Ramana Maharshi, who lived until 1950, is already regarded as among the classical sages of India.  Although he remained in simple rural surroundings and was never strongly influenced by European culture, Ramana lived at the core of awareness from which radiate the languages and images of all cultures.  His teaching is uniquely accessible because of the directness of his way to Enlightenment, which is not wedded to Indian culture or to the particular forms of any culture or religion but springs from the primal I am, or conscious being, shared naturally by members of every culture.

Ramana’s father was a lawyer.  There was a certain atmosphere of piety in the household which involved ritualistic worship of various Hindu Gods and Goddesses, but young Ramana underwent no intense religious training.  He attended the local Christian school, where sports interested him more than studies and where he was regarded as ordinary and predictable.  He had just one unusual characteristic:  he was subject to such deep sleep that nothing could rouse him.  His boyhood friends would carry him from place to place, or even pummel him as he slept.  Hours later he would wake, totally unaware of what had occurred.

Ramana’s life continued in a conventional manner until, at the age of sixteen, he read about the lives and practices of the south Indian saints.  As a result, he experienced an immediate, though mild, euphoria as a spiritual experience but simply assumed he had a light fever.  This was the first tremor of his spiritual awakening.

Several months later, Ramana experienced the sudden opening into Ultimate Consciousness in which his individual identity was almost entirely lost.  A family relation had died, and young Ramana decided to explore directly the experience of death.  His motive stemmed more from curiosity than any feeling of bereavement.  Ramana removed all his clothes, lay on the floor of his room, and with tremendous intensity, imagined his body dead.  He closed his eyes, simulating the state of deep sleep.  Suddenly there flashed into view, timeless and complete, the primal awareness that lies at the Source of our being, the Ultimate Consciousness that is the Source of Being itself.

This proved not to be an isolated trance.  The radiant flow of this primal awareness continued to be experienced throughout Ramana’s waking, dream, and dreamless sleep.  It was focused in the spiritual center Ramana later called the Heart, two fingers to the right of the breastbone.  Still, the boy did not realize he had now become Enlightened. He did not impose any religious interpretation on his spontaneous experience. He simply noticed the blissful flow of primal awareness that went on in the right-hand Heart continuously during the day and at night.  Imagine that you are startled.  Isolate in your imagination the sudden tingling sensation that flashes through your nervous system.  The current of illumination was described by Ramana as a similar sensation but continuous rather than momentary, healing and absorbing rather than shattering or distracting.

For the first few months after his Enlightenment, Ramana often visited the Shiva temple.  He had seldom gone there as a child but was now attracted to various temples because, no matter how institutionalized they were, primal awareness was mysteriously focused there.  As Ramana stood before the image of Shiva, sometimes he would pray for guidance:  where should he go and what should he do now that he perceived the world as inconsequential, perfectly transparent to this Light of primal awareness?  At other times he would find no need to pray but would stand silently before the image, experiencing the limitless expanse of Ultimate Consciousness that both he and Shiva equally expressed.  Gradually this mood of unity became completely natural to him.

Yet a certain life-pattern remained operative for Ramana, regardless of this condition of complete unity, or illumination.  His destiny was to reside at Arunachala, the holy mountain in South India where for hundreds of years sages and ascetics have lived and practiced.  Ramana simply heard the mention of Arunachala, and his body burned until he arrived at this Heart mountain, where he remained, without once leaving, for over fifty years, until his physical death.

When the young Ramana first arrived at Arunachala, he felt no concern whatever for the preservation of the body.  He would remain motionless for days at a time, neither eating nor sleeping, totally absorbed in the current of primal awareness from which all phenomena emerge and into which they disappear again like bubbles in a stream.  His Enlightenment had not yet begun to direct concern toward living beings or objects, simply the unbroken expanse of Ultimate Consciousness.  Ramana was discovered seated in a cave high on the mountain by a wandering holy man who kept him alive by force feeding.

The flowering of compassion and concern occurred spontaneously.  The various spiritual practitioners, or sadhus, who lived on the mountain assumed that Ramana had taken a vow of silence, because he never spoke.  But Ramana had not undertaken any vows.  He simply did not think to speak, to eat, or to move, being so absorbed in the awareness of perfect unity.  The sadhu who shared Ramana’s cave was encountering difficulty with an abstruse passage of scripture.  Ramana spontaneously approached him and clearly explained from his own spiritual experience the obscure scriptural meaning.  After that, various sadhus and local villagers came to Ramana, who could solve their problems, practical or philosophical, with one or two words, or even through silence.  Thus a small ashram, or spiritual community, gathered naturally around Ramana where he lived, high on the mountainside.  This growing concern of Ramana to aid others along their way to the experience of unity represents a significant deepening of his original Enlightenment, in which the structure of self and other had dissolved into pure Consciousness.  Now, without obscuring the expanse of perfect unity, individual beings reappeared to Ramana’s perception.  These individuals, although naturally rooted in primal awareness, were ignorant of their Source and therefore in need of Ramana’s concern and personal assistance.

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Shakti, or the Feminine Divine, drew Ramana to Her through the instrument of his human mother, making him available to humanity at large. 

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While Ramana preferred to remain high on the mountainside, difficult to access, he was eventually brought down to the foot of the mountain, where he would fulfill his destiny by becoming known throughout India and the world.  His return, indicating yet a further deepening of Enlightenment, occurred in this way.  Ramana’s mother, who had been seeking her son since his disappearance from the household, heard of a young sadhu living high on the slopes of Arunachala.  She made the arduous journey, recognized her child, and remained with him as his disciple, being inspired to lead the contemplative life by Ramana’s powerful silent presence.  One day, she died.  As she took her last breaths, Ramana kept his hands on her head and her heart, guiding her through subtle psychic realms, clearing from her way various obstacles to the experience of perfect unity.  With this potent assistance, she attained mukti, or release into Ultimate Consciousness. She was therefore accorded a saint’s burial at the foot of the mountain.  Ramana used to walk down the mountain every day to spend time at her tomb.  One day, about six months after she died, Ramana strolled down the mountain and settled permanently there by the tomb, which he did not regard as the physical remains of his human mother but as a shrine to the Divine Mother of the Universe.  Arunachala Mountain embodied Shiva, or Divine Transcendence; the mother’s tomb embodied Shakti, or Divine Immanence, which is experienced in Hindu tradition as feminine.  As Arunachala, or Shiva, had first drawn Ramana from his family home, so Shakti, or the Feminine Divine, drew Ramana to Her through the instrument of his human mother, making him available to humanity at large.  Now that Ramana was accessible, a large ashram began to build up around him at the foot of the holy mountain.

Although he was the central focus for decades in an ashram visited by thousands of seekers from all over the world, Ramana never recognized anyone as his disciple.  Many considered themselves his disciples and all took spiritual instruction from him, but Ramana declared unequivocally that no one was his disciple.  He would tirelessly insist that Ultimate Consciousness alone is the Guru, or teacher.  The Guru is simply the primal awareness focused two fingers to the right of the breastbone and accessible through the primordial sense, I am.  Ramana explained that while were are aware of the body, the source of the I am is experienced in what he called the right-hand Heart, but if our attention becomes totally absorbed in the stream of primal awareness, all sense of an individual body dissolves and no exclusive location remains.  Primal awareness, or Ultimate Consciousness, is then understood to be situated nowhere and everywhere.

During his final illness, various devotees of Ramana continued to plead that they needed his physical presence to help them in their spiritual practice.  Ramana replied, You attach too much importance to the body.  They say that I am dying, but I am not going away:  where would I go?  I am here.  Ramana, like any illumined being, is everywhere.  He is with us now as we think about him.  Ramana is the Ultimate Consciousness that we are.  And we are Ramana.  His life is an expression of our own deepest Life.  His story is essentially our own awakening.

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"I saw a shooting star with a luminous tail unlike any I have ever seen before moving slowly across the sky and reaching the top of Arunachala, the mountain, disappearing behind it... We raced to the ashram only to find that the master had passed into Mahanirvana
at that exact minute." 

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The physical death occurred on April 14, 1950.  Some devotees outside his room were singing at dusk one of Ramana’s own hymns to Shiva as the mountain Arunachala.  On hearing the song, writes an eyewitness, Ramana’s eyes opened and shone.  He gave a brief smile of indescribable tenderness.  This was the poignant tenderness of a mother for her children.  The devotees were singing as spiritual children to the mountain Arunachala, which Ramana knew to be actually their own primal awareness.  The eyewitness continues:  From the outer edges of his eyes tears of bliss rolled down.  One more deep breath and no more.  There was no struggle, no other sign of death only that the next breath did not come.

Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer, had come to the ashram the week before.  He tells the following remarkable experience at the hour of Ramana’s death:  I saw a shooting star with a luminous tail unlike any I have ever seen before moving slowly across the sky and reaching the top of Arunachala, the mountain, disappearing behind it.  We immediately looked at our watches. It was 8:47.  We raced to the ashram only to find that the master had passed into Mahanirvana at that exact minute.  Nor was this experience only documented by a select few…All the English and Tamil papers which arrived this morning from Madras referred to the meteor which had been seen in the sky over the entire state of Madras at 8:47 on the night of April 14, but a large number of people in different places.  These eyewitnesses had been struck by its peculiar look and behavior.  Was this an ordinary meteor or was Ramana simply dreaming this brilliant presence into the collective dream of our waking state as his last tribute to Arunachala, as his last act of worship or circumambulation of the holy mountain?  Responds Ramana: Who is asking this question?

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