Our world is in pretty rough shape these days. I know, I know. People have been saying that every century for several millennia.
“Yikes! This Bubonic Plague is killing everybody! How could things get any worse?” said anybody in Europe in the middle of the 14th century.
Ditto in the early 20th century when twenty million people died in World War I. I could go on for 3,000 pages on this, but I’ll stop there.
And today?
Our suffering planet
Wars in Iran and Ukraine. Global warming roasting the planet. The usual mass suffering throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Brutal, insane dictators (not to mention the wannabes) oppressing billions of people for their own selfish gain.
What’s a spiritual aspirant to do?
Enter Ramana Maharshi.
I’ve been at this spiritual stuff for going on fifteen years now and a big part of that journey has been spent studying the greats. The ones who “got there.”
Of all the saints I’ve studied, only a handful truly blew me away.
Who was Ramana Maharshi?
Ramana Maharshi was one of those few.
Sri Ramana’s story is that one night at age sixteen he had a revelatory experience in which he sensed a force inside himself that he identified as his true self. He dropped his ego right there and then.
Six weeks later, in 1896, he abruptly left home and traveled to the holy mountain of Arunachala in southern India. He spent the final 54 years of his life as a renunciant and spiritual teacher in and around the city of Tiruvannamalai, which lies at the base of Arunachala.
My favorite modern teachers, Eckhart Tolle and Michael Singer, have extolled Ramana Maharshi repeatedly over the years. Time and again in my spiritual studies he has been praised as the most authentic of Indian sages.
Paul Brunton’s journey to India
Today’s piece is inspired by something Sri Ramana said to Paul Brunton, an Englishman who traversed India in search of authentic yogis back in the 1930s.
Brunton wrote about those experiences in his iconic book, A Search in Secret India, where he recounts spending significant time with with Meher Baba and several other renowned saints.
But the one yogi who blew him away infinitely more than the others was Ramana Maharshi. Brunton’s recounting of their conversations is profoundly moving.
In one of those conversations, Brunton pressed Sri Ramana about the state of the world. He asked if good times were ahead or “chaos and war?”
