From Fear to Absolutisation

The Evolution of Ramana Maharshi’s 1896 Experience from Phenomenological Shift to Spiritual Myth

By Bodhangkur

1. The early core: a bare Vedantic reduction, not a cosmic drama

The earliest Raman material we have (Tamil reminiscences of a teenage thought experiment that later feed into Sri Ramana Vijayam and similar sources) is extremely compact. It can be summarized as:

· A sudden fear of death arises.

· He turns inward and asks, in effect:
“What dies? This body dies.”

· He notices that the body is inert (jaḍam).

· He recognises a “knowing principle” (jñāna-tattvam) that is aware of the body’s fall.

· He concludes that this knowing principle does not die.

· He identifies this as ātma – “the self”.

No mention of:

· Brahman

· Isvara

· Cosmic consciousness

· Eternal samadhi

· A life-long, unbroken trance-state

Nor any detailed description of how he lay down, held his breath, imagined the cremation ground, etc. The early account is conceptual and uses already-available Vedānta vocabulary: jaḍa (inert), jñāna-tattva (knowing principle), ātma (self).

Crucially:

· Tamil has no capital letters, so “ātma” is just “self”, not “Self”.

· At this stage it is phenomenological and personal: the inner “I” recognises itself as something that does not die when the idea of bodily death is entertained.

It is an identity-shift inside the first-person perspective, framed in familiar Brahminical language, not yet a metaphysical proclamation about Brahman.

2. The later canonical story: a crafted hagiographic narrative

By the time we get to Narasimha Swami’s Self-Realization in the 1930s and its many re-tellings, we’re dealing with a fully formed spiritual narrative, with all the features of a classic “conversion story”. A now-standard English version runs like this (compressed):

· “It was about six weeks before I left Madurai for good that the great change in my life took place. It was so sudden.”

· He is alone upstairs in his uncle’s house, healthy, a heavy sleeper, nothing wrong.

· “A sudden violent fear of death overtook me.”

· He does not try to find a cause; instead, the shock drives the mind inward.

· He dramatizes death: lies down like a corpse, stiffens the limbs, holds the breath, closes the lips as if in rigor mortis.

· He imagines the body being carried to the cremation ground and burned.

· He enquires: “What is it that dies? This body is inert; something knows its fall.”

· He experiences a “flash” of “living truth” and the perception of a “deathless Spirit”.

· Fear of death is said to have vanished once and for all.

· “Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.”

This later story adds several significant layers:

a) Dramatic physicalization

The early conceptual steps (“what dies?” → “body is inert” → “I am the knowing principle”) are given a physical theatre:

· Lying down like a corpse

· Stiffening the limbs

· Holding the breath

· Simulating rigor mortis

· Visualizing the cremation ground

This is not in the simple early reminiscences. It’s classical hagiographic “thickening”: making an interior shift visible and cinematic.

b) Emotional amplification

We also find:

· “great change in my life”

· “violent fear of death”

· “flash of excitement” or “heat” (avesam, a “current” or “force” that possessed him)

· “flashed as living truth”

· a sense of dramatic crisis and resolution

Again, this is literary psychology layered onto a conceptual core.

c) Metaphysical escalation

Later descriptions interpret the inner “current” he recognised as his Self as:

· the “real I”, a “force” or “current” that descended (?) and remained ever after

· later identified with Isvara (personal God) or Brahman

And the absorption is presented as:

· “unbroken from that time on”

· the “state of mind of Isvara or the jñānī”

This moves from:

“I recognised a deathless experiencer”
to:
“I attained akrama-mukti (sudden liberation), the state of Isvara, permanent.”

The metaphysical reading is retrofitted.

d) Translational inflation: “Self” vs “self”

The English translations almost universally write Self with a capital S:

· “Absorption in the Self”

· “Fear of death had vanished once and for all; I stood as the Self.”

In English Advaita discourse, “Self” signals Brahman / Absolute Reality. But the Tamil originally only had ātma, not “Paramātman”, and certainly no capitalisation. The capital S is a translator’s theological decision, not a datum from the event.

Thus the later narrative fuses:

· a personal discovery of an undying self-experience, with

· a doctrinal claim about the Absolute.

3. Why the story thickened: narrative, authority, and audience

Why this evolution from sparse conceptual account to cinematic saga?

3.1. The logic of hagiography

In most religious and spiritual traditions, the founding figure’s breakthrough is eventually:

· temporalised (date, place, sequence),

· dramatized (danger, crisis, surrender, miracle),

· universalised (interpreted as archetype, not just personal event).

The Ramana-story acquires all three:

· Temporalisation: “six weeks before I left Madurai”, upstairs room, aged sixteen.

· Dramatization: visceral fear, corpse enactment, enduring transformation.

· Universalisation: the event is now “sudden liberation”, a paradigm of akrama-mukti for all seekers.

3.2. The need for a unique selling point

By the 1930s–40s Ramana has:

· a growing ashram,

· Western seekers arriving,

· an emerging image as “the sage of Arunachala”.

A singular, dramatic “turning point” experience gives the guru:

· charisma (“this one has gone through something unique”),

· authority (people trust someone whose life was irrevocably transformed),

· narrative hook (publishers, biographers, devotees all need an “origin story”).

The simple cognitive realisation “I am not the body” might be philosophically sufficient, but it doesn’t feel like enough for a guru-culture that expects sparks, currents, samadhi and finality.

3.3. The metaphysical gloss: from ātman to Brahman

As Advaita interpreters (Indian and Western) engage with Ramana’s teachings, the natural move is to fold his experience into the classical Upanishadic equation ātman = Brahman:

· He experiences a deathless ātman → ātman is Brahman → he has realised Brahman.

· Translation capitalises “Self” to signal this.

· Later writers simply state that he realised Brahman or the state of Isvara at 16.

But this gloss is not in the earliest formulation. There, the move is more modest:

From “I am this body”
to “I am that which knows the body and does not die with it.”

This is a re-identification of the first-person subject, not yet a cosmological statement.

4. Phenomenological reconstruction: what actually happened?

Let’s now set aside both hagiographic inflation and sceptical dismissal and ask: What minimally had to happen for his early account to be true?

4.1. The cognitive steps

From the converging testimonies we can infer this sequence:

1. Sudden affective shock: a surge of “fear of death”, accompanied by intense bodily arousal (what he later calls avesam, a “current” or “force”).

2. Inward turn: instead of externalising the fear (“I’m ill; I must see a doctor”), attention collapses inward onto the sense of “I am going to die.”

3. Analytic split: he distinguishes between

o the object that can die (body) and

o the subject that contemplates death.

4. Re-identification: he stops identifying the “I” with the body and identifies it with the subject that cannot be located as any object.

5. Stabilisation: this new identification does not recede immediately but persists as the new default self-model.

In modern terms, we might say:

· The narrative self (body-bound, story-based “me”) is temporarily suspended.

· The minimal self (mere “for-me-ness” of experience) becomes predominant and self-reflexive.

· This minimal, objectless “I am” is experienced as whole, timeless, and spaceless, because it has no internal parts, no spatial coordinates, and no temporal markers.

None of this requires:

· a metaphysical Absolute,

· a cosmic consciousness outside the organism, or

· knowledge of the Upanishads as texts.

It does presuppose, however, that he had absorbed basic Vedantic distinctions (body vs knowing self, inert vs conscious) from his Tamil Brahmin milieu, which he later downplayed.

4.2. Why it felt “absolute”

Once local references (body, thoughts, social identity, biography) are stripped away, what remains is:

· awareness without identified objects,

· which is therefore experienced as non-relative (no before/after, here/there, this/that).

From inside that state, it is natural to describe it as:

· “deathless”,

· “changeless”,

· “beyond time and space”.

This is an experiential absolutisation: the structure of the state (contentless, reference-less) gives it an absolute feel. One does not thereby automatically prove an ontological Brahman, only a particular mode of subjectivity.

5. What Ramana actually taught, stripped of mythology

If we now look at his mature instruction, a pattern appears that lines up more with this phenomenological core than with the later metaphysical story.

5.1. Self-enquiry as systematic reduction

Ramana’s central method, ātma-vichāra (“Self-enquiry”), is repeatedly defined as:

“constant attention to the inner awareness of ‘I’ or ‘I am’.”

He urges the seeker to:

· Track any thought back to the “I”-sense that owns it.

· Ask “Who am I?” not conceptually, but as a way of pushing attention back into the subject.

· Let all object-contents fall away, leaving only the bare sense “I am”.

He also distinguishes:

· “I-I” (the pure “I am” or “being-consciousness”),

· vs “I am this/that” (egoic identification).

This is exactly the reduction he seems to have undergone at 16:
from “I am this body” to “I am the bare awareness in which body and world appear”.

5.2. Minimal metaphysics, maximal phenomenology

In his recorded dialogues, Ramana is often reluctant to elaborate metaphysics. He returns again and again to:

· “Find out who the ‘I’ is.”

· “Enquire into the seer.”

· “The world is seen when the ‘I’ appears; when the ‘I’ subsides, what remains is real.”

He occasionally uses the full Vedantic equation ātman = Brahman, but his practical teaching does not require you to:

· adopt a doctrine about creation,

· prove an Absolute, or

· believe in a cosmic Self outside experience.

What he requires is that you:

1. Notice that everything you call “me” is an object in awareness.

2. Turn attention toward the subject that is never an object.

3. Let that subjectivity stand alone, without identifying with any particular content.

In Finn’s terms: he is instructing how an individual can, by systematic elimination of local references, reduce to a perfect (whole, hence absolute-seeming, time-less, space-less, formless) experience of their own self.

5.3. Where the Brahman-talk comes from

The Brahman language then functions as:

· A traditional gloss: once you’ve found this formless, timeless subject, Vedānta tells you “that is Brahman.”

· A status signal: it frames the experience not as a private psychological condition but as insight into Reality.

· An integration device: it ties his method into the Indian scriptural canon and lineage.

But strictly speaking, the method itself—Self-enquiry—is a phenomenological technique. It works as described whether or not one accepts the metaphysical step “this subject = Brahman”.

6. Final analysis: from teenage shift to transpersonal myth

We can now summarise the transition and the underlying teaching in a few clear steps.

6.1. The transition of the account

1. Original core (Tamil, early 1900s):

o Sudden fear of death.

o Distinction between dying body and undying knowing principle.

o Identification of “I” with that knowing principle, ātma.

o No Brahman-claim, no cosmic language, no elaborate drama.

2. Intermediate reflection:

o As he lives with the after-effects, he begins to describe the state as a kind of constant background of “I” in which all activities take place.

o He connects his experience with Vedantic teaching he later studies, saying scriptures merely analysed what he had already experienced.

3. Canonical hagiography (Narasimha Swami & later):

o Adds concrete scene-setting and dramatic physical enactment.

o Amplifies emotion (violent fear, current, flash).

o Asserts once-and-for-all freedom from death-fear and unbroken absorption.

o Translator capitalises “Self” and introduces “Spirit”, “Isvara”, “Brahman”.

4. Subsequent tradition:

o Treats the event as akramamukti, a unique and final realisation of Brahman.

o Uses Ramana as an exemplar of instantaneous, effortless enlightenment.

6.2. What he actually taught, once all this is peeled back

If we bracket the embellishments, we’re left with a remarkably clean kernel:

· A method:
Direct attention to the “I” that owns every experience, and
Remove all that is not that “I” (body, senses, thoughts, roles, world).

· A phenomenological discovery:
When no object is identified as “me”, what remains is a bare, self-luminous “I am” that appears whole, timeless, spaceless and formless.

· A claim (interpretive, not logically necessary):
This bare “I am” is the true, undying self (ātman).

Everything further—Brahman, Isvara, Absolute Reality—is layered meaning, not the raw data of the experience.

So, in Finn’s compressed formulation:

Yes. In essence Ramana was teaching a procedure by which an individual, via systematic elimination of local references, could reduce experience to a maximally coherent, whole, and therefore absolute-seeming experience of their own self.

The transition from the original to the later account is the transition from:

· a local phenomenological re-identification (“I am the deathless knower”)

to

· a universal metaphysical myth (“A sixteen-year-old realised Brahman once and for all and lived henceforth as Isvara”).

The first is psychologically intelligible and operationalisable;
the second is doctrinally powerful but narratively embellished.

Ramana’s goal and achievement

Ramana vs. the Buddha

Reframing Ramana Maharshi’s goal

The Maharshi’s unverified self

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