Search For Happiness Is Unconscious Search for Self

Sri Ramana Maharshi

• You have to ask yourself the question, "Who am I?" This investigation will lead in the end to the discovery of something within you which is beyond the mind. Solve that great problem, and you will solve all other problems thereby. Man's real nature is happiness. Happiness is inborn in the Self. His search for happiness is an unconscious search for his true Self. The true Self is imperishable; therefore, when a man finds it, he finds a happiness which does not come to an end.
• For one has realized that state of Perfect Being which is really the inherent indescribable Bliss of the Absolute Self, nothing else remains yet to accomplish. The Self is one; and Self-knowledge is unique in that the knowing Self is itself the known Self. It can never become a known or unknown object.
• You say that this is the 'age of reason' and that the teaching must be in accordance with reason. I ask, 'Whose is the intellect?' You must answer, 'My intellect'. So the intellect is your tool. You use it for measuring variety. It is not yourself, nor is it something independent of yourself. You are the abiding reality, while the intellect is just a phenomenon. You must find and get hold of yourself. There is no intellect in dreamless sleep. There is none in a child. The intellect develops with age. But how could there any development or manifestation of the intellect without the seed of it in sleep or childhood? Why go to history to discover this fundamental fact? The degree of truth in the history is the same as the degree of truth in the historian.

- Thus Spake Ramana