Just Be As You Are

I often quote Avvaiyar, a very great saintly female poet from South India. She was clever with her use of words and never wasted any. Just a few words were enough to give you a great message. Somebody asked her, “How can I arrive at my home?” or in other words, “How...

Be As You Are—The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

David Godman (his family’s actual surname!) read a book in 1974 about the great sage and jnani, Sri Ramana Maharshi, and two years later traveled to his ashram in India. Since then, he has lived almost continuously in Tiruvannamalai, the town where Sri Ramana spent...

How to Know the Real from the Unreal

Essentially, there is only the One—and it’s real. But, its expressions vary and that’s the unreal part. So, really you are spirit, but when you express yourself in a human body, you become a human being. And when you express yourself in a young human body you become a...

You Bind Yourself and You Can Liberate Yourself

It’s alright to have a nice body, nice ideas, nice learning, and a lot of money. As long as you have a lot of money in the bank you call yourself rich. When the money goes away, immediately you change your label: I am poor now. You identify yourself with the money in...

Learning the Method of Direct Inquiry

It’s nearly impossible to calm the waves of the mind completely, but we can learn to dive under them. You don’t have to make all the waves calm. The Bhagavad Gita says that the mind gets tossed like a boat on the surface of wavy water. It’s very hard to keep the mind...