All Enveloping Light

Monday, January 18, 2010, 17:29

Sri Ramana Maharshi - The Indescribable

I am asking myself – What has Bhagavan meant to me, and what does he still mean to me? And I find that it is impossible to give a neat answer to this question.

The first thing, perhaps, is that he opened my heart. Immediately when I saw him, even from a distance, I recognised that this was what I had been looking for. But when I say that this was radiating, all-penetrating and all-overthrowing love, striking me with the power of lightning, I know that only those who had the same experience will know what I mean. To anybody else, all this is
verbiage, at best creating an image of someone very magnificent.

Well, Sri Ramana Maharshi was the Unimaginable, and therefore the Indescribable.

In literature, all over the world, one finds magnificent descriptions of sorrow. But who can describe happiness? Happiness is a state without ego and therefore without a someone in it to describe it, or even to remember it. What we remember is its afterglow, its reflection in feeling and body, not the moment when we were present as happiness itself, as happiness only.

Ramana Maharshi is not the frail, old, body that I saw reclining on a chair, but the Unimaginable, egolessness, pure radiance, and the body, however much we may have loved its appearance, was merely like a glittering diamond reflecting the light that he really was.

I did not understand all this when I first arrived. To me, he was something like a divine person, and I was inclined to compare him with Jesus or the Buddha. But Jesus or the Buddha were images in my head, formed on the basis of the belief in which I had been brought up, and on stories heard and read later on. And Sri Ramana Maharshi, from the first second I saw him, was anything but an image in my head. He was a bomb, exploding the myth of my life until then, within a few minutes, and without a word.

To be continued