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6
A Sadhu's Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi
associated with it continued so far as they were concerned. His mother still called him by his old name, he went to school and ate his meals, but the real ‘he’ did not associate ‘himself' with any of this, he observed it all as one might watch a cinema show, but knew it as the show it was.
It is surely hard for anybody except a Self-realized soul to understand this. Here we see someone acting, eating, sleeping and doing all the things that we do, yet we are told that he is doing nothing at all. Things are going on but he in no way associates himself with them; he is quite a different sort of person from us though fundamentally he seems to be like any one of us. What other difference can one find? The truth is that no one can tell what it is like to be a Self-realized soul except a Self-realized soul himself, Bhagavan used to say.
In this one short hour in the room upstairs Venkataraman had become a fully realized soul. He was now God-realized. From that day on, his life was, from a mundane point of view, almost eventless. He left home shortly afterwards and went to settle in Tiruvannamalai where he remained for the rest of his life. In time he became widely known, though for as long as possible he avoided the lime-light. Not that he had any desire either way, to be known or ignored. For a Self-realized soul there is no such thing as desire. He is liberated. Events just happen. Fame came to him because it was his Prarabdha to help others along the way to that state of Freedom which he now perpetually enjoyed.
