Keep Attention on the Self

Sri Annamalai Swami

Bhagavan (Ramana Maharshi) repeatedly told me, 'Don't forget your real nature. It is not necessary that you should sit and meditate. You should meditate all the time, even while you are working.'

In the beginning, when I first came to B, I had asked him for a mantra. In response he told me to repeat 'Siva, Siva' continuously. Later, B advised me to keep my attention in the Heart while I was working. I had read that B had spoken of a place called the Heart-centre which he located on the right side of the chest. I had assumed that B wanted me on this particular centre. However, when I started to practise this way, B stopped me and corrected me.

'This right side Heart-centre is not the true Heart, the real Heart is not located anywhere. It is all-pervasive.' 

'Stop meditating on the Heart-centre. Find the source. That is the true Heart . Just as electricity comes not from the individual meter boxes in people's houses but from a single source, so too the whole world has a single source, which is the Self or the Heart. Seek and enquire into this source of limitless energy. If the centre of the Self were really located in the body, the Self would die when the body dies.'

I understood from these remarks that just as one cannot experience the nature and source of electricity by starting at the meter box in one's house, similarly, one cannot gain a direct experience of the current of the Self by concentrating on the Heart-centre. I gave up concentrating on this centre and tried to follow B's advice. 

In order to keep my attention on the Self while I was working I adopted, with B's permission, the traditional approaches of 'neti-neti' (not this, not this) and affirmation: 'I am not the body and the mind; I am the Self; I am everything.'