Contemplation
Serenity comes from resting in awareness. Resting in awareness is looking inwardly, forgetting objective knowledge. Forgetting objective knowledge is resting firmly with clear truth, rather than using external engagement with thoughts and the world (to attempt to achieve serenity).
Ramana is pointing the reader to practicing awareness watching awareness meditation, or resting in silence, in order to experience serenity. Meditation allows a person to look beyond the mind’s appearing and disappearing thoughts, onward to the awareness aware of the mind. Resting in silence, with attention on awareness, leaves no room for the meditator to place attention on thoughts or other mental movements. Like placing no attention on thoughts or other mental movements, Ramana talks of completely forgetting all objective knowledge. The firm, inward looking suggested is the same as resting in silence.
Ramana is encouraging the reader to avoid using external engagements to find serenity. External engagement is contemplating, changing, persuading, arguing, considering, compromising, or otherwise engaging with thoughts or the external world. Engaging with thoughts and external events results in identifiable effects – for example, writing a pros and cons list to help make a difficult decision has an identifiable effect of placing in text many different considerations. Another example, quitting a stressful job or switching careers has an identifiable effect of ending a stressful trigger, or opening the door to new work opportunities. However, Ramana refers to all engagement with thought or the external world as bewildered pining with false phenomena. Ramana refers to external engagement as pining not because the engagement has no effects, but because external engagement is not meditation – external engagement is not what Ramana identified in the first sentence to be the practice of an aspirant who finds serenity (but meditation is).
To experience, dwell in, be in, abide in, and live in serenity, Ramana points the aspirant to resting in silence, awareness watching awareness meditation, or “turn[ing] inward[ly] firmly and see[ing] clearly the truth.” Ramana advises readers not to rely on interacting with the world (“pin[ing] bewildered” with “forgotten things” by recalling them) to experience serenity, but instead to rest in silence and firmly see truth.
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