'BHAGAVAN RAMANA MAHARSHI' ABOUT HIS STATE OF MIND FOLLOWING HIS AWAKENING IN JULY, 1896 -

“One of the features of my new state was my changed attitude to the Minakshi Temple.
Formerly I used to go there very occasionally with friends to look at the images and put the sacred ash and vermilion on my brow and would return home almost unmoved.

But after the Awakening I went there almost every evening. I used to go alone and stand motionless for a long time before an image of Siva or Minakshi or Nataraja and the sixty-three Saints, and as I stood there waves of emotion overwhelmed me. The soul had given up its hold on the body when it renounced the ‘I-am- the-body’ idea and it was seeking some fresh anchorage; hence the frequent visits to the temple and the outpouring of the soul in tears. This was God’s play with the soul. I would stand before Ishwara, the Controller of the universe and of the destinies of all, the Omniscient and Omnipresent, and sometimes pray for the descent of His Grace upon me so that my devotion might increase and become perpetual like that of the sixty-three Saints. More often I would not pray at all but silently allow the deep within to flow on and into the deep beyond. The tears that marked this overflow of the soul did not betoken any particular pleasure or pain.

I was not a pessimist; I knew nothing of life and had not learnt that it was full of sorrow. I was not actuated by any desire to avoid rebirth or seek Liberation or even to obtain dispassion or salvation. I had read no books except the Periapuranam, the Bible and bits of Thayumanavar and Thevaram. My conception of Ishwara was similar to that found in the Puranas; I had never heard of Brahman, samsara and so forth.

I did not yet know that there was an Essence or Impersonal Real underlying everything and that Ishwara and I were both identical with it. Later, at Tiruvannamalai, as I listened to the Ribhu Gita and other sacred books, I learnt all this and found that the books were analyzing and naming what I had felt intuitively without analysis or name. In the language of the books I should describe the state I was in after the awakening as Suddha Manas or Vijnana or the intuition of the Illumined.”