Aham Nirasa: Destroying the Ego

Witnessing, not suppressing

The Shaiva method for the ego is a third way: not suppression, which makes it stronger, and not indulgence, which feeds it. The method is witnessing from a place that is not the ego itself. This lesson opens with the Dakshinamurti image, four great sages sitting in silence at Shiva's feet, and walks the practice from there.

A Boy on the Floor at Madurai

It is the afternoon of 17 July 1896, on the upper floor of a house at Chokkappa Naicken Street in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. The room is small. A wooden cot stands in one corner. A boy of sixteen, named Venkataraman Iyer, has just sat down on the floor. He is alone. The day is hot. A faint sound of voices from the street comes through the latticed window.

Without warning, a violent fear of death takes hold of him.

There is no medical reason for it. He is healthy. There is no news of an illness in the family. The fear simply arrives, the way a thunderstorm arrives in a clear afternoon. The boy's body begins to feel cold. His heart pounds. He thinks, very clearly, that he is going to die in the next few minutes.

What he does next is the entire content of this lesson.

He does not run downstairs to call for help. He does not try to push the fear away. He does not try to pray it off. He stretches out on the floor, makes his body stiff like a corpse, holds his breath, and decides to let death happen and watch what happens. He says to himself, in Tamil: very well, this body is dying. They will carry it out. They will burn it on the ghat. But am I dying with it. Or is there something here that is not the body.

Forty-five minutes later he gets up. He walks downstairs and eats. He never tells his uncle what happened. He goes to school the next morning. But something inside him has shifted in a way that will not undo. Within six weeks the boy will leave home, travel south, and arrive at the foot of the mountain Arunachala in Tiruvannamalai. He will sit there in silence for the next fifty-four years. The world will come to know him as Ramana Maharshi.