"Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped."
-- Charles Duhigg
The unitive way
The unitive way is the way of those who are in the state of the perfect, that is, those who have their minds so drawn away from all temporal things that they enjoy great peace, who are neither agitated by various desires nor moved by any great extent by passion, and who have their minds chiefly fixed on God and their attention turned, either always or very frequently, to Him.
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It's important to first understand what triggered Sri Ramana Maharshi's realisation.
Room where Sri Ramana Maharshi had his death experience as a 16 year old boy…
Here is an account of what happened on that blessed day in August 1896 in Sri Ramana Maharshi's own words…
It was about six weeks before I left Madura for good that the great change in my life took place. It was quite sudden. I was sitting alone in a room on the first floor of my uncle’s house.
I seldom had any sickness, and on that day there was nothing wrong with my health, but a sudden violent fear of death overtook me.
There was nothing in my state of health to account for it, and I did not try to account for it or to find out whether there was any reason for the fear.
I just felt ‘I am going to die’ and began thinking what to do about it. It did not occur to me to consult a doctor or my elders or friends; I felt that I had to solve the problem myself, there and then.
The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words: ‘Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies.’
And I at once dramatised the occurrence of death. I lay with my limbs stretched out stiff as though rigor mortis had set in and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to the enquiry.
I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no sound could escape, so that neither the word ‘I’ nor any other word could be uttered. ‘Well then,’ I said to myself, ‘this body is dead. It will be carried stiff to the burning ground and there burnt and reduced to ashes.
But with the death of this body am I dead? Is the body ‘I’? It is silent and inert but I feel the full force of my personality and even the voice of the ‘I’ within me, apart from it.
So I am Spirit transcending the body. The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. That means I am the deathless Spirit.’
All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly, almost without thought-process. ‘I’ was something very real, the only real thing about my present state, and all the conscious activity connected with my body was centred on that ‘I’.
From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.
Other thoughts might come and go like the various notes of music, but the ‘I’ continued like the fundamental sruti note that underlies and blends with all the other notes (The monotone persisting through a Hindu piece of music, like the thread on which beads are strung, represents the Self persisting through all the forms of being.)
Whether the body was engaged in talking, reading or anything else, I was still centred on ‘I’. Previous to that crisis I had no clear perception of my Self and was not consciously attracted to it. I felt no perceptible or direct interest in it, much less any inclination to dwell permanently in it.
After this experience, the individual consciousness never again functioned in Sri Ramana Maharshi's life. He had realised himself to be that universal consciousness known as Brahman in the Upanishads. This was the most fundamental realisation of Ramana Maharshi.
On September 1st 1896, a young Venkataraman (future Ramana Maharshi) arrived in Tiruvannamalai and sat in the Patala Lingam, at the main temple of Sri Arunachala for many months absorbed in the Self totally oblivious of his body.
Later from 1899 onwards upto 1922, he spend his years at Virupaksha Cave and Skandashrama on the Arunachala Hill.
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