Namaste 🙏 and welcome again to our series on Ulladu-Narpadu – 40 Verses on Reality by Śrī Ramana Maharshi. Today we’re going to look at verse number two, which is very interesting. [chuckles]

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This is another wonderful verse – well, they’re all wonderful [laughs], what can I say! But the last time we talked about the world, and the unreality of the world, because the world is impermanent, and it doesn’t have real existence; its existence is only derivative of some prior cause, and because of this it can’t be accepted as absolutely real. Nevertheless, most people see the world as the world, they see it as permanent and real. And why is that? Well, because the nature of the seer is similar to the nature of the seen. In other words, if the world is illusory, if it’s just temporary and relative and so on, then what kind of being does it require to see that unreality as real? See what I’m getting at?

The ego, or what most people accept as their self, is just an unreal as the world! [laughs] And it has to be that way, it has to be, because only an unreal seer would see an unreal world as being real. But these are the triad, the inescapable result of being in illusion, or being attached to illusory being, being in the world. One of our first video series way back, five years ago or so, was called Being in the World, and it goes into this from the standpoint of existentialism. Now, existentialism is very interesting, because it’s based on experience, phenomenology, or observation of one’s own experience. And this is very close to the principle of meditation advocated by Ramana, to look into one’s own self, one’s own consciousness, and say, “Where does this ‘I’ arise from? Where does this ‘mine’, where do these thoughts come from? Where do they originate?” and by looking into that one thought “I am”, one can transcend it.

But what you see when you first look at the self, you think “Oh, this is me! This is I, Mister So-and-so, and I have this designation on my job, or in my community. I am a this, I am a that. [laughs] I am somebody’s husband, or somebody’s wife, or somebody’s girlfriend or boyfriend, I am the owner of this property and that car and this thing and that thing,” isn’t it? That’s how we think when we’re naive, when we don’t know anything about spiritual life, or the philosophy of reality. But the more we look into this, the more we meditate on this “I am. I am this, I am that, I am so-and-so, I am such-and-such,” we start to see that this is actually just an illusion. It’s actually just words, and we’re attached to those words, and we think those words are real – in other words, that words are things, or that symbols are reality.