Ramana Maharshi and the Most Dangerous Question in Religion: Who Am I? - What remains when we remove the saint, the mythology and even the religion?

Most religions begin by telling you something.

There is a God.

There is a soul.

There is heaven.

There is karma.

There is salvation.

There is liberation.

Believe this. Reject that. Perform this ritual. Follow this path.

Ramana Maharshi did something considerably stranger.

He asked:

Who are you?

Not what religion you belong to.

Not what you believe.

Not which scriptures you have read.

Not whether you believe in God.

Not even what philosophy you accept.

Who is the person experiencing all of this?

It sounds like an elementary question.

Follow it seriously enough, however, and almost everything we ordinarily call ourselves begins to become unstable.

That is what makes Ramana Maharshi one of the most interesting spiritual figures of modern India.

And perhaps the best way to understand him is not to worship him.

It is to test him.

The Boy Who Thought He Was Dying

Ramana Maharshi was born Venkataraman Iyer in Tamil Nadu in 1879.

His defining experience reportedly occurred when he was sixteen.

Without an obvious physical cause, an intense fear of death suddenly overwhelmed him.

Instead of running for assistance, the teenager apparently decided to investigate death directly.

He imagined himself dying.

His limbs became rigid. His breathing was restrained. He pictured his body becoming a corpse, being carried away and eventually cremated.

Then came the essential question.

If this body dies, what exactly is dying?

The body could become lifeless.

But something was presently aware of the body.

Something knew fear was occurring.

Something was observing the imagined death.

Venkataraman concluded that his essential identity could not simply be identical with the physical body.

Whether that conclusion was metaphysically correct is another question.

But the intellectual manoeuvre itself was extraordinary.

Instead of asking:

“How do I escape death?”

he effectively asked:

“Who is the thing that dies?”

Soon afterward, he left home for Arunachala at Tiruvannamalai, a mountain regarded as sacred within the Shaiva tradition.

He would spend essentially the remainder of his life there.

The teenager Venkataraman gradually became the figure the world remembers as Ramana Maharshi.

Who Am I?

Ramana became associated above all with ātma-vichāra — self-enquiry.

It is sometimes reduced to endlessly repeating the sentence Who am I?

That misses the point.

The question is not intended merely as a mantra.

It is an investigation.

Suppose anger appears.

Instead of immediately asking why somebody made you angry, Ramana’s method turns attention around.

Who is angry?

Me.

Who is this me?

Suppose anxiety appears.

Who is anxious?

Me.

Who is this me?

Suppose you think:

I am unsuccessful.

Who knows that thought?

Suppose you think:

I am extraordinary.

Who knows that thought?

Suppose you think:

God loves me.

Who knows that thought?

Suppose you think:

God hates me.

Who knows that thought?

Again and again, attention is redirected from the contents of consciousness toward the apparent owner of consciousness.

And eventually an uncomfortable possibility emerges.

Perhaps many things we call the self are things the self can observe.

Start Removing Yourself

Try the experiment.

You have a name.

But you can think about your name.

Therefore the name is something appearing within your awareness.

You have a body.

You can observe sensations arising from your body.

You have memories.

You can notice memories appearing and disappearing.

You have beliefs.

You can change those beliefs.

You have emotions.

You can observe yourself becoming angry, frightened, euphoric or sad.

You have a personality.

Yet personality itself changes across childhood, adolescence, adulthood, relationships, trauma, environments and experience.

You possess an autobiography:

I was born here.

These are my parents.

This happened to me.

I became this kind of person.

But even your autobiography appears as memories and concepts within consciousness.

Keep subtracting.

Name.

Nationality.

Religion.

Profession.

Status.

Possessions.

Body image.

Political identity.

Personal mythology.

Memories.

Desires.

Fears.

Thoughts.

What remains?

That is where Ramana becomes difficult.

What Is Doing the Observing?

Human beings usually experience themselves as though there were a little executive sitting somewhere behind the eyes.

The thinker.

The decision-maker.

The owner.

The I.

But when you search directly for this entity, things become strange.

You can observe thoughts.

You can observe emotions.

You can observe bodily sensations.

You can even notice the thought:

“I am observing.”

So where exactly is the observer?

Ramana’s answer emerged from Advaita Vedanta.

The deepest Self, in this framework, is not the ordinary ego-personality but the fundamental awareness in which the apparent individual and world arise.

Whether one accepts that metaphysics is optional.

The investigation comes first.

And that distinction is enormously important.

Ramana Without Hinduism

Here is perhaps the most interesting test we can perform on Ramana Maharshi.

Take Hinduism away.

Take away Shiva.

Take away reincarnation.

Take away karma.

Take away moksha.

Take away Sanskrit terminology.

Take away every miracle attributed to Ramana.

Take away Arunachala’s sacred mythology.

Take away Advaita Vedanta.

Take away the ashram.

Take away his devotees.

Take away the photographs.

Eventually, take away even the title:

Ramana Maharshi.

What remains?

A human being notices that virtually everything he ordinarily calls himself can become an object of his own awareness.

His body can be observed.

His thoughts can be observed.

His emotions can be observed.

His memories can be observed.

Even the sentence I am thinking can itself be noticed.

And then comes the question:

What is doing the noticing?

That question does not require Hinduism.

It does not require atheism either.

It belongs to humanity.

Neuroscience Enters the Ashram

Modern neuroscience does not prove Ramana Maharshi right.

That needs to be stated clearly.

There is currently no scientific demonstration that an eternal metaphysical Self exists independently of the brain.

But neuroscience has complicated our intuitive idea of the self considerably.

What we casually experience as one continuous “me” involves many interacting processes: memory, attention, bodily representation, perception, emotion, language and self-referential cognition.

Damage or alteration to different brain systems can profoundly change personality, memory, body ownership and subjective identity.

Meditative practices can also change people’s experience of selfhood.

This does not establish Advaita.

But it makes Ramana’s question surprisingly contemporary.

What exactly is the self?

A biological process?

An information model?

A narrative generated by the brain?

A useful evolutionary construction?

A field of consciousness?

Something else entirely?

Science has considerably better instruments than Ramana possessed.

But the question has not disappeared.

Was Ramana Enlightened?

Here language becomes dangerous.

What does enlightened mean?

If it means that Ramana underwent an unusually profound and enduring transformation in his subjective experience of selfhood, the historical accounts surrounding his life provide substantial reason to take the possibility seriously.

If it means he achieved the precise metaphysical liberation described by Advaita Vedanta, then we have moved beyond straightforward historical verification.

And if enlightenment means becoming omniscient, superhuman or incapable of error, another enormous evidentiary burden appears.

These propositions should not be bundled together.

A person can have an extraordinary contemplative experience without becoming omniscient.

A person can understand consciousness unusually deeply without knowing everything about medicine, physics, economics or history.

Spiritual insight should not automatically generate authority in unrelated domains.

Humanity has repeatedly made that mistake.

Was Ramana an Embodiment of God?

Devotional traditions surrounding extraordinary people often escalate.

Teacher becomes master.

Master becomes saint.

Saint becomes enlightened being.

Enlightened being becomes divine incarnation.

Eventually the historical human being becomes almost inaccessible beneath theology.

Ramana has sometimes been understood by devotees through the language of Shiva, Arunachala or divine manifestation.

Such interpretations belong legitimately to religious experience.

But they should remain distinguishable from historical demonstration.

There is no generally accepted empirical procedure capable of establishing that a particular human being was literally God incarnate.

That does not prove the claim false.

It means something simpler:

We do not know.

And “we do not know” is sometimes the most intellectually sophisticated sentence available.

The Problem With Making Ramana Divine

There is also a paradox.

Turning Ramana into a supernatural being may actually diminish the significance of his life.

If Ramana was fundamentally different from ordinary humans, then his transformation tells us comparatively little about ourselves.

Of course he could transcend ego.

He was divine.

Of course he could confront death.

He was an incarnation.

Of course he could achieve extraordinary states of consciousness.

He wasn’t like us.

But suppose Ramana was simply human.

Then everything changes.

A sixteen-year-old boy became terrified of death.

Instead of escaping the fear, he examined it.

That investigation transformed his understanding of himself.

He spent the rest of his life pursuing the implications.

Suddenly Ramana is not evidence of what gods can accomplish.

He becomes evidence of what the human mind might be capable of investigating.

That possibility is arguably more radical.

The Guru Test

Every spiritual teacher deserves scrutiny.

Not because spirituality is inherently fraudulent.

Because authority without scrutiny is dangerous.

Ask of any guru:

Did the teacher demand unquestioning obedience?

Did the teacher make followers psychologically dependent?

Were dissenters threatened with supernatural consequences?

Was sexuality exploited?

Was wealth extracted through spiritual authority?

Were followers told that leaving would cause catastrophe?

Was the teacher positioned as humanity’s exclusive gateway to truth?

Could the teachings survive criticism?

Could students eventually walk away?

And perhaps the strongest question:

Does the teaching survive if the teacher loses his halo?

This is where Ramana becomes especially interesting.

Remove the supernatural claims surrounding him and his central experiment still exists.

Who am I?

You do not need to believe he was God to investigate it.

The Ramana Paradox

There is something almost comical about constructing a personality cult around a teacher whose philosophy undermines the ultimate reality of the individual personality.

Imagine spending decades decorating the cage after somebody showed you the door.

If Ramana’s teaching is taken seriously, the important thing cannot ultimately be Ramana.

The photograph is not the investigation.

The shrine is not the investigation.

The biography is not the investigation.

Even reverence is not the investigation.

The investigation begins when attention turns around.

Who wants enlightenment?

Who wants God?

Who wants power?

Who wants recognition?

Who is suffering?

Who is frightened?

Who wants to survive death?

Who?

And after answering me—

Who is that?

What If Ramana Was Right?

Consider the possibility without accepting it.

Suppose the ordinary ego is not the deepest level of identity.

Suppose much of what we defend as ourselves consists of accumulated memories, social identities, biological impulses and mental narratives.

Then enormous amounts of human conflict begin looking strange.

My religion.

My caste.

My nation.

My status.

My reputation.

My superiority.

My humiliation.

My enemy.

My victory.

Civilisations have killed millions over identities that Ramana would invite us to investigate before treating them as absolute.

This does not mean identities are socially irrelevant.

They have consequences.

But there is an enormous difference between using an identity and being imprisoned inside it.

Perhaps self-enquiry’s political implication is not withdrawal from society.

Perhaps it is simply this:

Before defending an identity to the death, find out what exactly you are defending.

The Experiment

Ramana Maharshi does not ultimately need another believer.

He needs an experimenter.

So conduct the experiment.

Sit somewhere quietly.

A thought appears.

Notice it.

Another appears.

Notice that too.

An emotion arises.

Notice it.

A memory arrives.

Notice it.

Your body produces sensations.

Notice them.

Then ask:

Who noticed them?

An answer will probably appear.

Notice the answer.

Then ask again:

Who noticed that?

Do not force a mystical conclusion.

Do not imagine supernatural voices.

Do not decide beforehand that you are Brahman.

Do not decide beforehand that materialism must be correct either.

Just investigate.

Perhaps nothing extraordinary happens.

Perhaps you discover interesting features of attention.

Perhaps Ramana’s metaphysics eventually seems mistaken.

Perhaps you encounter something extraordinarily difficult to describe.

The experiment does not guarantee the answer.

That is precisely what makes it an experiment.

So Who Was Ramana Maharshi?

Perhaps a realised sage.

Perhaps an exceptional contemplative.

Perhaps a philosopher of consciousness operating through the vocabulary available to his civilisation.

Perhaps something stranger.

Perhaps devotees are correct about aspects of him that cannot presently be demonstrated.

Perhaps future neuroscience will explain experiences that once required metaphysical vocabulary.

Perhaps consciousness will prove stranger than contemporary neuroscience expects.

We should resist premature certainty in either direction.

But one thing makes Ramana unusual.

You can remove much of the mythology surrounding him and something powerful remains.

Not a commandment.

Not a threat.

Not a promise of paradise.

Not a demand that humanity surrender its intelligence.

A question.

Who are you?

And perhaps Ramana Maharshi’s greatest achievement was not answering it for humanity.

Perhaps it was understanding that nobody else could answer it for you.

The Mahakali Tribunal Principle

Do not worship a question because a sage asked it.

Do not reject a question because a religion inherited it.

Investigate.

If Ramana was wrong, investigation should expose the limits of his philosophy.

If he was right, investigation matters even more.

And if the truth turns out to be stranger than both religion and materialism presently imagine, humanity should remain free enough to discover it.

Respect the mystic.
Remove the mythology.
Test the method.
Keep what survives.