GOD, GURU AND SELF
“I have seen God! I have seen him face to face! I am seeing
God just as clearly as you are seeing me. Those who have seen the truth can also show it to others. There is no room for doubt in these direct revelations.”
These were the words of grace vouchsafed by Sri
Ramakrishna. By these divine visions he revealed that Self-realization was possible through the grace of the great ones.
Appearing in the latter part of the same century in South India, Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, who shone as the sun of the Self, shedding his grace throughout the world, went one step further in his pronouncements than Sri Ramakrishna. In his teachings he proclaimed that there is no God apart from the person who sees him; that there is no one who is not aware of his own being; that one's own being is God's being; and that Being is both the Self and God. Sri Bhagavan summarized these ideas when he proclaimed the divine nature of man in the following terms:
“There is no one who has not seen God. God vision is natural to all. Ignorance is only the non-awareness of the truth of this natural Self-experience. As wrong knowledge, ajnana, is only ego, which is the attachment to the body, loss of ego is itself the attainment of God. Knowing oneself is knowing God, knowing God is only being God. Since Self-Realization is God-Realization, Self and God are not two different things.”
Bhagavan confirmed this when he wrote verses twenty-four and twenty-five of Upadesa Undiyar:
24 By their existing nature, God and soul are only one substance. Their adjunct [upadhi] knowledge alone is different.
25 Knowing oneself, having given up adjuncts [upadhis], is itself knowing God because he shines as one’s Self.
- Sadhu Natanananda in ‘The Power of the Presenc
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