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Our email address is editor @realization.org.

Copyright 2001 Realization.org.

No thought

	This is an old editor's page. The current one is here.

November 4, 2001

I'd like to look again at something Douglas Harding said in the interview we published a few weeks ago:

Well, I’ve read all the books about Ramana—I’ve never met him—and I think he says a lot of things—some of which don’t mean much to me, it seems to be more part of that culture—but one of the things he does say in places is that you don’t have to do anything to see who you really are, you don’t have to stop thinking to see who you really, really are.

As I've said here before, the last part of this seems odd to me. If Sri Ramana taught anything, it was silence. Silence means not thinking. I just ran across a quote that explains the matter very nicely:

When this question Who am I? is raised, what results is silence, an ending of the entire thought-process. Be watchful: cling to this silence. This silence, though temporary, is the link between the 'I' and the Self. "True Silence where no thoughts exist, is the real state of Realisation," says Sri Bhagavan. The 'I' is a distortion of this state of quietude, being a movement, a wave in the ocean of stillness.

(From Sri Ramana, the Self Supreme by K. Swaminathan, pp. 113–14.)

Here's another one:

When camphor burns, nothing remains afterwards. The mind should be made like camphor. In the search for the Self, the mind should burn out. Then there will be nothing remaining such as inside or outside.

(Ramana Maharshi quoted by Swami Madhavatirtha in Power of the Presence Part One, p. 239.)