Who Am I?

Sri Ramana Maharshi, in 1902, wrote out the answers to some questions asked by a disciple seeking spiritual guidance. These questions and answers, collected together as ‘Nan Yaar?’ or ”Who Am I?’, give a short introduction to self-enquiry as a path to liberation. The 8 page PDF of ‘Who Am I?’ is available here. The following excerpts may encourage you to read the full document.

Excerpt 1:

Q. What is the path of inquiry for understanding the nature of the mind?

A. That which rises as ‘I’ in this body is the mind. If one inquires as to where in the body the thought ‘I’ rises first, one would discover that it rises in the heart. That is the place of the mind’s origin. Even if one thinks constantly ‘I’ ‘I’, one will be led to that place. Of all the thoughts that arise in the mind, the ‘I’ thought is the first. It is only after the rise of this that the other thoughts arise. It is after the appearance of the first personal pronoun that the second and third personal pronouns appear; without the first personal pronoun there will not be the second and third. By the inquiry ‘Who am I?’ the mind will become quiet. The thought ‘who am I?’ will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning fire, it will itself in the end get destroyed. Then, there will arise Self-realization.

Excerpt 2:

Q. What is happiness?

A. Happiness is the very nature of the Self; happiness and the Self are not different. There is no happiness in any object of the world. We imagine through our ignorance that we derive happiness from objects. When the mind goes out, it experiences misery. In truth, when its desires are fulfilled, it returns to its own place and enjoys the happiness that is the Self. Similarly, in the states of sleep, samadhi and fainting, and when the object desired is obtained or the object disliked is removed, the mind becomes inward-turned, and enjoys pure Self-Happiness. Thus the mind moves without rest alternately going out of the Self and returning to it. Under the tree the shade is pleasant; out in the open the heat is scorching. A person who has been going about in the sun feels cool when he reaches the shade. Someone who keeps on going from the shade into the sun and then back into the shade is a fool. A wise man stays permanently in the shade. Similarly, the mind of the one who knows the truth does not leave Brahman. The mind of the ignorant, on the contrary, revolves in the world, feeling miserable, and for a little time returns to Brahman to experience happiness. In fact, what is called the world is only thought. When the world disappears, i.e. when there is no thought, the mind experiences happiness; and when the world appears, it goes through misery.

What are our retreats about?

(The following is collected together from messages written by Pawanji on a WhatsApp group)

In the retreats that SIDH has been organising over the recent past, we have tried to invite only those who in our opinion are more or less aligned together. More or less on the same page in terms of self-enquiry and a genuine desire to Know (to know what is it all about?). The retreats are broadly about exploring the inner world, the self and the external world. We do not use any scripture, any Guru for this because we believe in this process of delving within in togetherness. We have no issues with scriptures or genuine Gurus, for them we have the highest of regard, but we think our retreat process, which is non-hierarchical, is better for self-learning. Authority has a tendency to lead us towards belief rather than learning.

Why saman-dharmi or people on the ‘same page’? The entire retreat process is a means to go deep within and get answers (from within) rather than from someone else. When people are on the same page and are sincere about the enquiry then they are deliberating (speaking and listening), but not with the other but with themselves. Samandharmita is supportive, or rather a pre-condition, of the other becoming a catalyst in our journey of diving deep within. Otherwise, the deliberations tend to be argumentative and opinions, facts and information start dominating rather than Truth. Arguments are aligned with opinions. Self-enquiry and authentic questioning (as different from rhetorical questions or challenging questions) is aligned with Truth. Opinions, by their very nature, will always differ, while Truth tends to converge even if different people come from different directions.

Another essential requirement, in line with the above, is the importance of authenticity in such a process. Authenticity is with oneself, honesty is with others. Honesty is certainly a virtue but authenticity is even more difficult. The ultimate lie is with the self not with the other. In the process of self enquiry and for “stepping out”, authenticity is essential. Authenticity to acknowledge our inauthenticity with ourselves (nothing to do with the other) and not feel depressed. No justification and no guilt. No blame and no complaint. No feeling sorry for oneself. No victimhood. All of these are escape routes – mind games to keep us away from going deep within.

To understand modernity we need to acknowledge that all of us – to a larger or lesser degree – are afflicted by it. This is painful to acknowledge because our tendency is to justify all our actions. To be rid of the trap of modernity we need to see its totally illusionary nature. The gap between what is professes and its reality. This leads to भ्रम मुक्ति and मोह भंग। if this happens, we step out of the trap of modernity. This is what we are trying to do in our retreats.

Learning to learn – Part 2

Part 1 of this post talks about the first of the two books on ‘Learning to learn’. Here are some excerpts from the second book, ‘Learning to learn – Ideas on implementation’.

Excerpt 1:

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) established in 2008 has been giving data driven insights into our education system. The latest ASER report in various places says the following:
“In 2018, ASER returns once again to the ‘basic’ model. A total of 546,527 children in the age group 3 to 16 years were surveyed this year. ASER 2018 is the thirteenth ASER report. ASER 2018 data indicates that of all children enrolled in Std VIII in India, about 73% can read at least a Std II level text. This number is unchanged from 2016. The overall performance of Std VIII in basic arithmetic has not changed much over time. Currently about 44% of all children in Std VIII can solve a 3-digit by 1-digit numerical division problem correctly.”

My colleague and I were visiting a rural school near Bangalore. We were sitting on the floor with the children and observing a 1st standard class in progress. A small girl came and sat near my colleague and asked him in Telugu- ‘Do you speak Telugu?’, seeing his hesitation she asked in Kannada, ‘Oh, you speak Kannada.’ My Tamilian colleague speaks very good Kannada and he responded to her question. She understood that he was not a native speaker and switched to fluent Tamil. I am just wondering whether the ASER team will not talk to this miraculous child after 7 years and tell us that her reading proficiency in class 8 is at 2nd standard level…

What the story illustrates is that it is not the child but the system that has failed. Failed to recognize, acknowledge and develop the Self-Learning capacities that she is naturally endowed with.

Excerpt 2:

As children, we grew up learning how to make many types of paper planes (ordinary/ fast/ rocket etc.), boats (ordinary/ with a sail/ catamaran etc.), whistles from leaves or paper, string telephones with empty cans, rubber band powered rolling toys, a jumping mouse from a handkerchief, a boat cut out of a plastic tongue cleaner with a blob of soap at the notch behind etc. I can go on adding to this list. Nobody formally taught us any of this but every child knew many such tricks. This was probably because there was a lot of unstructured free time to play, explore, talk to other children and adults, read, get bored, etc.

This has now become replaced by the idea that learning is all academic and structured and there is no space for children or adults to discover such things. I feel that we need to get these free spaces back or Self-Learning, which I think thrives on these spaces, will probably not work.

(If you are interested in buying copies of the two ‘Learning to learn’ books, please write to me at arun@sidhsri.org.)

North and South

My wife and I prefer to travel sleeper class and not in the AC coaches on the many 12+ hour train journeys we do. We have a simple rule – when we travel anywhere in South India, we buy sleeper class tickets but on North Indian routes we travel by AC. This is because the trains, for example between Kolkata and any place in South India, seem to have twice the number of people the sleeper class compartments can accommodate. It was bad to start with, but in the recent past the Indian railways have been slowly reducing the number of non-AC sleeper coaches and increasing the AC 3-tier coaches. This must be the bright idea of someone high up in the railway hierarchy to reduce the losses made by our passenger trains. The people who suffer are the poor who are forced to travel like cattle and, of course, some people like me and my wife who prefer to travel by sleeper class but are forced to buy AC tickets to avoid the impossible rush.

My wife and I were on a train from Delhi to Visakhapatnam recently and we calculated that Visakhapatnam was not on the especially crowded route and decided to try out the sleeper option. Our train was starting from Delhi at 8 pm and we were to reach Visakhapatnam after a 32-hour journey. Fortunately, we had two upper berths and got into them as soon as the train started moving. The compartment looked all right and we went to sleep reassured that our decision of travelling by sleeper had paid off. At Agra, 3 hours from Delhi, a huge crowd got in and brought back our memories of a nightmare journey on a Kolkata train many years ago. There were five people sleeping on the two lowest berths below us and people sleeping in between them on the floor and all along the corridor as far as we could see. When I went to the toilet at night I had to navigate in between the sleeping limbs and heads. This story had a good ending because the crowd emptied at Nagpur in the late morning and the next 24 hours of our journey was like travelling on our nice South Indian trains.

I wanted to bring this story up to highlight not just the differences in what public transport feels like between North and South India but also to point to something else. It seems to me that there is a difference in the harshness of people’s behaviour between these two parts of our country. To me, the Northern part feels somewhat more threatening than the much gentler Southern part. For example, the rough looking five friends on the two berths below us – their language and the stories they were telling each other are not something I expect to hear anywhere on public transport in South India. Now, I may be overreacting or making generalisations from too little data but what has your experience been? When you travel around, does North India feel more aggressive than the South?

Announcing a two week break

The first post on this blog was written on 23rd November 2020, just over three years ago. The blog has 158 posts that broadly cover the areas of education and modernity. The next post here will appear on 25th December after a two week break.

With many thanks,

Arun, SIDH

Why China Survived Its Dark Ages

In his last week’s blog post, John Michael Greer talked about the reasons for China’s culture continuing more or less intact after repeated collapses, while so many other civilizations rose, fell, and vanished. I thought that the insights in the post were useful for looking at our Indian context. Here are some excerpts to encourage you to read the full post:

Excerpt 1:

During its recorded history, China has been through four major dark ages: during the late Zhou dynasty, 770-226 BC, when the Zhou emperor became a powerless figurehead and warlords fought over the wreckage of the empire; during the long interval between the Han and Tang dynasties, 220-618 AD, another age of warlords when some sixty short-lived dynasties struggled for power; after the fall of the Tang dynasty, 960-1271, another brutal period of war and chaos; and finally the period after the fall of the Ming dynasty, 1644-1949, when China fell under foreign rule, first Manchu and then European, and plunged into poverty and misery as its wealth was stripped away by its foreign masters and its government disintegrated into another round of rule by local warlords.

Excerpt 2:

The most important resource base for any nontechnic society—that is to say, any society that gets most of its energy from human and animal muscle—consists of food and water. . . . The heart of China’s traditional subsistence economy was wetland rice agriculture, which used human and animal manure, nitrogen-fixing water plants, and hundreds of varieties of rice specialized for local conditions to provide a relatively robust food supply come thick or thin. Supplement that with dryland millet and soybean agriculture and animal raising that focuses on small livestock such as pigs, chickens, and pond-raised fish, and you’ve got a means of subsistence that’s impressively resilient. It doesn’t depend on extracting nutrients from the soil, as less sophisticated systems of agriculture do; instead, it systematically puts nutrients back into the soil. This is why there are areas in China that have been producing rice crops regularly for five thousand years.

Excerpt 3:

The old sustainable agriculture that made China so resilient for so long is a thing of the past. These days China uses more chemical fertilizer than any other nation on earth, by a significant margin. That’s not optional—more than a billion Chinese depend for their daily meals on the extravagant yields that only massive use of chemical fertilizers can provide—but it’s also not sustainable. On the one hand, chemical fertilizer feedstocks are mostly nonrenewable resources, and as those deplete, feeding China’s population is going to become more and more difficult; on the other, chemical fertilizers wreck the soil over time, so that an area that’s been farmed using chemical agriculture becomes more and more barren. That promises a very difficult future for China and the Chinese people.

Satya Anirvachaniya Hai

(To a question on WhatsApp about stark contradictions in what Osho says, for example that Krishna is great in one talk and Krishna is no good in another, Pawanji responded in the following manner. I thought it needed to be recorded as a blog post here.)

सत्य अनिर्वचनीय है, इसे भाषा में व्यक्त नहीं किया जा सकता, यह हमारे यहां कहा जाता रहा है। भौतिक जगत को, भावनाओं को भी, एक हद तक बताया जा सकता है पर सत्य तो अनुभव की वस्तु है, उसे बताया नही जा सकता। संकेत दिए जा सकते हैं। पहली बात तो यह। सत्य की तरफ इशारा ही कर सकते हैं। फिर अनुभव होना और निष्कर्ष पर पहुंचना, ये दो बिल्कुल अलग अलग बातें हैं। सत्य का निष्कर्ष नहीं निकाला जाता । सत्य तो बस होता है।

तीन मुख्य प्रश्न है संसार में। १) क्या २)क्यों और ३) कैसे। “क्या” का उत्तर सत्य में है। सत्य यानि हमेशा एक जैसा – हर काल में और हरेक स्थान पर। समय और स्थान से निरपेक्ष। इसलिए उसे सनातन कहा जाता है। सत्य को पहचाना जा सकता है उसके बाद अनुभव।

“क्यों” दिमाग के दायरे में आने वाली वस्तु है। “क्यों” यानि कारण। कारण एक से अधिक होते हैं। पर बहुदा हम किसी एक या दो प्रमुख दिखने/लगने वाले कारणों को देखकर निष्कर्ष निकाल लेते हैं। कई बार, साइंस वालों को भी अपने बताए कारणों पर पुनर्विचार करना होता है। कहने का अर्थ, “क्यों” का उत्तर मैं उतनी गंभीरता से नहीं लेता। काम चल जाय उतना भर। कई बार बगैर “क्यों” के उत्तर के भी काम चलता है। हमारे लोक ज्ञान की परंपराओं में “क्यों” को बहुत महत्व नहीं दिया गया है। Observation और patterns को देख कर भी निष्कर्ष निकाल लेते थे लोग। अंदाजा लगा लेते थे – बारिश होगी की नही, मौसम कैसा रहेगा, कौन सा भोजन कब करना ठीक है, कब नहीं, कौन सी फसल किस दिन लगानी ठीक रहेगी, कब काटना है, अमावस्या, कृष्णपक्ष, पूर्णिमा, ग्रहण इत्यादि के हिसाब से। इसका लॉजिक अलग था जो पैटर्न पर और observation based था। कहने का तात्पर्य “क्यों” का उत्तर एक ही हो यह जरूरी नहीं। और निष्कर्ष की बात “क्यों” से जुड़ी है।

फिर “कैसे”। ” कैसे” का संबंध तो ‘करने’ से है। करना हमेशा ही स्थिति परिस्थिति यानि सामयिक स्थिति पर निर्भर करेगा।

सत्य सूक्ष्म होता है और स्वयं को ढूंढना पड़ता है। दूसरे के बताए से चलता नही – वह कोई काम का नहीं। “क्यों” और “कैसे” दूसरा बता सकता है। इसमें सामान्य लॉजिक की भूमिका है। इसलिए बहुत सी परंपराओं में “क्या” या सत्य को बताने के लिए paradox का सहारा लिया गया। Zen Buddhism में तो बहुत ही। हमारे यहां भी जैसे हम उलट बांसी के बारे में सुनते हैं। ओशो भी कुछ वैसे ही बात करते हैं। वह हमारे दिमाग को जड़ता से बाहर निकालने का प्रयास करते हैं। क्योंकि यह हमारा आधुनिक दिमाग ठस हो गया है, जड़ हो गया है। उसमे दुनिया भर की मान्यताएं भरी पड़ी हैं जो उसकी सोच, उसके तर्क, उसके निष्कर्षों को प्रभावित करती रहती हैं, पर हम उन मान्यताओं के प्रति बिल्कुल अनिभिज्ञ रहते हैं। ओशो की कोशिश है हम उनसे बाहर निकलें और एकदम innocent हो कर चीज़ों को देखें, समझें। सरन इसे noetic sensitivity कहते है जो हमने खो दी है। उसे जगाने की कोशिश होती है इन contradictory (लगने) वाली बातों से।

Under-evaluation and Over-evaluation

There is a wonderful short story by Anton Chekhov called ‘Overdoing it’. Here is an extract. . . .


It was dusk by the time the cart drove out of the station. On the surveyor’s right hand stretched a dark, endless, frozen plain. On the horizon, where it vanished and melted into the sky, there was the glow of a cold autumn sunset. The surveyor could not see what was in front as his whole field of vision on that side was covered by the broad clumsy back of the driver. The air was still, but it was cold and frosty.

“What a wilderness it is here,” thought the surveyor, “if, by ill-luck, one were attacked and robbed no one would hear you, whatever uproar you made. . . . And the driver is not one you could depend on. . . . Ugh, what a huge back! He has only to move a finger and it would be all up with one! And his ugly face is suspicious and brutal-looking.”

“Hey, my good man!” said the surveyor, “What is your name?”

“Mine? Klim.”

“Well, Klim, what is it like in your parts here? Not dangerous? Any robbers on the road?”

“It is all right, the Lord has spared us. . . . Who should go robbing on the road?”

“It’s a good thing there are no robbers. But to be ready for anything I have got three revolvers with me,” said the surveyor untruthfully. “And it doesn’t do to trifle with a revolver, you know. One can manage a
dozen robbers. . . .”

It had become quite dark. The cart suddenly began creaking, squeaking, shaking, and, as though unwillingly, turned sharply to the left.

“Where is he taking me to?” the surveyor wondered. “He has been driving straight and now all at once to the left. I shouldn’t wonder if he’ll take me, the rascal, to some den of thieves . . . and. . . . Things like that do happen.”

“I say,” he said, addressing the driver, “so you tell me it’s not dangerous here? That’s a pity. . . I like a fight with robbers. . . . I am thin and sickly-looking, but I have the strength of a bull . . . . Once three robbers attacked me and what do you think? I gave one such a beating that. . . that he died, and the other two were sent to jail in Siberia. And where I got the strength I can’t say. . . . One grips a huge fellow of your sort with one hand and . . . wipes him out.”


The surveyor goes on in this manner till, to his great surprise, Klim rolls off the cart and runs away shouting . . .

“Help! Take the horse and the cart, you devil, only don’t take my life. Help!”

The surveyor then realises that the cart driver is as afraid of him as he is of the driver. It takes two hours of shouting and an explanation before the cart driver agrees to take the surveyor (now not afraid at all) to his destination.

I thought this story highlights how easily and how often we fall into the trap of under-evaluating and over-evaluating ourselves and other people.

Keeping Our Cities Clean

My daughter stays on the first floor of an independent house in Bangalore. When she first moved into this house she tried to figure out how to get her garbage disposed. The landlady downstairs has her daily help take the garbage away and keep it in a place from where the BBMP van collects it. My daughter has no daily help and she realised that the BBMP van comes at odd hours and doesn’t stop at individual houses so it is difficult to catch it. The landlady suggested that my daughter speak to the BBMP workers who clean the streets outside and get one of them to carry away the garbage. It would then become the responsibility of the worker to ensure that the garbage got into the garbage van somehow. The landlady said that 100 Rupees per month is the maximum that we should pay for this service. A white-haired BBMP worker agreed to this and the garbage from my daughter’s house started getting disposed. Now, the white-haired BBMP worker comes sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 AM, so my daughter’s task is to have her garbage kept near her small side-gate downstairs before 7:00 AM. Whenever I have stayed at my daughter’s house I have noticed the brown paper garbage bag near the gate and when I look sometime later the bag would have vanished. I have met the white-haired BBMP man only a few times but I have always felt a deep sense of gratitude towards him. I have wondered why this quiet, smiling man would go out of his way for 100 Rupees per month and I have no answer to that question. I see the vanishing of the brown paper bag as a daily morning miracle.

The other thing that I want to juxtapose with this anecdote is the large number of pet dogs of all sizes and shapes that live in the somewhat posh neighbourhood that my daughter stays in. She has to come out on to the road using the side-gate to the house and she regularly finds dog-shit just outside the gate. It seems that the dog-minders find this side-gate a quiet place hidden from normal view and utilize it as a public toilet for their dogs. There are two types of dog-minders. A few are the owners of the dogs and a small percentage of these owners carry a strange device for collecting their dog-shit (how this behaviour has been normalized is a great mystery to me). However, most dogs are with professional dog-walkers, people who are paid to take the dogs of busy people for walks. Obviously, none of the professional dog-walkers carry the strange device for scooping dog-shit.

The dog-walkers get paid many times the 100 Rupees that the white-haired BBMP worker gets from my daughter. The difference is that the BBMP worker gets my daughter’s deep gratitude and the dogs, their walkers and their owners get her curse.

Sangoshthi on Bharatiyata at Kaneri Math

जीविका आश्रम, इन्द्राना, मध्यप्रदेश व सिद्ध, मसूरी, उत्तराखण्ड के संयुक्त तत्वाधान में दिनांक 2 से 5 नवम्बर, 2023 को कणेरी मठ्ठ, कोल्हापुर, महाराष्ट्र में एक संगोष्ठी आयोजित हुई। संगोष्ठी में देश के विभिन्न प्रान्तों से 7 संस्थानों से जुड़े लगभग 22 प्रतिभागि आये थे। मार्गदर्शन हेतु कणेरी मठ्ठ के मठाधीपति पुज्यश्री अदृश्य काडसिद्धेश्वर स्वामीजी उपस्थित रहे।

संगोष्ठी में मंथन हेतु निम्न उद्देश्यों को रखा गया था :-

  1. वर्तमान व्यवस्थाओं व विचार तंत्रों में स्वयं की असहजता को देखने का प्रयास करना।
  2. वर्तमान में प्रचलित विभिन्न आधुनिक अवधारणाओं की गम्भीरता से परीक्षा।
  3. भारतीयता पर आधारित विभिन्न प्रयासों के मूल सिद्धान्तों को पहचानने का प्रयास करना।

चर्चा को प्रारम्भ करते हुए प्रतिभागियों ने अपनी व्यक्तिगत यात्रा के बारे में बताया। इस दौरान उन्होंने अपने द्वन्द्वों और भारतीयता व आधुनिकता से जुड़ी व उन्हें स्पष्ट हुई कुछ धारणाओं को रखने का प्रयास किया। इस चर्चा में जो धारणायें प्रमुख रूप से निकल कर आयीं वे निम्न प्रकार हैं :-

  1. किसी भी यात्रा व संघर्ष में ‘आहार की सुरक्षा’ प्रारम्भिक बिन्दु है।
  2. कुटुम्भ का सुदृढ़ीकरण। अर्थात हम जिस भी समाज या समूह में वर्तमान समय में निवास करते हैं उनके साथ सृदृढ़ सम्बन्धों को विकसित करना।
  3. हमनें अपनी विचार यात्रा में जिस भी माध्यम को साधन के रूप में चयन किया है उसमें भी बहुत अधिक नहीं फंसना।
  4. स्थानीय स्तर पर उत्पादन के साथ-साथ स्थानीय स्तर पर खपत को प्राथमिकता प्रदान करना।
  5. एक ऐसी व्यवस्था का विकास जिसमें उत्पादित वस्तुओं को ना तो बेचा जाये और ना ही उन्हें मुफ्त में वितरित किया जाये।
  6. आधुनिकता के विभिन्न आयामों में स्वयं फंसावट का निरतंर परिक्षण करते रहना।
  7. ‘होने’ की अवधारणा पर विश्वास मजबूत करना, ‘करने’ की बाध्यता से मुक्त होने का प्रयास करना।

उक्त धारणाओं की पहचान के उपरान्त इस संगोष्ठी में निम्न कार्यबिन्दुओं पर विचार किया गया।

  1. अपने अनुभवों को ईमानदारी से रखना और उन्हें सुनने का प्रयास बहुत सार्थक रहा। अतः भविष्य में भी इस तरह की संगोष्ठियों का आयोजन होना चाहिए।
  2. संगोष्ठी में शामिल हुए मित्रों द्वारा अपने-अपने स्तर पर किये जा रहे प्रयासों को ओर गहनता से जानने व समझने का प्रयास होना चाहिए।
  3. वर्तमान के विभिन्न आधुनिक उपक्रमों में उन उपक्रमों की पहचान करनी चाहिए जिन्हें सहजता से त्यागा जा सके और साथ में ऐसे उपक्रमों की भी पहचान होनी चाहिए जिनके बिना फिलहाल चलना संभव नहीं है।
  4. संगोष्ठी में उपस्थित मित्रों के बीच पारिवारिक स्तर पर भी सम्बन्धों को विकसित करने का प्रयास होना चाहिए।
  5. संगोष्ठी में उपस्थित मित्रों को समय-समय पर ऑनलाइन मिलने का प्रयास करना चाहिए और इस दौरान ए.के. सरन, आनन्द कुमार स्वामी, धर्मपाल जी, गाँधी जी जैसे चितन्कों के माध्यम से आधुनिकता को समझने का प्रयास होना चाहिए।
  6. आधुनिकता को समझने के क्रम में अपने जीवन में आ रहे बदलावों को मित्रों के साथ साझा करना चाहिए और उस पर चर्चा होनी चाहिए।