Jnana Yoga, the message of Sri Ramana Maharshi

Jnana yoga is the path of direct knowing: the way to freedom that works not by adding anything to you but by letting go of a wrong idea about what you are. Jnana is the Sanskrit word for wisdom, and it does not mean information. Sri Ramana Maharshi, who lived at the foot of the mountain Arunachala in southern India until 1950, is one of its clearest modern voices. Cave of the Heart Retreats draws inspiration from Sri Ramana Maharshi on our silent retreats at Karuna Retreat Center in Monchique, in the Algarve, Portugal, and on our annual pilgrimage to Arunachala.

What jnana actually means

The four classical paths of yoga are usually given as karma yoga, the path of action, bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, raja yoga, the path of meditation, and jnana yoga, the path of direct knowledge.

The knowing that jnana points at is not the kind you have when you know that the capital of France is Paris, or that this switch turns on the light. That is useful knowledge, and it is held by the mind, and it is not what is meant. Jnana is a direct recognition of what you are.

It does not work by accumulation. Jnana is not something gained but something uncovered: what goes is the ignorance, the not-knowing, the conditioning and the veils that in reality were never there and give us the impression of being something limited. Our culture, our upbringing, our karmic conditioning, whatever we have carried, all of it leaves the same impression behind, that we must do something in order to be happy, that we must achieve something in order to be free. In this view that impression is simply a mistake, and jnana is what happens when it stops being made.

So the path kindles a fire rather than fills a shelf. The light it brings is the understanding that we are not only the limits of a personality, not only our thoughts, our conditioning, our role in society or our emotions.

Why Ramana Maharshi is a way into jnana yoga

Sri Ramana Maharshi had a profound awakening experience at the age of sixteen, facing his fear of death and embarking on a spontaneous inquiry into the Source of his being, the question "Who am I?".

After that experience, his whole life was transformed, and soon afterwards he left home and went to Tiruvannamalai, the town at the foot of the Arunachala mountain. From the moment he arrived he was taken into very deep states of consciousness, spending many years in silence.

His life story, and the way in which he transmitted his realisation, can give us a framework for how to approach the practice and the quest for the Self.

The first teaching was silence

Before there were any words, there was Silence.

For years after he came to Arunachala he simply sat in silence, and people who came near him reported that something was transmitted, heart to heart, without anything being said. He described this plainly:

The highest form of grace is silence.

And:

Mauna, silence, is the real form of God.

This is why a silent retreat is not an unusual setting to open to our true nature but its natural one. Of course, Ramana Maharshi refers to a Silence that is the background which includes both sound and the absence of sound. We write about what that silence means in noble silence, or mauna.

So, for people who came to Ramana Maharshi looking for spiritual guidance and support, just being in his silent presence was enough, since it allowed them to recognise their own silent presence. This natural recognition of the Self, the ineffable Stillness of our being, is the most direct way. However, not everyone could understand the depth of his silence, in the same way that opening to this ineffable Stillness of our being might not seem available to us in meditation. Therefore we use words and concepts to point to that which is nameless.

What he wrote to his mother

His first written teaching was a note to his mother, who had come to bring him home and stayed for days, weeping, unable to understand why her teenage son would not return with her. He was not speaking at the time. A devotee, watching her suffer, asked him to write down an answer to his mother.

He wrote:

The Ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their past deeds. Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try how hard you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to stop it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain silent.

What he is pointing at is not external silence, but a deep communion with the silent presence that is your own most intimate being, and the invitation is to let your whole life be permeated by it. Allow life to happen, unconcerned with the external, immersed in the Silence of your own being.

One teaching, many tastes

Anybody who reads a collection of his answers notices quickly that, even though Ramana Maharshi is always recommending Self-Inquiry, the way he suggests approaching it sometimes varies from person to person. He tells one person to do nothing but inquire, another that their mantra practice is fine, another to trace the feeling of "I" in the body, another to look at awareness itself.

He answered the person in front of him rather than the question in the abstract, and what he transmitted was never only the words. He was like a spring in a mountain, water simply flowing, and you can make many different teas from the same water. The taste changes according to who is drinking. What is behind the words does not change at all. The water is always the same.

This means any attempt to turn his teaching into a single system, including this one, is already a small betrayal of it. The honest use of a summary is as a set of doors, and the question is which one can open for you today.

The door he offered almost everyone

To most people, most of the time, he gave one instruction: ask yourself who you are.

When a visitor came asking for spiritual guidance, wanting to know himself, Ramana Maharshi wrote the answers on the ground with a stick, and those writings became the small book Who Am I?. In it he describes the practice in the plainest possible terms:

Not letting the mind go out, but retaining it in the Heart, is what is called "inwardness"… When the mind stays in the Heart, the "I" which is the source of all thoughts will go, and the Self, which ever exists, will shine.

And he describes what the question itself does:

The thought "Who am I?" will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed. Then, there will arise Self-realisation.

No one can tell you the answer. The question is not a mantra to be repeated, not a piece of rational analysis to be worked through, and not a formula that works by repetition. It is a longing given a shape in words. Most people carry that longing already, in some form of their own, long before they ever hear the question.

He invited us to keep the question "Who am I?" alive constantly. In his invitation, any other thought that brings us to externalisation can be made to point towards ourselves:

When other thoughts arise, one should not pursue them, but should inquire: "To whom do they arise?"… The answer that would emerge would be "to me". Thereupon if one inquires "Who am I?"…

How that is actually practised is the subject of its own post, Self-Inquiry, and how to practise the question "Who am I?".

What is worth saying here is why he thought it was the direct path, and he put that in terms anyone can check:

What is essential in any sadhana [spiritual practice] is to try to bring back the running mind and fix it on one thing only. Why then should it not be brought back and fixed in Self-attention [to the pure feeling of "I"]? That alone is Self-Enquiry (atma-vichara). That is all that is to be done!

Everything else, he said, is practised while the ego is left standing.

Reality is simply the loss of the ego. Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. Because the ego is no entity it will automatically vanish and Reality will shine forth by itself. This is the direct method. Whereas all other methods are done, only retaining the ego. In those paths there arise so many doubts and the eternal question remains to be tackled finally. But in this method the final question is the only one and it is raised from the very beginning.

This is his own image for it: the attempt to destroy the ego or the mind by methods other than Self-Inquiry is like a thief turning policeman to catch the thief, that is, himself.

The other doors to Self-Inquiry

The pure I-feeling, or I-thought, as most of the translations have it. Before "I am tired" or "I am happy" or "I am someone who does this kind of work", there is the bare "I am". No story attached to it, just the simple sense of existing. He suggested resting there, in that simple beingness, and then looking for where it arises from.

That which rises as "I" in this body is the mind.

He also suggested, for those who wanted something to hold, simply repeating "I, I" inwardly, with the whole mind on it, which he said leads to the same source.

Even if one thinks constantly "I-I", one will be led to that place.

Awareness aware of itself. A different emphasis, for people whose door is consciousness rather than existence. Not a trick of the mind. Simply giving the full attention of your being to the fact of being aware, here, now, until you begin to perceive yourself as that awareness rather than as its contents. If you try this, you might notice that everything becomes very quiet.

For knowing That which is There is no other knower. Hence Being is Awareness; And we all are Awareness.

The Heart. He was asked where in the body the "I" arises, and his answer rested on something anyone can check by watching other people rather than by taking his word for it. Whatever the language and whatever the tradition, when someone says "I", the hand goes to the chest.

All people indicate themselves by pointing to the chest when saying "I".

If one inquires as to where in the body the thought "I" rises first, one would discover that it rises in the heart.

It is worth saying that he localised the Heart in the body only for those who could not yet stop thinking in terms of the body, and that he was firm elsewhere that the Heart is neither inside nor outside, since it alone is. There is a story of a man who insisted he could not feel his own existence, could not locate himself at all, and who, while protesting, put his hand on his own chest. This intuition is used in our Hridaya meditation practice.

The source of a mantra. Ganapati Muni, a famous Sanskrit scholar and a prodigy as a child, came to him at the Virupaksha cave in November 1907 after years of intense practice, having asked the Divine Mother in prayer to send him someone who could help. What he said when he arrived is this whole question asked by a man who had already done everything:

I have performed japa to my heart's content, yet I have not up to this time understood what tapas is.

Ramana Maharshi answered twice, in the same breath. First the inquiry itself:

If one watches whence the notion "I" arises, the mind gets absorbed there; that is tapas.

Then the same instruction, turned towards the practice the man in front of him had given his life to:

When a mantra is repeated, if one watches whence that mantra sound arises, the mind gets absorbed there; that is tapas.

The instruction had not changed. Since the mantra and the deity are not two, looking for the source of the sound is the same movement as looking for the source of the "I". It was a revelation to him, and it was Ganapati Muni who afterwards gave the young man on the hill the name by which the world now knows him, Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi.

What he said about the practice you already have

He would not usually tell anyone to stop the practice that they were already doing.

If someone arrived with a mantra, he did not take it away. If someone was devoted to a form of God, he did not argue. His own position was that any practice will eventually complete itself and fall away naturally, and that forcing that moment is pointless. He always favoured Self-Inquiry as the most direct path.

The story usually told about this concerns Poonjaji, later a well-known teacher himself, who had a fierce devotion to Krishna and repeated his name constantly. After visiting Arunachala he found, back home, that he could not do it any more. The name would not come. Other teachers told him to try harder. He travelled back to ask what had happened.

Ramana Maharshi asked him how he had got there. Poonjaji, slightly annoyed to be asked about logistics when he had come with a real problem, answered politely that he had taken the train and then a bullock cart to the ashram.

And where are the train and the bullock cart now?

They brought him there. He did not need them any more.

This is the attitude the whole path takes towards method. Practices are fingers pointing to the moon. Our true nature is.

Looking in the place where it is not

Everybody is looking for happiness, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that. The problem is not the wanting. The problem is that we look for it outside, where it is not, and we will not find it there, however skilfully we search.

Happiness is the very nature of the Self; happiness and the Self are not different. There is no happiness in any object of the world.

Every strategy has this shape. If I can arrange the relationship, the work, the body, the house, the retreat, the practice, then I will be happy. And the strategy fails not because the arrangements fail, though they often do, but because the strategy itself assumes that happiness is elsewhere and has to be fetched. That assumption is the thing being questioned. We are so conditioned to be focused on obtaining happiness for a reason that we forget there is a happiness for no reason, unconditional, not dependent, always in this present moment.

He explains what is actually happening in the moment we call getting what we wanted, and it is not what we think:

In the states of sleep, samadhi and fainting, and when the object desired is obtained or the object disliked is removed, the mind becomes inward-turned, and enjoys pure Self-Happiness.

The object did not bring anything. The wanting stopped for a moment, and what was always there was noticed.

The invitation of Self-Inquiry is not about gaining something that will make us happy, but about becoming more empty and more transparent, so that we can clearly see what already is.

The shift it is actually asking for

The mind is merely thoughts. Of all thoughts, the thought "I" is the root. Therefore the mind is only the thought "I". From where does this thought "I" arise? Seek for it within; it then vanishes. This is the pursuit of Wisdom.

He asked for this to be done the way a man dives for something he has dropped in water:

Just as a man would dive in order to get something that had fallen into the water, so one should dive into oneself, with a keen one-pointed mind.

And what is waiting at the bottom of that dive:

The Self is like a pearl. To find it you must dive deep into Silence, deeper and ever deeper until it is reached.

Silence is the way. But the direction of travel, if any, is from doing to being. From holding the mind on something, to falling in love with that which cannot be described. The talks, the practices, the questions, all of them are there to bring us to a place that is already effortless, and then to get out of the way.

Any of the doors that Ramana Maharshi is inviting us to will take us to the natural recognition of who we are.

Is jnana yoga for you

It suits those who would not believe a dogma or follow anything blindly, but who wish to open to a direct experience of their own true nature.

It suits those who are willing to set their hearts on fire.

Self-Inquiry is not cold or dry. Ramana Maharshi's own writing about Arunachala is love poetry, and the devotion in it is not a contradiction of the jnana. Both are in the same person, and both are the same longing.

Only if one knows the truth of Love, which is the real nature of Self, will the strong entangled knot of life be untied. Only if one attains the height of Love will liberation be attained. Such is the heart of all religions.

If you are weighing this against other meditation practices, we have written about Vipassana and Hridaya and about why we are not a mindfulness retreat.

Where we teach this

If you wish to visit Tiruvannamalai, where Ramana Maharshi spent most of his life, at the foot of Arunachala, you can join our annual pilgrimage.

The same teaching is the spine of every silent retreat we run, in continuous silence, with roughly five and a half hours of sitting a day and an hour and a half of Hridaya Hatha Yoga. A day is described hour by hour in what to expect on a silent meditation retreat. No previous experience is needed, everything is taught on the retreat, and if it would be your first our honest guide for beginners covers the worries people actually have. Every length we run is open to beginners.

To begin at home, our free weekly online meditation is guided live, and there are recorded meditations to sit with.

Dates are on our silent meditation retreats in Portugal page.

Frequently asked questions

What is jnana yoga?

Jnana yoga is the yogic path of direct knowing, one of the four classical paths alongside karma yoga, bhakti yoga and raja yoga. Jnana means wisdom in the sense of a direct recognition of what we are, rather than knowledge held by the mind. It works by removing a mistaken idea about ourselves rather than by acquiring anything new.

Is jnana yoga the same as Self-Inquiry?

Not quite. Self-Inquiry, atma-vichara, is the practice; jnana yoga is the path it belongs to. Sri Ramana Maharshi taught Self-Inquiry as the most direct way into jnana. Ramana Maharshi invited us to constantly keep the question, Who am I?, but he also offered several other doors, including resting in the pure feeling of "I", bringing awareness to awareness itself, tracing the "I" to the Heart, and looking for the source of a mantra.

Do I have to be a scholar, or read Sanskrit?

No. The name misleads people. Jnana yoga is not academic study and Ramana Maharshi taught it to farmers, scholars, children and visiting sceptics in the same plain language. Reading can help and it is not the path.

Is jnana yoga a religion, or part of Hinduism?

It comes out of the Indian tradition and it asks you to adopt no belief. Ramana Maharshi consistently refused to give anyone a doctrine to hold, on the grounds that a belief ends the search by making you feel you already know. People from every tradition and from none have practised it.

What is the difference between jnana and bhakti, knowledge and devotion?

Less than the categories suggest. The same man who taught the inquiry into the ego wrote passionate devotional poetry to Arunachala. In practice the two support each other.

How do I actually start?

Begin with the question, in the way our post on Self-Inquiry describes, and keep whatever practice you already have rather than abandoning it. If you want conditions that make it easier, silence is a powerful option, which is what a retreat is for.

With Love, the Cave of the Heart Team