All Enveloping Light-Part II

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New Colour, New Meaning to 'Who am 'I'?' enquiry

Ramana Maharshi's famous, to some, notorious question, “Who Am I?" immediately got a totally new colour. For several years, at home, I had been meditating on it, and it had something of a mystical, yogic and philosophical ring about it. Now it turned into, “Who on earth do you think you are, that you should be so important as to cultivate a garden full of problems and questions?" The question took this form in a sphere of utter astonishment: how, boy, tell me, how have you been so misled as to think that you or your ego had any importance? Instead of seeing that an ego is a mere stupidity or the belief in a fantasy, you have been cherishing it and even cultivating it by feeding it with important questions and problems. Your life until now was led by the belief in something totally imaginary.

Again, there was no condemnation in this – it was a discovery, something revealed to me, suddenly, and leaving me in utter amazement. Perhaps that is what trigged it. His mere presence revealed to me how utterly stupid I had been until now, that it was love which revealed it, not the criticising father-knows-better attitude that we know only too well. My darkness was revealed by the mere confrontation with light – light that did not condemn me or wish to change me, but accepted and loved me totally and unconditionally; light, as I understood later, that saw me as nothing but light.

All questions stand solved, the moment the question 'Who am I?' is solved, when the light that we are and have always been is suddenly recognised in all perceptions, in the ones usually called 'good' no more than in the ones usually called 'bad'; in the perceptions usually called 'the world' and in perceptions called 'the ego'. Self-realisation is never found by attempts to change the person, the ego that we are not. It dawns, the moment it is made possible, and that is when there is full realisation of the fact that 'I am no ego and I have no ego'. I am That unimaginable something in which all things, including the thought that 'I am a person' arise, and which remains over after such perceived thoughts or feelings or sensorial perceptions have dissolved into it.

But we may for instance direct our attention to what remains over when thoughts, feelings and sense-perceptions have disappeared. Only that, which is always here, is entitled to the name 'I'. Thoughts and feelings and perceptions leave us as fast as they have come. Therefore, we can never be anything perceived. We are that which remains over when nothing is perceived but the Presence that we are, and in which all perceptions arise.

About the author

Walter A Keers

Walter A Keers was one of the followers of Ramana Maharshi.

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