Peace Could Be Gained Anywhere

Sri Ramana Maharshi

A brahmachari youth who has graduated in science has been waiting here for grace for the last four or five months in order that some job might drop on him like a ripe apple from the tree. He has making no other efforts to secure a job. His brother yesterday came here to take him away to his parents. But the youth declined to go. An appeal was made to Sri Bhagavan.

B said, "I do not tell anyone to come nor ask him to go. Everyone pleases himself here. He says he finds peace in the hall and he also wants a job. Evidently the job must be found in the hall itself so that his peace may not be disturbed. Peace is not in the hall. It is in the repose of the Self. It can be gained anywhere."

Some days later the youth threw away his sacred thread and appeared before Sri Bhagavan with his limbs shaking, which the young man later described as his Bliss (ananda). B told him not to make a habit of sitting in front of Him in the hall and ordered him out. Furthermore He continued: "Even a fledgling is protected by the parent bird only till such time it grows its wings. It is not protected forever. Similarly with devotees, I have shown the way. You must now be able to follow it up and find peace wherever you are."

The young man things that B gave him upadesha in the following words: "The self (ego) must be subdued by oneself."

The man, however, has refused the offer of a job to him in one of the local schools and thinks that he has been given a mighty job by the Hill or by Sri Bhagavan. "What that job is the world will know later.", he says. He had further anticipated all this day's occurences some months agao and had foretold them to his mother and to his friends. He is happy at the happenings. 

Sri Bhagavan, however, compared him to another man who is in no way of the right type. And yet the boy thinks that he is Bhagavan in embryo. Later he turned mad and died.