A Quote by Ramana Maharshi

Our identification with the mind and body is the chief reason for our failure to know our self as we truly are. — © Ramana Maharshi
Our identification with the mind and body is the chief reason for our failure to know our self as we truly are.
Identification with the body, with the mind, with our possessions, with our families, with our friends - any kind of identification takes you outwards. All your possessions will be outwards: your wife, your husband, your children, your body - your body is outside you; your mind - your mind is outside you. The only thing that is not outside you is the witnessing. Just the watchfulness - that is your buddha. Identification means losing witnessing, falling into the trap of attachment. That is our misery, that is our slavery.
Our soul, our true self, is the most mysterious, essential, and magical dimension of our being. In fact, it is not a separate reality, as traditional Western thought views it, but the cohesive force that unites our body, heart, and mind. It is not a ghost trapped somehow in the physical machinery of our body but the very essence of our being.
It is precisely our egoism, our self-centeredness and self-love that cause all our difficulties, our lack of freedom in suffering, our disappointments and our anguish of soul and body.
An affectionate disposition not only makes the mind more peaceful and calm, but it affects our body in a positive way too. On the other hand, hatred, jealousy and fear upset our peace of mind, make us agitated and affect our body adversely. Even our body needs peace of mind and is not suited to agitation. This shows that an appreciation for peace of mind is in our blood.
When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.
When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. Its a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. Its a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.
Before making peace, war is necessary, and that war must be made with our self. Our worst enemy is our self: our faults, our weaknesses, our limitations. And our mind is such a traitor! What does it? It covers our faults even from our own eyes, and points out to us the reason for all our difficulties: others! So it constantly deludes us, keeping us unaware of the real enemy, and pushes us towards those others to fight them, showing them to us as our enemies.
If we only identify with the mortal world, then we identify with a level of scarcity and lack and brokenness, and that will be our experience. But if we shift our experience of self-identification - and this is what enlightenment is - from the body-self to the spiritual-self, then we place ourselves under an entirely different set of possibilities and probabilities.
Our mind is the foundation of all our actions, whether they are actions of body, speech, or mind, i.e., thinking. Whatever we think, say, or do arises from our mind. What our consciousness consumes becomes the substance of our life, so we have to be very careful which nutriments we ingest.
Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self.
The transformation from body identification to spirit identification is the purpose of our lives.
Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it....Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.
To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.
At the very center of our being is rhythmic movement, a cyclic expansion and contraction that is both in our body and outside it, that is both in our mind and in our body, that is both in our consciousness and not in it.
Our self-identification changes with our environment, but sometimes those dark thoughts permeate within us and there are those who are able to fight off those thoughts and others who don't want to fight them, or have just given in for whatever reason and whether they know the darkness they act upon is wrong, they love the darkness.
Many of us struggle with ideas that come to our head from our self-identification.
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