One night when there was heavy bleeding from the tumour as it was being dressed, two or three bhaktas couldn’t conceal their emotion. He looked at them and said, “Where will l go? And where can I go?” And whenever he said ‘I’, with emphasis, he always meant the Atman.
An inevitable consequence of Bhagavan’s state as a jivan mukta, permanently established in the egoless State, was that he could not claim any rights, even the right to choose what shall be done or not done to his body, because from his point of view, that body was not his. Also, he was so full of compassion, that he could not bear to hurt anyone’s feelings. Anyone that came to him offering edibles or medicine, was sure of its being accepted, though he did not want it. Once he said, “Nature cure is right. But….”
As Bhagavan says in the Supplement to the Reality in Forty Verses: “If one associates with Sages, where is the need for any other rigorous sadhana? No one looks for a fan when there is the pleasant southern breeze.”
As soon as I fell on the track, I saw the face of Sri Bhagavan repeating like a mantra, “Don’t lift the head.” Where I was on the track I cannot say. But I saw the wheels moving faster and faster.
The first darshan of the Maharshi remains an unforgettable experience, especially Sri Ramana’s casual, as it were, statement ‘ We are always aware’; and this made a most powerful impact on him. It resounded in his consciousness like a chime and continued to linger in his memory like a mantra or an echo of Sri Arunachala or Dakshinamurti. He also remembers some passages mentioned from the Bible: the phrase, ‘I AM THAT I AM’, ‘Be Still and know that I am God’, ‘Know ye not that you are Gods?’ and the words Jesus exchanged with Nicodemus.
It was in the year 1936 that I had the good fortune of having darshan of Sri Bhagavan. I had heard about him before, and was longing to go to Tiruvannamalai but the opportunity never came till then.