Ramana Maharshi

Life of Ramana Maharshi

Ramana Maharshi was a spiritual person and also the Guru of International fame from Southern India who practiced during the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1879 near Madurai, Tamilnadu. Ramana’s father was a farmer and he was the second of three sons. His family was religious, who often offered rituals and prayers to the family deity and visited temples. It is widely believed that his family was cursed by a travelling monk, due to their refusal to offer him food. The monk declared that in every generation of their family, a child will abandon the world and will lead a religious life.

Ramana was disinterested in his schooling and was absent-minded during work. He had a marked bias towards meditation and self-analysis. He always used to ask some fundamental questions about his identity, such as “Who am I?”. He was desperate to find the answer to the secret question of his own identity and origins.

One of the strange aspects of Ramana’s character was to sleep soundly. He could be beaten or even get carried from one place to another while he was asleep, and would not wake up nor show any sense. He was sometimes called “Kumbhakarna” in a funny way, after a character in the scripts of Ramayana who slept soundly for months.

All of sudden in the summer of 1896, Ramana went into a renovated state of knowledge or consciousness which had a great effect on him. He got experienced with what he actually understood to be his own death and later returned to his life. He also had involuntary flashes of amazing sights where he saw himself as being independent of the body. From all these events happening around him, Ramana felt as eternal, who exist without depending on the physical body or material world out there.

Along with such intuitions came a power with the word “Arunachala” carrying the associations of deep devotion and a sense that he always thought of his destiny. At the age of sixteen, Ramana learned that a place called “Arunachala” actually exited, (also known as Tiruvannamalai), and this brought him great happiness and hope to all his questions.

When Ramana has reached the end of High School, he was criticized and discriminated against that he was unfit for schooling and was asked to leave. At that time he had been reading a famous book on Tamil Saints and decided to leave home and hometown and lead the life of a religious seeker. As soon as he decided, he planned to go to “Arunachala”, the place which was called the apex point of all his religious ideals and beliefs.

When Ramana was seventeen years old, he left for Arunachala and arrived after four days. He went directly to the Central Shrine or Gopuram at the temple and addressed Lord Shiva stating he had given up everything, abandoned and come to Arunachala in reply to the god’s call.

Ramana spent many years living in temples and meditating for a longer period of time, pursuing spiritual purification, keeping the methods of silence and non-attachment to any emotions. Ramana was in deep meditation and spent over two years living in caves and gardens in meditation. People started noticing, and soon he was referred to as Brahma Swami. His name got to grow and other worshippers began to visit him. His followers began to bring him sacred books. This was all about Ramana’s early life.

After a few years of his continuous devotion and offerings to God, everything seemed to go well. Suddenly there developed throat cancer, of which he refused medicine for the pain and cure. When asked about the pain he was going through, he responded that though his physical body felt the pain, he did not feel any pain.

Later then, Ramana’s pupils constructed an Ashram and a temple, and a space to accommodate many visitors. The Ashram was a sanctuary for animals, and Ramana Maharshi had a great fondness for cows, monkeys, birds, and squirrels that inhabited the grounds of his Ashrama.

Even in his life of being confined to Ashrama, Ramana continued to inquiry nature on “Who am I?”.

Ramana always believed and recommended denying the fact that physical and mental pleasures help you find yourself. He demonstrated his non-attachment when thieves broke into the Ashram and robbed pupils and visitors. He remained calm. Those were his ideas of spirituality and belief in self.

Ramana Maharshi died in 1950, April, sitting in the lotus position with a final word of spell OM.

Hope you liked our small article about the Life of Ramana Maharshi and his beliefs. Also, consider checking our other articles on some of Hindu’s Famous Personalities.