There was a king with a devoted queen. She was a devotee of Sri Rama and yearned that her husband should similarly be a devotee. One night she found that the king mumbled something in his sleep. She kept her ears close to his lips and heard the word ‘Rama’ repeated continually as in japa.
“The original name is always going on spontaneously without any effort on the part of the individual. That name is aham – ‘I’. But when it becomes manifest it manifests as ahamkara – the ego. The oral repetition of the name leads one to mental repetition which finally resolves itself into the eternal vibration. The mind or the mouth cannot act without the Self.”
Kaduveli Siddhar was famed as a very austere hermit. He lived on the dry leaves fallen from trees. The king of the country heard of him and offered a reward to one who would prove this man’s worth. A rich dasi agreed to do it. She began to live near the recluse and pretended to attend on him. She gently left pieces of pappadam along with the dry leaves picked by him.
A devotee obtained a copy of Sri Bhagavan’s work Ulladu Narpadu (Forty Verses on Reality) and began to write out the entire work for himself. Seeing him doing this writing with earnestness, though with a certain amount of difficulty and strain, since the devotee was not accustomed to squatting and doing continuous writing work, Bhagavan told the story of a sannyasi and his disciples to illustrate what is called sraddha – earnestness of purpose.
“Whatever form your enquiry may take, you must finally come to the one ‘I’, the Self. All these distinctions made between ‘I’ and ‘you’, master and disciple, are merely a sign of one’s ignorance. That ‘I’ Supreme alone is. To think otherwise is to delude oneself.”