Guru Vachaka Kovai

Sri Ramana Maharshi

Give up thinking that the loathsome body is ‘I’. Know Self, which is eternal Bliss. Cherishing the ephemeral body as well as trying to know Self is just like using a crocodile as a raft to cross a river. 

Those who show great care and love for their bodies, while saying that they are trying to know Self, are like one who tries to cross a river, mistaking a crocodile for a log. 

Instead of attending to Sat-Chit-Ananda, the subtlest, which is beyond the reach of speech or mind, to spend one’s life attending merely to the welfare of the gross body is just like drawing water with great difficulty from a well in order to water some useless grass [instead of paddy]. 

Those who take to the petty life, mistaking the body as ‘I’, have lost, so to speak, the great life of unlimited Bliss in the Heart, which is ever waiting to be experienced by them. 

Not knowing that the world in front of them brings only great harm, those who take it to be real and a source of happiness will drown in the ocean of birth and death, like one who takes hold of a floating bear as a raft. 

Just as the movements of a vehicle in which one is sitting is wrongly taken to be one’s own movements, so also those who do not have Self-Knowledge suffer from the delusion of mistaking the birth and death [i.e., samsara] experience by the ego as their [Self’s] own [birth and death]. 

If the ignorant one, who is clinging to the body and world as real, wants to have peace, he should, giving up his wrong notion, cling like an udumbu to Self in his heart. 

From Collection of Guru's Sayings by Sri Muruganar