Hritspandana: The Shining of The Heart: A Troubleshooting Guide for Self-Enquiry by Philip Renaud & M. R. Badrinarayana

Author:Philip Renaud & M. R. Badrinarayana [and M. R. Badrinarayana, Philip Renaud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-03-24T22:00:00+00:00

Question and Answer №. 8

How can I ascertain for myself whether I am doing vichara properly?

All the time keeping mind in Athman – for this alone is the name “investigation into Athman” (applicable).

Commentary:

This answer is particularly valuable because it provides us with an important safeguard against doing something else, along with splendidly tricking ourselves into believing that we are practising vichara. Bhagawan has time and again emphasised that vichara involves the descent of mind into the Heart. The sensation of having the mind descend into and captured within the Heart cannot be described; it seems to be a response from the Beyond arising pursuant to one’s effort to scrutinise oneself subjectively (as against intellectually or conceptually). When the ‘I’ remains attending to itself exclusively, it seems to be drawn back into its source, and to remain established there so long as the spell of self-absorption lasts. By self-absorption, I simply mean the act (or condition) of the ‘I’ remaining occupied with itself to the exclusion of any other object of interest or fascination. So, ⌈ I ⌋’s self-absorption (that is to say, its subjective scrutiny of what itself is) results in its Self-absorption (that is to say, its absorption into the Heart). Consider the following content from the biography Self-Realisation by Sri B. V. Narasimha Swami—

From that moment onwards [i.e., following his experiment with death in July 1896], the ‘I’ or ‘self’ focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination; absorption in the self continued unbroken from that time on.

You may notice that “self” has not been capitalised above, but you might recall having seen the same passage in the original material with the “s” capitalised. Yes, the alteration is deliberate. I harbour a mild grouse concerning that fact that several Vedantic publications make the mistake of capitalising the “s” unnecessarily where the word “self” is concerned, and even books—several of them—published by Sri Ramanasramam commit the same blunder (pertinently, books whose publication was supervised by Bhagawan during his earthly lifetime don’t make this mistake). This has unfortunately become a trend in today’s publications especially. Words with apparently lofty connotations such as “self”, “existence”, and “reality” are heedlessly capitalised without pausing for a moment to think whether that would be an appropriate thing to do. This practise results in an unwanted change in the originally intended meaning, as I go on to demonstrate below.

As an aside, I have actually borne the brunt of the unlucky happenstance of coming across a popular devotee of Bhagawan mentioning in one of the articles on his website that there is no point in distinguishing between “self” and “Self”, because the non-dual Self could only ever be Brahman, besides which there could not exist anything; that is, he is claiming that since the ego is non-existent, there is only one self, namely Brahman, which is oneself and which he represents simply as the self. I can only ask who then wrote that article. Did the Unmanifest Brahman come and write it? Of course that clever

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