WHAT IS DELIVERANCE (MUKTI)?
Letter 175, 8th April, 1948
At 3 o’clock this afternoon, an Andhra youth with a sad face approached Bhagavan and said,
- “Swami, I have a request to make, if you will allow me to mention it. I have just come from Bangalore. I do not know how to meditate in order to attain deliverance (mukti), and so am worried. You must put me in the way and help me to realise it.”
- “What are you doing now?” asked Bhagavan.
- “I am doing nothing now, Swami. That is why I am praying to you to tell me how I should meditate,” said the young man.
- “Why do you want to meditate? What is deliverance? What is it you want to realise? Why has this idea come to you at all?” asked Bhagavan.
Poor man, he could not say anything and so was silent. It was however clear from his face that he was worried over something. After waiting for a while, Bhagavan, with a compassionate look, said,
- “Keep your mind steadily on your family deity, discard outside thoughts and meditate, or keep the Self itself before your mind and meditate. If that is done, that which comes from outside will gradually disappear and meditation alone will remain. You need not meditate separately. The meditation on Self will steady itself and will remain constant. What IS, is meditation. There is no such thing as attaining deliverance. Getting rid of extraneous things itself is deliverance. Breath control (pranayama) and other spiritual practices are only for concentrating the mind on one thing. Breath control keeps the wandering mind within the body. That is why breath control has been prescribed first and only then the practising of japa (repetition of Divine name), tapas (austerities) and the rest. If breath is controlled and kept within for a while, it helps in practising Self-enquiry. If the family deity or some other form is meditated upon, the mind becomes controlled of its own accord. Where that is done repeatedly, that meditation itself leads on to the realization of the Self. You will not then have the duality of the doer and the thing done. All becomes one’s natural state (Swarupa) only.”
The young man sat like a statue hearing all this. Bhagavan, addressing himself to another devotee by his side, said,
“See! Call HIM Ishwara (the Personal God), or Atma (the Self) or what you will. He is omnipresent and omniscient; only people cannot see Him. They say that they will do tapas and, as a result of it, they want Him to come to them suddenly. What can I do? We are in Him, and we search for Him saying, ‘Where is He?’ The little ego ‘I’ wells up and does all this mischief. See its great capacity!”
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Letters from Sri Ramanasramam, by Suri Nagamma