(1) How am I to search for the ‘I’ from start to finish? (2) When I meditate, I reach a stage where there is a vacuum or void. How should I proceed from there?
Bhagavan [Ramana Marharshi]: Never mind whether there are visions or sounds or anything else or whether there is void. Are you present during all these or are you not?
You must have been there during the void to be able to say that you experienced a void. To be fixed in that ‘you’ is the quest from start to finish.
In all books on Vedanta you will find this question of a void or nothing being left raised by the disciple and answered by the Guru.
It is the mind that sees objects and has experiences and that finds a void when it ceases to see and experience, but that is not ‘you’.
You are the constant illumination that lights up both the experience and the void.
It is like the theatre light that enables you to see the theatre, the actors, and the play while the play is going on but also remains alight and enables you to say that there is no play on when it is all finished.
Or there is another illustration:
We see objects all around us but in complete darkness we do not see them and we say: ‘I see nothing’.
In the same way, you are there even in the void you mention.
You are the witness of the three bodies: the gross, the subtle, and the causal, and of the three times: past, present and future, and also this void.
In the story of the tenth man, when each of them counted and thought they were only nine, each one forgetting to count himself, there is a stage when they think one is missing and do not know who it is; and that corresponds to the void.
We are so accustomed to the notion that all that we see around us is permanent and that we are this body, that when all this ceases to exist we imagine and fear that we also have ceased to exist.
Bhagavan also quoted verses 212 and 213 from Vivekachudamani in which the disciple says: “After I eliminate the five sheaths as not-Self, I find that nothing at all remains”; and the Guru replies that the Self or That by which all modifications, including the ego and all its creatures and their absence (that is the void), are perceived, is always there.
Bhagavan continued and said:
The nature of the Self or ‘I’ must be illumination. You perceive all modifications and their absence.
How?
To say that you get the illumination from another would raise the question how he got it and there would be no end to the chain of reasoning.
So you yourself are the illumination.
The usual illustration of this is the following: You make all kinds of sweets of various ingredients and in various shapes and they all taste sweet because there is sugar in all of them and sweetness is the nature of sugar. And in the same way all experiences and the absence of them contain the illumination which is the nature of the Self.
Without the Self they cannot be experienced,
just as without sugar not one of the articles you make can taste sweet.
(Later he continued):
First one sees the Self as objects, then one sees the Self as void, then one sees the Self as the Self; only in this last case there is no seeing because seeing is being.”
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