Ramana Maharshi's Who Am I?

We cannot get rid of the body and mind by just saying, ‘I am not this body and mind,’ because it is the mind that is thinking this. To separate ourself from the body and mind, we need to cling only to ‘I’; in other words, we need to be keenly self-attentive.

Bhagavan taught us dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda, the contention (vāda) that perception (dṛṣṭi) precedes creation (sṛṣṭi). According to Bhagavan, this world is just a dream. A dream does not exist before we perceive it; it exists only in our perception of it. It is only in our awareness that the dream world seems to exist.

‘First find ego, and then if you find it, bring it to me, and then we can consider how it arose. But first find it.’ If we look for it, it disappears, because we seem to be ego only when we are looking at things other than ourself. When we look at ourself, ego thereby dissolves and merges back into its source and what remains is only pure awareness

‘If ego comes into existence, everything comes into existence; if ego does not exist, everything does not exist. Ego itself is everything. Therefore, know that investigating what this [ego] is alone is giving up everything.’[8]

Bhagavan said that sleep is not a state of ignorance but a state of pure awareness. It seems like ignorance or darkness only from the perspective of ego in waking and dream. In sleep, we are aware of ourself as ‘I am’, and there is no defect in our awareness of ‘I am’.

We experience that fundamental awareness of our own existence as ‘I am’, but as ego, we mix this awareness ‘I am’ with adjuncts.

Anything that appears and disappears must be something different from ourself because it is in our view that they appear and disappear. We are there before objects appear, and we are there after objects disappear. Even the mind is something that appears and disappears. It appears in waking and dream, it disappears in sleep, and therefore even this

What we are trying to investigate is only ourself as the subject. In other words, we investigate only ‘I’ and not anything known by ‘I’, not anything that appears and disappears in our awareness.

We are the subject; we are that which can never be objectified.