🔱 Om Namo Bhagavathe Sri ArunachalaRamanaya 🔱
The Paramount Importance of Self Attention, by Sri Sadhu Om, As recorded by Michael James
Part Three - Mountain Path: April-June 2012 - Excerpt
Note of 29th December 1977
Sadhu Om (in reply to my question whether he was doing any sādhanā in the years before he came to Bhagavan):
I was longing for grace and always thinking of God. That is sādhanā enough!
Some people say that the light seen at the time of Bhagavan's passing was him returning to Skandaloka [the world of Skanda, the younger son of Lord Siva]. First they try to limit him as a body, and then they try to limit him as a light. Their minds are so bound up in limitations that they have to limit even the illimitable. Bhagavan always said:
'Do not think this body is me. I am shining in each one of you as 'I'. Attend only to that'.
How often and for how many lives have we fooled ourselves thinking that our social service is selfless? We did it only for our own self-satisfaction or glory. It is natural for each one of us to love ourself. We are all naturally selfish, so we should first find out what is self. When we knοw ourself as we really are, we will experience everything as not other than ourself, and thus our selfishness will then be the highest virtue. Only a jñāni knows how to be truly selfish, because without knowing self we cannot knοw what real (unlimited) selfishness is.
In the path of surrender saints sing, 'Send me to heaven or hell, but never let me forget you', as if heaven and hell really exist. Their prayer only shows their total love for God alone. They teach us the right attitude, but they know that heaven and hell have no real existence. All these dualities — heaven and hell, good and bad, God and individual — exist only in the mind. So ultimately we must learn to make this mind subside.
When I first came to Bhagavan and heard him repeating constantly that everyone must eventually come to the path of self-enquiry, I wondered whether he was being partial to his own teaching, but I soon understood why he insisted that this is so. The final goal is only oneness, and to experience oneness our mind must subside, which will happen entirely only when we attend to nothing other than ourself.
So long as we attend to anything other than ourself, our mind cannot subside, because attention to other things sustains it, since that which experiences otherness is only this mind. When the mind subsides completely, only self-attention remains, and self-attention alone is the state of absolute oneness. Bhagavan used to repeat this teaching every day, maybe ten or twenty times, but still we didn't change. He didn't change his teaching either, because to him this truth was so clear.
The basic mistake we all make is to take a body to be 'I'. This deeply entrenched feeling 'I am this body called so-and-so' is the root of all our trouble. If this tape-recorder is not working, we must attend to it and not to other things, because then only will we be able to repair it. Likewise, to rectify this mistaken identity, 'I am so-and-so', we must attend to it in order to knοw what it really is: what or who am I?
Only when we thus investigate ourself will the false adjunct 'so-and-so' drop off, and what will then remain is only the reality, 'I am'. 'I am so-and-so' is the naivedyam [the food to be offered to God] [1], and when Bhagavan has consumed the adjunct 'so-and-so', what remains is only 'I am', which is his prasadam [the purified remnant of God's food, which is shared among devotees as a token of his grace].
'I am' alone really exists, so it is the true form of God and guru. To treat and cherish this filthy body as 'I' is therefore the worst kind of idol-worship. If we give up this idol-worship by knowing the truth of ourself, then we can worship anything as God, because we will know that nothing is other than him, our real self.
[1] Refer to Guru Vachaka Kovai, V.486
The flame of Bhagavan burns timelessly.
