Your True Self Is the Ultimate Reality!

(34:32)

In this video, Swami Atmananda Udasin comments on verse 16 of Upadesha Saram, a Sanskrit poem composed by Sri Ramana Maharshi in 1927, based on Upadesha Undiyar, his original Tamil poem. Swami Ji offered a commentary on the 30 verses at the open satsangs he shared from 27 January to 6 February 2020 in Tiruvannamalai, India.

“If one’s attention is turned away from external objects of sense and focused on the light of the Self, that is the true vision of Reality” (Upadesa Saram, v.16)

Your body is a reality that is perceived. So, there must be a “perceiver” that is prior to the body. The same applies to the mind. You can perceive thoughts, emotions, memories… Yet, the real seer is prior to both the body and mind. There is a perceiver that sees the mind, the body and the so-called “world” as objects. Then, what is “that” which perceives? What is the ultimate observer? Awareness! It can never be an object. Everything that appears in it is the ‘seen’.
Is ‘I’ the seer or the seen? This ‘I’ is in fact also seen in your Awareness. If you remove all the attributes from this ‘I’, you come to recognize a deeper ‘I’, which has no attributes… This pure ‘I’ is prior to your individual ‘I’. Sri Ramana Maharshi calls it the ‘I-I’. It is the pure Awareness shining within you, the Self! The recognition of the Self is the true vision of the Ultimate Reality!