THE EIGHT STANZAS TO ARUNACHALA BY SRI BHAGAVAN RAMANA MAHARSHI Eight Stanzas 1. Look, there it stands as if insentient. Mysterious is the way it works, beyond all human understanding. From my unthinking childhood, the immensity of Arunachala had shone in my awareness. But even when I learnt from someone that it was only Tiruvannamalai, I did not realize its meaning. When it stilled my mind and drew me to itself and I came near, I saw that it was stillness absolute. 2. Enquiring within “Who is the seer?” I saw the seer disappearing and That alone which stands for ever. No thought arose to say “I saw”. How then could the thought arise to say “I did not see?” Who has the power to explain all this in words, when even You (as Dakshinamurti) conveyed this of yore in silence only? And in order to reveal by silence, Your state transcendent, now You stand here, a Hill resplendent soaring to the sky. 3. When I approach You thinking You have form, You stand here as a Hill on earth. If one regarding You as formless wants yet to see You, he is like one wandering through the world to have a look at the ether (ubiquitous, invisible). Meditating without thought on Your formless Being, my form (my separate entity) dissolves like a sugar-doll in the sea. And when I realize who I am, what being have I apart from You, O, You who stand as the mighty Aruna Hill? 4. To search for God ignoring You who stand as Being and shine as Awareness is like looking, lamp in hand, for darkness. In order to reveal Yourself atlast as Being and Awareness, You dwell in various forms in all religions. If still there are people who fail to see You whose Being is Awareness, they are no better than the blind who do not know the Sun. O mighty mountain Aruna, peerless Jewel, stand and shine, One without a second, the Self within my Heart. 5. Like the string that holds together the gems, in a necklace, You it is that penetrate and bind all beings and the various religions. If, like a gem that is cut and polished, the separate mind is whetted on the grindstone of the pure, universal Mind, it will acquire the light of your Grace and shine like a ruby whose brightness is not flawed by any other object.When once the light of the Sun has fallen on a sensitive plate, will the plateregister another picture? Apart from you, O Aruna Mountain bright, auspicious does any other thing exist? 6. You alone exist, O Heart, the radiance of Awareness. In You a power mysterious dwells, a power which without You is nothing. From it (this power of manifestation) there proceeds, along with a perceiver, a series of subtle shadowy thoughts which, lit by the reflected light of mind amid the whirl of prarabdha, appear within as a shadowy spectacle of the world and appear without as the world perceived by the five senses as a film is projected through a lens. Whether perceived or unperceived, these (thoughts) are nothing apart from you, O Hill of Grace. 7. Until there is the I thought there can be no other thought. When other thoughts arise, ask “To whom? To me? Where does this ‘I’ arise?” Thus diving inwards, if one traces the source of the mind and reaches the Heart, one becomes the Sovereign Lord of the Universe. There is no more dreaming of such as in and out, right and wrong, birth and death, pleasure and pain, light and darkness, O boundless ocean of Grace and Light, Arunachala dancing the dance of stillness in the dancing Hall of the Heart. 8.The raindrops showered down by the clouds, risen from the sea cannot rest until they reach, despite all hindrance, once again their ocean home. The embodied soul from You proceeding may through various ways self-chosen wander aimless for a while, but cannot rest till it rejoins You, the source. A bird may hover here and there and cannot in mid-heaven stay. It must come back the way it went to find at last on earth alone its resting place. Even so the soul must turn to You O, Aruna Hill, and merge again in You alone, Ocean of bliss.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 07:21:15 +0000
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