Learn To Live Says Ramana Maharshi

Are we ROBOTS?

This is a question that keeps cropping up. Why indeed are we reducing ourselves more or less to automatons inspite of our much prided intellect? Our daily life is so routinised (caught up in daily routine) that it could well be lived by a robot. It"s a routinised life (caught up in daily routine), which results in the drift that drains one of essential energy and joy.

If one divides the unfettered power, the power of the mind, into bits and pieces and is dragged by the momentum of thoughts, what remains? Why should it be so? The reason is that we have superimposed illusion on reality. Reality is that consciousness alone IS. The illusion is to confuse a fragment of consciousness, which is the waking mind, with 'The mind". When this is only an idea mixup of mistaking a part for the whole, the urgent need to enquire and get out of this illusion stares us in the face.

Ramana"s wake-up call:

Despite one"s unthinking ways, which are making an oasis into a desert, Ramana makes a gracious entry. His entry is bound to rescue one from the 'narrow barren life", which would otherwise become the lot of that person.

All of us are familiar with a 'wake up call" through the mobile or from the reception of the hotel where one might be staying. Ramana Maharshi's entry is indeed this wake up call, which forces one as it were to steal the time for essentials. It does not require much argument that the essential need is to “learn to live". In one reported conversation, Ramana Maharshi's told the person that those in whom the spirit of enquiry is alive are the only ones who are truly alive(the ones who have made an attempt to learn to live). It is reported that Ramana's words are even stronger. “The rest are only living corpses".

To be continued

About the author

A.R.Natarajan
A.R.Natarajan in this article which is an excerpt from his “Darkness at Noon," urges one to learn to live, avoiding a dull life like that of Robots.