PEACE AND HAPPINESS

D: How can I get peace? I do not seem to obtain it through vichara.

M: Peace is your natural state. It is the mind that obstructs the natural state. Your vichara has been made only in the mind.
Investigate what the mind is, and it will disappear. There is no such thing as
mind apart from thought. Nevertheless, because of the emergence of thought, you surmise something from which it starts and term that the mind. When you probe to see what it is, you find there is really no such thing as mind. When the mind has thus
vanished, you realise eternal peace.

D: Through poetry, music, japa, bhajana, the sight of beautiful landscapes, reading the lines of spiritual verses etc., one experiences sometimes a true sense of all-unity.
Is that feeling of deep blissful quiet
(wherein the personal self has no place) the same as the entering into the heart of which Bhagavan speaks?
Will practice thereof lead to a deeper samadhi and so ultimately to a full vision of the Real?

M: There is happiness when agreeable things are presented to the mind. It is the happiness inherent to the Self, and there is no other happiness. And it is not alien and afar. You are diving into the Self on those occasions which you consider pleasurable; that diving results in self-existent bliss. But the association of ideas is responsible for foisting that bliss on other things or occurrences while, in fact, that bliss is
within you. On these occasions you are plunging into the Self, though unconsciously. If you do so consciously, with the conviction that comes of the
experience that you are identical with the happiness which is verily the Self, the one Reality, you call it Realization. I want you to dive consciously into the Self, i.e., into the heart.

🕉 Maharshi’s Gospel
Being Answers of
BHAGAVAN SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI
to Questions put to Him by Devotees