Look Within

Sri Ramana Maharshi

3-7-1946

A visitor said: I am told that according to your school I must find out the source of my thoughts. How am I to do it?’ 

Bhagavan: I have no school; however, it is true that one should trace the source of all thoughts. 

Visitor: Suppose I have the thought ‘horse’ and try to trace its source; I find that it is due to memory and the memory in its turn is due to prior perception of the object ‘horse’, but that is all. 

Bhagavan: Who asked you to think about all that? All those are also thoughts. What good will it do you to go on thinking about memory and perception? It will be endless, like the old dispute, which came first, the tree or the seed. Ask who has this perception and memory. That ‘I’ that has the perception and memory, whence does it arise? Find out that. Because perception or memory or any other experience only comes to that ‘I’. You don’t have such experiences during sleep, and yet you say that you existed during sleep. And you exist now too. That shows that the ‘I’ continues while other things come and go. 

Visitor: I am asked to find out the source of ‘I’, and in fact that is what I want to find out, but how can I? What is the source from which I came? 

Bhagavan: You came from the same source in which you were during sleep. Only during sleep you couldn’t know where you entered; that is why you must make the enquiry while waking. Some of us advised the visitor to read Who am I? and Ramana Gita and Bhagavan also told him he might do so. He did so during the day and in the evening he said to Bhagavan: “Those books prescribe Self-enquiry, but how is one to do it?” 

Bhagavan: That also must be described in the books. 

Visitor: Am I to concentrate on the thought ‘Who am I?’ 

Bhagavan: It means you must concentrate to see where the I-thought arises. Instead of looking outwards, look inwards and see where the I-thought arises. 

Visitor: And Bhagavan says that if I see that, I shall realise the Self? 

Bhagavan: There is no such thing as realising the Self. How is one to realise or make real what is real? People all realise, or regard as real, what is unreal, and all they have to do is to give that up. When you do that you will remain as you always are and the Real will be Real. It is only to help people give up regarding the unreal as real that all the religions and the practices taught by them have come into being.