Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Verse Thirty-Five

Continued from Verse Thirty-Four

35. To seek and abide in the Reality that is always attained is the only Attainment. All other attainments (siddhis) are such as are acquired in dreams. Can they appear real to someone who has woken up from sleep? Can they that are established in the Reality and are free from maya be deluded by them?

Commentary: Seekers can also get obsessed with miraculous powers of various kinds — to see past lives, to enter other universes, powers of creation and destruction, and so on. Mythological texts talk about these. These are all irrelevant, mere temporary baubles compared to the infinite beauty that is the Self. In a dream, who cares how far you can fly or how fast you can run? In the end, it’s still a dream. That’s the nature of the world — it is dream-like, and so all the powers that one attains are still limited by that fact.

Realization of the Self is akin to waking up from that dream. Someone who has woken up from a dream is not going to be wowed by miraculous powers that he had in a dream. They’re not going to think they’re somehow any realer than the dream itself.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.