Questioner: So you’re talking about Yoga and Vedanta to give some sort of
context to his enlightement?
Ram: Yes. Now that Ramana is getting fame it is rather sad to see all these
Western people coming to Tiruvannamalai with absolutely no notion of the
context of his enlightenment and his life, with no understanding of the depth
of the Vedic tradition and burdened with amazing and ill-considered views of
enlightenment based on their Ramana fantasies.
Anyway, Ramana’s type of realization, because it did not occur at the feet of
a guru in a traditional Vedantic classroom, is more in line with the tradition
of Yoga, although most yogis do not become jnanis as Ramana did. His lifestyle
too, sitting in meditation in a cave, is more typical of the yogic tradition
than the Vedantic. The reason yogis do not usually become jnanis is because
they have often been confused by the language of Yoga into thinking of
enlightenment as a permanent experience of samadhi. So when the experience is
‘on’ they are not looking to understand anything, they are simply trying to
make the state permanent, sahaja. The joke is that enlightenment is not an
experience, nor is there any permanent experience. Furthermore, they do not
realize that to make an experience permanent one would have to be a doer, an
agent acting on the experience, maintaining it or controlling it or staying in
it … which is a dualistic state, not enlightenment.