Arun Shourie - Two Saints: Speculations Around and About Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Ramana Maharishi

Two Saints

Speculations Around and About
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Ramana Maharshi

ARUN SHOURIE

For my mother and father, for Malti Shukla,
who gave up so much for us

For Anita, who has borne so much with unimaginable fortitude

For our Adit, who bears his travails with Ramana-like equanimity

Karti hai gauhar ko ashkbaari paida

Tamkeen ko mauj-e-bekaraari paida

Sau baar chaman mein jab tadapti hai naseem

Hoti hai kali pe ek dhaari paida

Contents

Ramakrishnas touch, Ramanas gaze. How they transformed lives, influenced the course of our country. Why Gandhiji sent individuals in distress to Ramana but never met him

Their lives, their peak attainment vs the peripherals we take as marks of divinity. Natural explanations before supernatural ones. Confidence vs nervous defensiveness. Reductionism vs open-minded inquiry

Austerities they put themselves through. Effects these would have hadillustrated by those of sleep deprivation

Cautionary tales about relying on memory, wishful reading, eyewitness accountsespecially when these are written to a purpose

Visions. Triggers. A telltale cure. A clue in music-as-a-trigger?

Seeing what one longs for. Is longing so intense self-hypnosis? Concerns as explanations. Illusions and delusions

The guide who emerges. Visions of devoteesespecially after the Master passes away. Parallels from the bereaved. From mountaineers and explorers

Experience recreated by electrical stimulation and without. The sensed presence again: indisputable and disputable recreations

Seeing patterns, experiencing ghosts. How fellow believers, majorities, authority figures influence what we perceive, believe, do

As mind, brain, body influence each other so deeply and swiftly, how much would their austerities, longings and beliefs have predisposed them to experience what they did? What heals ustheir power to heal or our belief that they have that power?

Could the sudden withdrawals and trances be absence or partial or ecstatic seizures? Ramanas testimony. How this makes their attainments all the greater

Self, self, ego. It just is? Or is it active? Evidence fails scrutiny. The mundane self accounted for by this-worldly explanations. Ramanas surprising reason for what he taught

Cosmic and mundane. Confirmations of mystics view. Awarenessnature and origins. Brain as its own witness

Near-death experiences. Ramanas. Cultural variability. Doubtful accounts. This-worldly explanations for accounts: anaesthetic awareness, awareness in vegetative state, brain under extreme stress

If world is unreal, why did they eat, teach, circumambulate a non-existent hill? Senses in which world is not what it seems. Inconsequential or unreal? Ramanas surprising reason for maintaining that it is wholly unreal

Contrasted with what we encounter today. Need to scrutinize modern-day godmen, and ourselves. The next project?

The Master has been praying to the Devi, and weeping and wailing before her to send him disciples who will carry forth the work. He has visions in which he has seen some of the young men who will come to him; in particular he has seen and come to know facts about one young boy, Narendra, who is rebellious, independent-minded, agnostic. By a series of happenstances, along with some friends, he starts visiting the Master at Dakshineswar. On seeing them, in particular Narendra, the Master is joyous as can be.

Narendra visits Dakshineswar with a friend. He concludes that the Master is a monomaniac. Yet, a few days later he decides to trudge from Calcutta to Dakshineswar again. He is exhausted by the time he gets therehe had never thought the place was that far. He goes directly to the room of the Master. The latter is sitting on a small bedstead near his bed.

I saw him sitting alone, merged in himself There was no one with him. No sooner had he seen me than he called me joyfully to him and made me sit at one end of the bedstead. I sat down but found him in a strange mood. He spoke indistinctly something to himself, looked steadfastly at me and was slowly coming towards me. I thought another scene of lunacy was going to be enacted. Scarcely had I thought so when he came to me and placed his right foot on my body, and immediately I had a wonderful experience. I saw with my eyes open that all the things of the room together with the walls were rapidly swirling and receding into an unknown region and my I-ness together with the whole universe was, as it were, going to vanish in the all-devouring great void. I was then overwhelmed with a terrible fear; I had known that the destruction of I-ness was death and that death was before me, very near at hand. Unable to control myself, I cried out loudly and said, Ah! What is it that you have done to me? I have my parents, you know. Giving out a loud laugh to hear those words of mine and touching my chest with his hand, he said, Let it then cease now; it need not be done all at once; it will come to pass in course of time. I was amazed to see that extraordinary experience of mine vanish, as quickly as it had come when he touched me in that manner and said those words. I came to my normal state and saw inside and outside the room standing still as before.

The experience causes what Narendra is to later describe a revolution in his mind.

Narendra comes a third time. There is a crowd at the temple. The Master asks him to accompany him for a walk in the garden and a house that abuts the temple. They enter a room of the house and sit down. The Master enters into ecstasy. Narendra is observing the change in the Master. Suddenly, the Master approaches and touches him. Narendra becomes completely overwhelmed at that powerful touch. He lost consciousness completely that day, not partially as had happened on the previous occasion. When he regains awareness after some time, he finds the Master passing his hand on his chest

Weeks pass. One day, standing in the veranda outside the Masters room, smoking, Narendra and a friend are mocking what they have heard from the Master about everything in the world being God. Hearing Narendra laugh, he [the Master] came out of his room like a boy with his cloth in his arm-pit, and coming to them smiling, said affectionately, What are you talking about? He goes into ecstasy, and touches Narendra. Narendra experiences a complete revolutionI was aghast to see actually that there was nothing in the whole universe except God. He remains silent, to see how long the experience would last. But that inebriation did not at all diminish that day Indeed, it lasts for days. When he comes back to his normal state, he feels that he has experienced non-duality: Since then I could never doubt the truth of non-duality.

Narendra is drawn more and more into the circle. But he remains sceptical, argumentative, questioning.

His father dies. The family is thrown into penury. There is not enough to eat. At mealtimes, Narendra often makes out that he has to go to a friends house for the meal. It is just pretencehe does not want to eat the little that there is at home so that his mother and siblings have a little more to eat. Those well-to-do friends who used to flock around him shun him. He goes from pillar to post looking for a job. He finds none Hunger, helplessness, anger, disillusionment follow one after the other

The summer has passed. Rains are upon the province. As on so many days, Narendra has been roaming the whole day looking for a job. He is utterly exhausted, so exhausted, he tells his associates later, that he could not place a single step further. Drenched, I lay like a log of wood on the open veranda of a nearby house. I cannot say whether I lost consciousness altogether for some time; but I remember that thoughts and pictures of various colours, one after another, arose and vanished of themselves in my mind And questions that have been assailing him erupt again: Why are there malign forces in the creation of the Benign? Where is the harmony between stern justice and the infinite mercy of God? I was beside myself with joy, he said later. Afterwards, when I resumed my walk home, I found there was not an iota of fatigue in my body and that my mind was filled with infinite strength and peace. The day was then about to break.