Shapes of Truth by Neal Allen

Author:Neal Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pearl Publications
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

But Who Am I?

A FEW YEARS AGO I visited an ashram in Southern India devoted to Ramana Maharshi, a guru who died there in 1950. My friend Meg, whom I met in the 1980s when we were both reporters at a New Jersey newspaper, has lived near the ashram for fifteen years. Now that I was on my own spiritual path, she insisted that I come visit. Most of my days I spent on the ashram grounds; nights were in the spare dormitory across the street. I ate communal meals on the floor with food slopped onto banana leaves, sat around and meditated, observed daily Hindu ceremonies, hung out nearby with Meg, spent a cold, windy night at the rocky top of the sacred mountain overlooking the ashram, and concentrated repeatedly on the being and messages of Ramana Maharshi. His path can be summed up as a lifelong pursuit of a single question: “Who am I?”

I also began the research for this book. At the time I was most interested in linking the body-forms to the philosophy of Plato. The plan for the book was to tie the body-forms closely to Plato’s notion of inborn ideals. Does a person already know what “the good” is, before finding it in morality and their own actions, as Plato had said they did? Were we born with an imbedded vocabulary? I thought so, and wondered whether these body-forms of Hameed Ali were a missing link to what Plato had been talking about. In pursuing this line of questioning, I also needed some grounding in modern linguistics, to study the bridges between words, body-forms, concepts, and things. It turned out that the ashram had a lovely new library, and in the stacks I discovered some beat-up copies of the Socratic dialogues and a recent textbook on linguistics, donated by previous visitors. Bingo!

I lived temporarily in three lives: the explorer of self, the productive scholar, and the familiar friend. The first two were solitary endeavors, one less worldly than the other, and the third was both interpersonal and worldly.

I can explore myself. I can explore the world. I can explore my relationship with people in the world. In the first two, I am looking for an answer to what is true? In the third, I am asking instead what is love?

Most of the divine body-objects are in service to how we humans interact with the outside world. Hidden in that statement is the idea that there’s a me who experiences that. The mystery of the me, the that, and their relationship to each other give us theology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and sociology, plus all the other sciences. They give us Ramana Maharshi and his question, Who am I? Most of the divine body-forms help give me a clearer view of the other, or how to see through my subjective interpretation of life into an objective view of my relations with others. But two of them give me a direct view of myself, the me involved in this thing called life.

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