Who am I? The life and teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi with Michael James
Who or what am I? We are each aware of ourself as being, as it were, composed of five layers: a physical body, the life that animates it, and the mind, intellect and will that function within it. Though these five components are more or less distinct from each other, we experience them collectively as ourself, ‘I’, and are always aware of being one and not many. So are all or any of these five components what we actually are?
What we are always fundamentally aware of is only our own existence – that which we experience as ‘I am’. Although by intellectual analysis we can understand what we are not, and by a process of elimination what we actually are, we still do not thereby experience ourself as we actually are.
Bhagavan Sri Ramana makes clear in his teachings that the means by which we can experience what we actually are is the simple practice of self-investigation and self-surrender. In this talk Michael James will briefly outline the life of Sri Ramana, and then explain his teachings in more depth and what he means by the practice of self-investigation and self-surrender.
Michael lived from 1976 till 1996 in Tiruvannamalai, the town in south India where Sri Ramana (1879-1950) lived for the last 54 years of his life, and for the first 8 years of his stay there he studied and translated all the original Tamil writings of Sri Ramana under the clear guidance of one of his foremost disciples, Sri Sadhu Om. He regularly writes and talks about the teachings of Sri Ramana, and has a website, blog and YouTube channel dedicated to them:
https://happinessofbeing.blogspot.com
https://youtube.com/user/SriRamanaTeachings/feed
Tickets: £10 for an invitation on Zoom