only. In justification of this view I would say that:
- In his lengthy explanations of the ‘I-I’ Bhagavan always speaks of it as a temporary experience;
- In a long conversation with S. S. Cohen that will appear later, Bhagavan twice states that the ‘I-I’ consciousness is different from the sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi state, that is, the natural state of the jnani;
- Bhagavan’s Tamil and Sanskrit verses on this subject can all be interpreted in such a way that they support this view.
I should like now to raise an interesting question, and, if possible answer it. If the ‘I-I’ or aham sphurana experience occurs immediately before realisation, and not after it, is there any evidence to show that Bhagavan himself went through such an experience on the day of his own realisation? I think there is, although it is somewhat flimsy. I will begin by quoting one other verse that Bhagavan wrote:
Therefore on diving deep upon the quest
‘Who am ‘I’ and from whence?’
thoughts disappear
And consciousness of Self then flashes forth
As the ‘I-I’ within the cavity
Of every seeker’s Heart… (Atma Vidya Kirtanam, v. 2, taken from Collected Works)
If one adds this to the previous similar quotations I have already cited, there are now four written accounts by Bhagavan that have in common an almost identical theme; as a result of self-enquiry, the ‘I’-thought subsides, disappears and is replaced by the ‘I-I’ ‘flashing forth’ in the Heart. What authority does Bhagavan have for saying this? I would answer by making the novel suggestion that these writings are autobiographical in nature and that Bhagavan is recording what happened to him on his enlightenment day in 1896. I would support this view by comparing the introductory comments from Vichara Sangraham, answer three, to the well-known account of the death experience which has been printed in many ashram books.
- Therefore, leaving the corpse-like body as an actual corpse, and remaining without even uttering the word ‘I’ by mouth, if one keenly enquires, ‘What is it that rises as ‘I’?… (Vichara Sangraham, answer 3)
- I lay with my limbs stretched out still as though rigor mortishad set in and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to the enquiry. I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no sound could escape, so that neither the word ‘I’ nor any other word could be uttered. ‘Well then,’ I said to myself, ‘this body is dead…But with the death of the body, am I dead? Is the body ‘I’?
The second quote is from Ramana Maharishi and the Path of Self Knowledge, ch. 2. In an alternative version (The Mountain Path, 1982, p. 68) Bhagavan asks himself, just prior to his Self-realisation, ‘What was this “I”? Is it the body? Who called himself the “I”?’ This version, in which such a definite act of self-enquiry takes place, is even closer to the Vichara Sangraham version.
The similarities cannot be ignored. Indeed, since the preamble to the Vichara Sangraham answer is so close to the published accounts of his death experience, it is possible that the remainder of the answer (cited in full earlier in this article) is also autobiographical. If this whole answer is merely a thinly-disguised account of Bhagavan’s own Self-realisation, then one can say that he experienced the aham sphurana as a consequence of his enquiry, and that the aham sphurana finally subsided, leaving the full, permanent and sphurana-less experience of the Self. No hint of this can be found in B. V. Narasimhaswami’s account of the death experience, but in Krishna Bhikshu’s Telugu biography Bhagavan takes up the story of what happened after he had begun his enquiry into the nature of the ‘I’.
Now the body is inert, devoid of consciousness, while I am full of awareness. Therefore death is for the inert body. This ‘I’ is indestructible awareness. The knowledge that remains when the body gives up its affairs and when there are no sensory workings is not sensory knowledge. This aham sphurana is direct knowledge, Self-experience, self-effulgent and not imaginary. (Ramana Leela, 7th ed., pp. 20-21)
In 1945 Bhagavan confirmed that he had experienced the aham sphurana on the day of his realisation. In a conversation with Swami Rishikeshananda in November that year he remarked: ‘In the vision of death I experienced at Madurai, all my senses were numbed, but my aham sphurana was clearly evident to me…’ (The Life and Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi by T. S. Anantha Murthy, 1972, ed., p. 6-7.) In neither Krishna Bhikshu’s nor Anantha Murthy’s account does Bhagavan go on to say that the aham sphurana subsided, leaving the full and permanent state of Self-realisation. However, since he on many other occasions asserted that the aham sphurana was a temporary experience and that it must subside and disappear before realisation can take place, it is reasonable to infer that he did in fact experience the sequence of events described in Vichara Sangraham, answer three, on the day of his own realisation.
There is one other point that can be mentioned in passing. Though Bhagavan rarely talked about it, there appears, occasionally, to be a cosmological aspect to this usage of the term aham sphurana. On one occasion he said, ‘The Supreme Being is unmanifest and the first sign of manifestation is aham sphurana’ (Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, talk no. 518). In what may be an amplification of this unusual statement, Bhagavan once told Devaraja Mudaliar:
‘… both sound and light may be implied in the word sphurana. Everything has come from light and sound.’… Explaining how the Self is mere light and how it is both the word or sound and also that out of which word or sound originally came, Bhagavan said, ‘Man has three bodies, the gross, the one made of the five elements, the sukshma or subtle one made of manas [mind] and prana, and the jiva. Similarly, even Iswara has three bodies. All the manifest universe is his gross body, light and sound are his subtle body, and the Self is his jiva.’)
This paragraph is taken from Day by Day with Bhagavan, 24th March, 1945. These remarks are part of Bhagavan’s explanation of the word sphurana in question three of Vichara Sangraham.