Ramana Maharshi’s Simple Prescription for Spiritual Growth
Be still. Be.
It’s odd that I’ve been writing about all this spiritual stuff for almost three years and this is the first time I’ve delved into Ramana Maharshi, the great 20th century Indian saint. Why is that odd? Because my favorite teachers, Eckhart Tolle and Michael Singer, have extolled Ramana Maharshi repeatedly over the years.
His story is simple and fascinating. The truncated version is that at age 16 he experienced a force inside himself that he identified as his true self. Six weeks later, in 1896, he left home and traveled to the holy mountain of Arunachala in southern India. He spent the final 54 years of his life in and around the city of Tiruvannamalai, which lies at the base of Arunachala, as a renunciant and spiritual teacher.
The focus of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching did not involve much in the way of Hindu dogma. He never even read the Bhagavad Gita, arguably the most important text in all of Hinduism. His teachings related almost solely to his own experiences with his inner world.
“Who am I?”
He is most well-known for recommending this simple meditative practice: asking ourselves the question, “Who am I?” Repeatedly. Crucially, he stipulates that we don’t answer the question. We just keep asking it. That’s the entire…
