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

Continued from Verse Thirty-Eight

39. Only so long as one considers oneself bound, do thoughts of bondage and Liberation continue. When one enquires who is bound the Self is realized, eternally attained, and eternally free. When thought of bondage comes to an end, can thought of Liberation survive?

Commentary: The idea of bondage or ignorance is itself based in the egoic idea that there you are a person, a body and a mind. It is the one who believes that they are the body and mind that seeks freedom. Yet when you engage in self-inquiry, this one who believes that they are the body-mind is itself seen not to exist. What you actually are is not the body and mind, and not the one who believed they were the body and the mind, therefore you are not the one who wanted liberation. You did not really want liberation because liberation was already yours. You did not need liberation because you were never imprisoned to begin with. Ignorance is itself, and always has been, a misconception.

The idea of bondage is itself a product of dividing the world into “I” and “not-I” and the consequent identification with the I. The idea of liberation is dependent on the idea of bondage. Indeed, language itself, all concepts, and all meanings are only relevant in the context of the egoic identification. Beyond that, they so lose meaning that they cannot even be said to be meaningless; even that would be too much. Realization is the recognition that the structure of division and language is itself mute, is itself merely like strokes or gashes of color on a painting, rather than meaningful in itself. And so bondage and realization are also only abstractions, shapes in clouds as seen by a child — not actually existent.

The end result of realization will be to recognize that there was never any ignorance, and therefore never any solution to it. Realization itself is a mere concept that is destroyed along with the concept of bondage. They annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter. Realization is a ladder the seeker climbs and then tosses away once at the top.

Even as concepts, truly, ignorance and realization didn’t exist; they were misconceptions, and even the idea that they were misconceptions is a misconception, and that is a misconception too, all the way down.

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