Constant Meditation Necessary

Sri Annamalai Swami

Q: I want to ask Swamiji about his own experience. Was his own experience a single event, an explosion of knowledge? Or did it happen more gradually, in a more subtle way?

M: It was my experience that through continuous sadhana I gradually relaxed into the Self. It was a gradual process.

Q: So it is not necessarily something that happens with a big bang?

M: It is not something new that suddenly comes. It is eternally there, but it is covered by so much. It has to be rediscovered.

Q: But do some people explode into That? I was with a man this morning who claims to be realized. He came here. Do you remember him? He said he had an experience of exploding into it, and that the experience of the Self, he says, stayed with him ever since 1982.

M [laughing]: If he says, "I don't know myself" or if he claims, "I have known myself", both are statements to laugh at. Because you are That, you can be That, but there is nothing to say about it. If somebody says, "I am a jnani, I am an enlightened person", who is claiming that?

Q: Yes exactly. Very good. Can I ask another question about my enquiry? I have been having small little glimpses, especially during sleep, of having no thoughts. There have been other glimpses in the most unlikely places. In Lucknow, which is a big, busy city, with people yelling and screaming everywhere, I was cycling down a crowded street when I suddenly felt the peace of the Self that was underlying everything. I could feel the Self, or at least it was an experience that I thought must have been the Self. There was a stillness and a silence in the midst of these utterly chaotic conditions. At other times the pendulum swings the other way and I feel completely lost in my mental world, and in the chaotic outside world. 

I feel a little confusion about the process and the technique of self-enquiry, so much so I have to go to back to reading Ramana's teachings on the subject again and again until the confusion leaves me. I would like Swami's comments on this. I know that there is nothing new that e can say about it. I know that I have to continue with self-enquiry.

M: Constant meditation is the only way. If you bring the light into your room, the darkness immediately goes away. You have to see that the light is not put out. It has to be continuously burning so that there is no darkness. Until you get firmly established in the Self, you have to continue with your meditation. Doubts take possession of you only if you forget yourself.