Today’s message cannot be understood by the mind, so if you are identified with mind when you read today’s message, you will not be able to follow its clarity. It might be helpful to practice awareness-watching-awareness before reading today’s message in order to break the attachment to mind and read from a place of Self-realization.
The Self does not experience pain. It does not experience mental pain, emotional pain or physical pain. It is completely beyond pain. The only thing that experiences pain is the mind (attention on thought).
When you believe that you experience pain, you are identified with the mind. Awareness as attention has projected itself into thought and imagines itself to be thought. It is like watching virtual reality from what appears to be within virtual reality; therefore, appearing to experience virtual reality, although virtual reality can never be actually experienced, and you can’t actually be in a virtual reality.
When Ramana Maharshi’s body was being eaten up by sarcoma prior to his death, the body was filled with pain. Ramana asked his devotees to move his body carefully, because of the pain. When asked about his experience of pain, he explained that the jnani (enlightened one) experiences pain as if it is a dream.
Today’s reading explains the same phenomenon this way:
You are the true Self, who is constant and changeless and sees the passing of all experience from a deep abidance within itself.
In other words, Ramana saw the pain in the body and asked his devotees to move it carefully in the same way that you may be aware of the pain in a hurt kitten’s body and ask a person who is moving the kitten to move it carefully. You do not experience the kitten’s pain, but you have compassion for it. Ramama did not experience the body’s pain, but he had compassion for it.
Ramana’s compassion for the body wasn’t any different than his compassion for the world. He saw the pain and understood that it was experienced as real, but he did not experience pain from his place of abidance.
Just as the Self does not experience pain, the Self does not require purification. It has never been anything but pure, so the idea of purifying the Self is ridiculous. Also, the mind cannot be purified. The mind is the illusion that it is. All one can do is see that the mind does not exist and that s/he is not the mind.
So, what is the purpose of purification?
Purification is not the process of changing or improving the mind, which is what many people mistake it for. Purification is the process of seeing that the mind is not real and the mind is not what I am. When one awakens from the delusion that the mind is me, purification is no longer necessary, because one has awakened to purity (pure truth). The false isn’t believed anymore.
In the apparent process of awakening, one may feel like s/he is changing or improving the mind. However, what is really happening is this:
One is starting to see, “I am not the mind.” Therefore, one is starting to disregard the mind’s chatter and act based on wisdom instead of mind. That is not changing or improving the mind. The mind remains the same. That is disengaging from the mind.
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