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“Duraswami is crying because he thinks I am suffering agonies! It is true that my body is suffering. But oh, when will he realize that I am not this body?"114
Dilip Roy, during his two visits to Maharshi's ashram realized that Maharshi was "not merely a great Guru, come with His Kindly Light, to lead us back home but a human friend and divine sponsor rolled into one."!15 He experienced peace and harmony afterwards. He writes: "After just being near him for a little while my relentless gloom melted away like mist before sunrise."116 (B) Evaluation :
The author found that there were such traits of the sage's personality which could be called paradoxical. On the one hand, he appeared simple and indifferent towards the whole world. On the other, he was compassionate, caring even for the cow-Lakshmi. His sadhana seemed spontaneous to him, but it looked severest to others. He would talk of the importance of silence at one moment. On the next, he would say that silence does not mean mental inertia or passivity. Knowing of one's real self was important according to Maharshi, but, how one could avoid the importance of the real selves of others was left to be decided by the individual on his own. On one occasion, he would appear an intimate friend, on the other, a bhagavan, who had come to uplift the whole humanity from its ignorance and ego. He appeared to be a sage and a saint combined into one, because he talked of Illumination (jnana), but he also accepted love (bhakti) as the mother of Illumination. He seemed to be concerned for all people around him, but, like Paul Brunton, Dilip Roy also felt that
“... he did not belong to us, the human race, so much as he belonged to nature, to the solitary peak that rose abruptly behind the hermitage, to the rough tract of jungle which sketched away into distant forests and to the impenetrable sky which filled all
space."117
It was not easy to understand Ramana Maharshi's behaviour with human intellect. Even C. G. Jung admits that "the identification of the self with God” as expressed in Ramana Maharshi's consciousness and utterances, is so strange that even
“Psychology cannot contribute anything further to it, except the remark that it lies far beyond its scope to propose such a thing. However, it is clear to the Indian that the Self as spiritual Source is not different from God; and in so far as man abides in his Self, he is not only contained in God but is God Himself. Sri Ramana is quite clear in this respect."118
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