How Ramana Maharshi realized the Self

He simulated death and watched what happened to him. It may not sound like atma-vichara but the experience is the same.

This article is a revised, expanded version of a post that I published years ago on my Wordpress blog. The most important addition is the answer to Question 3.

What did Ramana Maharshi do that made him Self-realized? If you’re serious about liberation, and you recognize that there’s something special about Ramana, don’t you want to know what he did in enough detail so you can reenact it?

Our only records of what he did are his biographers’ descriptions based on conversations they had with him. Those descriptions go something like this:

One day when Ramana was 16 years old, for no apparent reason, he suddenly thought he was about to die. Instead of shouting for help or running to a doctor, he lay on the floor and pretended he was already dead. He made his limbs immobile and held his breath. He did this, according to a biographer’s translation of his words, in order to “solve the problem.” Then he thought, in effect, “Okay, this is what it’s like to be dead. But I’m still conscious. Therefore I’m not my body. I am something else.” With this understanding, he realized the Self. It took just a few minutes.

If you want to read all the records we have of this event, you’ll find them collected here on Realization.org.

It made no sense

For a long time, the biographers’ descriptions didn’t make sense to me for the following reasons:

1. This experience came out of nowhere. He said in later life that at age 16 he knew nothing about liberation (although remarks by his best friend from high school make me doubt this) and that he had never done sadhana. Why would he suddenly react this way?

2. What “problem” was he trying to solve? Usually when people think they’re dying they try to stay alive. But he didn’t do that. On the contrary, he pretended he was already dead. (Objection: One of the biographers, Krishna Bhikshu, quotes him as saying, “The only problem for me was what death meant and how it could be avoided.” Reply: But he made no effort to avoid it. I think Krishna Bhikshu must have added the last six words. And yes I know that Ramana checked this biography for accuracy. But he didn’t always correct errors when he checked things.)

3. The practice that he taught for the rest of his life, atma-vichara (he defines that Sanskrit term as attention to one’s self) is based on that event. We know this for several reasons including the fact that he says in the little textbook he wrote, Nan Ar, that atma-vichara is the only way Self-realization can come about. Since he became Self-realized during this episode he must have done atma-vichara. But his insructions for atma-vichara seem quite different from his biographers’ descriptions of what he did that day. How can we reconcile these two things?

Here are my answers to those questions. They are based on a combination of written evidence and speculation. After pondering for a quarter century, these answers are the only plausible ones I’ve thought of or heard of. Maybe you can suggest better ones.

Question 1:
Why did the experience happen?

The biographers give the impression that the experience is inexplicable, that it came out of nowhere. I believe it happened because Ramana’s father had died four years earlier when Ramana was twelve. During those four years Ramana did a kind of sadhana without realizing it.

There are at least two pieces of written evidence for this, both very short. The first is a paragraph in Paul Brunton’s “red notebook.” This is the manuscript that provided the raw material for Sri Ramanasramam’s book Conscious Immortality. If you want to read that book, I strongly recommend that you read instead the typed copy of the manuscript on the website of the Paul Brunton Philosophical Foundation. (The foundation calls it “Commentaries by Sri Ramana Maharshi” not the “red notebook”.) Over the years the ashram has removed the important paragraph that I’m about to quote from the book and then put it back in later editions. This is typical of the way the ashram has bungled its responsibilities over the years in many publications, and it would be unsurprising if other editorial mutilations exist in the book. In this case a copy of the manuscript is easily available for free, so why not take advantage of it?

Here’s what Brunton wrote:

Maharshi told once how he got realisation. On the day his father died he felt puzzled by death and pondered over it, whilst his mother and brothers wept. He thought for hours and after the corpse was cremated he got by analysis to the point of perceiving that it was the ‘I’ which makes the body to see, to run, to walk and to eat. “I now know this ‘I’ but my father’s ‘I’ has left the body.” That day he got Jnana. [From Paul Brunton’s “red notebook” aka Commentaries by Sri Ramana Maharshi, paragraph 77‒4]

I think Brunton’s account of Ramana’s remarks is accurate except for the time span. These events didn’t occur in a single day. They took place over four years.

The second piece of written evidence is a footnote in Sadhu Om’s and Michael James’s English translation of Sadhu Om’s Path of Sri Ramana Part One.

When, after hearing of His father’s death, Venkataraman [Ramana] came from Dindukkal to Tiruchuzhi to see him, He wondered: “When father is lying here, why do they say that he has gone?”. Some elders then told Him, “If this were your father, would he not receive you with love? So you see, he has gone.” This information might have roused in Him the idea that this body was not his father, the person. We may assume that this was a seed which afterwards — blossomed in Him at the age of sixteen. [Sri Sadhu Om, The Path of Sri Ramana Part One, p. 4]

Based on those two paragraphs and empathy and a simple knowledge of human nature, here’s what I think happened.

Ramana was twelve when his father died. He must have been extremely upset. Living in India in the 19th century, he had heard of reincarnation but didn’t know whether to believe in it. He wondered, “Is Dad really dead or is he still alive?” That question and the powerful emotions created by his father’s death were the cause of his Self-realization.

It’s worthwhile to notice the precise form in which he thought of that question. It occurred to him like this: “Was Dad his body, in which case he died with it, or was he not his body, in which case he’s still alive?” This is why in later life he put so much emphasis on the fact that “I” is not the body.

It occurred to Ramana that he could answer the question by observing whether he himself was his body. This would answer the question about his father because presumably all people are the same in this respect. Therefore, as a result of his father’s death, he began examining himself, his sense of “I”, to see what he was.

This self-inspection became part of what he later taught as atma-vichara. He must have done it for four years. He did it intensely because he was driven by the emotions surrounding his father’s death.

Question 2:
What problem was Ramana trying to solve?

The problem was the question he had been pondering for four years. He was now dying, or so he believed, and had only a few minutes to answer it.

Question 3.
How can we reconcile what Ramana did that day with his teachings about atma-vichara?

The basic instructions for atma-vichara which he taught for fifty years are as follows. I’ll give a summary in my own words but print them as a block quote because Substack’s formatting options are limited.

Place your attention on yourself, on “I”. To do this you must turn your attention away completely from mental activity. Examine yourself closely to see what you are. Find the source of that “I”. The source is the Self (atman). Stay at or in the Self until the ego is absorbed in the Self and destroyed.

Many people are surprised to learn that these are the actual instructions. There is a widespread misimpression that Ramana’s method has to do with asking questions. You can learn more about his actual instructions by reading the essay version of Nan Ar (he didn’t actually write the other editions). I recommend Michael James’s translation.

How can we reconcile these instructions with what Ramana did that day?

Let’s summarize what he did in the form of brief instructions like we just did for atma-vichara.

He pretended he was dead and at the same time watched himself, his sense of “I”, to see whether he — “I” — would die with the body or remain alive.

For many years I couldn’t see that the two sets of instructions amount to the same thing but now I can’t understand how I failed to see it.

The basic idea of what he did was:

Watch myself as I die to see what happens to me.

The way he pretended to die was by stopping his body and mind. He “immobilized” his body. He held his breath. Most important of all, he stopped thinking or at least looked away completely from his thoughts. His biographers don’t report this but it had to happen for Self-realization to occur and it was natural for him to assume that thinking will stop at death. This assumption was more natural at that time for an Indian boy than a Western one because thoughts are regarded as part of the material world in the main Hindu traditions. (I write “at that time” because this is probably about to change in the West due to development of AI, and if anyone reads this article a few years from now it may not make sense to them unless I specify the era.)

As he pretended to die, he watched himself, his sense of “I”, to observe what happened to it. This was the most direct possible way to answer the question that had originated with his father’s death.

Since he stopped everything else, his attention was exclusively on himself.

“Dying” was a way to focus his attention exclusively on himself because when everything else stops, only you are left.

People always call Ramana an Advaitin and he frequently denigrated Yoga but this reminds me strongly of Patanjali’s instructions for attaining kaivalya in the Yoga Sutras.

Final thoughts

People sometimes disparage neti-neti as mere intellectualism. (Neti-neti is an idea or practice that originates from a list in an early upanishad of things we are not.) But I would call what Ramana did that day the real neti-neti. It was experiential not intellectual.

The words “neti-neti” mean, in this context, “[I’m] not this, [I’m] not that.” Not my limbs, not my breath, not my thoughts.

By stopping those things (or at least looking away from them completely) yet continuing to exist, Ramana demonstrated to himself experientially that he was not those things.

It might make a good tee shirt for retreats:

Pretend you’re dead. It’s the real neti-neti.