A 16-Year-Old Lay Down to Die. He Got Up With One Question

In the summer of 1896, in his uncle's house in Madurai in southern India, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy was sitting alone when he was hit by a sudden, overwhelming fear that he was about to die. He wasn't ill. Nothing was wrong with him. The fear simply arrived.

He didn't run for help. Instead he lay down on the floor, held his body still as if it were a corpse, and asked himself a question: if this body dies, what dies? The body would be carried to the cremation ground and burned. Was he the body?

By his own later account, the answer that came was not a thought but a direct recognition. The body could die. Whatever was aware of the body was not touched by that.

Six weeks later he left home without telling anyone and travelled to Arunachala, a sacred hill near the town of Tiruvannamalai. He stayed there for the rest of his life, more than half a century. The world came to know him as Ramana Maharshi.

Here is what happened that day, the method he taught afterward, how it differs from ordinary meditation, and how you can try it today.

I came to Ramana through a doubt of my own. I had been meditating for a while, and I wrote this:

"I can experience absolute truth via meditation, but is it actually true that meditation can access the experience of Self? Something akin to ego dissolution or Self realization?"

His answer, as far as I can tell, was yes, and the tool he offered was a single question.

A Death Rehearsed

What makes the Madurai story unusual is that it wasn't a vision. Nothing appeared. There were no lights or voices. The boy simply investigated, as carefully as he could, what remained when he set the body aside.

His conclusion was that the sense of "I" he had always attached to the body actually belonged to awareness itself, which did not seem to depend on the body. After that, he said, the fear of death never returned.

At Arunachala he spent years in deep silence, so absorbed that local people had to look after his basic needs. Visitors gradually arrived, and many of them asked the same thing: what should we do?

His reputation eventually spread far beyond India. In 1934 the British writer Paul Brunton described his visit in A Search in Secret India, and readers in Europe and America began making the journey to Tiruvannamalai. The question they came with was usually practical, and so was the answer.

The Question in the Sand

Around 1901, a visitor named Sivaprakasam Pillai brought a series of questions. Ramana was still largely silent, so he answered by writing, some of it reportedly traced on the ground. Those answers were later edited into a short booklet called Nan Yar?, Tamil for "Who am I?"

The teaching is simple to state. Every thought you have refers back to a thinker, the sense of "I." Instead of following thoughts outward, turn attention back toward that sense of "I" and ask what it is.

When a thought arises, the booklet advises, don't try to finish it or fight it. Notice who it is arising to. The answer is "to me," and that returns you to the question.

Not a Mantra

It is easy to mistake self-inquiry for repeating a phrase. Ramana was clear that it is not. Saying "Who am I?" over and over is just another thought.

The question is meant to point attention, not to produce a verbal answer. Any answer that arrives in words, "I am a body," "I am a mind," "I am awareness," is one more object that the inquiry can be turned on.

That is the meaning of the image in the epigraph. A stick used to stir a funeral pyre keeps the fire going, and at the end it is thrown in and burns too. The question removes other thoughts and then dissolves itself.

What Science Can and Can't Say

Neuroscience has studied attention, mind-wandering and the brain networks involved in self-referential thought. Experienced meditators show measurable changes in some of these networks. Those findings are real, but they describe correlates of practice, not what the practitioner discovers.

Self-inquiry makes a claim of a different kind. It says that if you look directly for the self you assume you are, you won't find an object, and that the looking itself will show you something more basic. That claim can't be confirmed in a laboratory. It can only be tested by doing it.

Trying It

Here is the simplest version, based on how Ramana described the method.

Sit comfortably for ten minutes. Don't try to stop your thoughts. When one appears, notice it and ask, quietly, to whom this thought is appearing. The honest answer will be "to me." Then, rather than answering further, turn your attention toward that "me." Try to find where it is and what it is made of.

You will probably not find a thing. Stay with not finding it for a few seconds before the next thought arrives, and then begin again.

That is the whole method. It doesn't require a belief system, a teacher or a special setting.

Ramana also accepted that not everyone takes to it. For people who found the inquiry too dry, he pointed to a second route, complete surrender to God or to the Self, and said the two lead to the same place: in one, the separate "I" is investigated until it disappears; in the other, it is handed over until nothing is left to hand over.

He taught both for more than fifty years, until his death at Tiruvannamalai in 1950. The question he started with, on a floor in Madurai at sixteen, was the same one he gave everyone who asked him what to do.