Efficacy of Self Enquiry

Recently uploaded new material on the Arunachala Samudra website. So please check out these new postings. 

In particular you might enjoy looking through the section on Self Enquiry, at this link here. 

The section which is Ramana Maharshi-centric is filled with His advice and suggestions regarding Self Enquiry and how to perform it. This is invaluable information in these trying times. 

As to the efficacy of Self Enquiry, Sri Sathya Sai Baba said: 

"All agitations will cease the moment one enters, "Who Am I?". This was the sadhana that Ramana Maharshi achieved and taught to his disciples. This is also the easiest of all disciplines." 

[Sri Sathya Sai Baba] 

Just a little Self Enquiry helps still the mind. 

In this regard there is an interesting quote by Frank H. Humphreys, an Englishman who came to India in 1911 to serve as assistant superintendent of police in Madras. He was the first Western devotee of Ramana Maharshi. 

Later in his life, he turned away from worldly things, entered a monastery and became a monk. 

“The phenomena we see are curious and surprising—but the most marvellous thing of all we do not realize, and that is that one and only one illimitable force that is responsible for all the phenomena we see and the act of seeing them. Do not fix your attention on all these changing things of life, death and phenomena. Do not think of even the actual act of seeing them or perceiving them, but only of that which sees all these things, that which is responsible for it all. This will seem nearly impossible at first, but by degrees the result will be felt. It takes years of study and daily practice, but that is how a master is made. 

Give yourself a quarter of an hour a day. Try to keep the mind unshakably fixed on that which sees. It is inside you. Do not expect to find that ‘That’ is something definite on which the mind can be fixed easily—it will not be so. Though it takes years to find that ‘That’, the results of this concentration will soon show themselves in four or five months time—in all sorts of unconscious clairvoyance, in peace of mind, in the power to deal with troubles, in the power all around, always unconscious power. 

I have given you these teachings in the same words that the master gives to his intimate disciples. From now on, let your whole thought in meditation be not on the act of seeing, nor on what you see, but immovably on that which sees.”