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.
When the bondas were served to the devotees at breakfast, as usual, Ramaswami Iyer said to me angrily, “Look here. Did I not ask you to prepare vadai? Then why have you made bondas?” I was afraid to say anything and so merely looked at Sri Bhagavan who immediately turned to Ramaswami Iyer and said, “What does it matter? If the cakes are flat and circular they are vadais, if spherical, bondas. The stuff is the same and the taste is the same. Only names and forms are different. Eat the prasadam (food offered to a deity) and don’t make a fuss.” Everyone was astonished at the ready and apt reply of Sri Bhagavan.