Sublime

To feel oneself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, locked up inside a bag of skin, is in the view of the East a hallucination. You are not a stranger on the earth who has come into this world as the result of a fluke of nature, or as a spirit from somewhere outside

One of these great saints, Ramana Maharshi, used to ask, “Who am I?” We see now that this is a very deep question. Ask it ceaselessly, constantly. Ask it and you will notice that you are the answer. There is no intellectual answer—you are the answer. Be the answer, and everything will change.

‘I [am] who?’, and his first two answers, ‘அறிவே நான்’ (aṟivē nāṉ), which means ‘awareness alone is I’, and

Verse 29: Investigating by an inward sinking mind where one rises as ‘I’ alone is the path of jñāna, whereas thinking ‘I am not this, I am that’ is an aid but not vicāra.

The real Self is the infinite ‘I’. That ‘I' is perfection. It is eternal. It has no origin and no end. The

Brahman is that which exists in the heart devoid of thought as the pure awareness ‘I am’.

Tradition has isolated four powerful formulaic utterances (mahavakyas) embedded in the early Upanishads. One is sarvam idam brahma, “All is Brahman” (Chandogya III.14.1), which states the foundation of mysticism: that everything is ultimately one.