Actions will go on automatically

Sri Ramana Maharshi

V: But the work may suffer if I do not attend to it.

M: Attending to the Self means attending to the work. Because you identify yourself with the body, you think that work is done by you. But the body and its activities, including that work, are not apart from the Self. What does it matter whether you attend to the work or not? Suppose you walk from one place to another: you do not attend to the steps you take. Yet you find yourself after a time at your goal. You see how the business of walking goes on without attending to it. So also with other kinds of work.

V: It is then like sleep-walking.

M: Like somnambulism? Quite so. When a child is fast asleep, his mother feeds him; the child eats the food just as well as when he is fully awake. But the next morning he says to the mother, "Mother, I did not take food last night". The mother and others know that he did, but he says he did not; he was not aware. Still the action had gone on.

A traveler in a cart has fallen asleep. The bulls move, stand still or are unyoked during the journey He does not know these events but finds himself in a different place after he wakes up. He has been blissfully ignorantly of the occurrences on the way, but the journey has been finished. Similarly with the Self of  a person. The ever-wakeful Self is compared to the traveler asleep in the cart The waking state is the moving of the bulls; samadhi is their standing still (because samadhi means jagrat-sushupti, that is to say, the person is aware but not concerned in the action; the bulls are yoked but do not move); sleep is the unyoking of the bulls, for there is complete stopping of activity corresponding to the relief of the bulls from the yoke.

Or again, take the instance of the cinema. Scenes are projected on the screen in the cinema show. But the moving pictures do not affect or alter the screen. The spectator pays attention to them, not to the screen. They cannot exist apart from the screen, yet the screen is ignored. So also, the Self is the screen where the pictures, activities etc. are seen going on. The man is aware of the latter but not aware of the essential former. All the same the world of pictures is not apart from the Self. Whether he is aware of the screen or unaware, the actions will continue.

V: But there is an operator in the cinema.

M: The cinema show is made out of insentient materials. The lamp, the pictures, the screen etc., are all insentient and so they need an operator, the sentient agent. On the other hand, the Self is absolute consciousness, and there self-contained. There cannot be an operator apart from the Self.