QUESTIONER: How can any one reconcile [God-realization] with the wage-earning which is a necessity for worldly people?

RAMANA MAHARSHI: Actions form no bondage. Bondage is only the false notion, "I am the doer." Leave off such thoughts and let the body and senses play their role, unimpeded by your interference.

Samadhi with closed eyes is certainly good, but one must go further until it is realized that actionless and action are not hostile to each other. Fear of loss of samadhi while one is active is the sign of ignorance. Samadhi must be the natural life of every one.

After 1991, when he demoted Ramana Maharshi from 7th stage to 6th stage, Franklin Jones began promoting the idea that Ramana's realization was an "exclusive inversion" upon the witness consciousness, and a "developmental phase" in the life of the ego:

ADI DA: The sixth stage...is the inversive (and conditional or conditionally achieved) transcending of the ego-"I" by means of exclusive (or object-excluding) Identification with the True (and inherent, and Self-Evident) Transcendental Witness-Consciousness. (Aham Da Asmi, p204)

At last the sixth stage of life (which, itself, is associated with conditionally patterned inversion upon the Consciousness Principle) must be (Most Perfectly) transcended in the transition to the only-by-Me Revealed and Given seventh stage of life (which is the stage of True, and Fully Spiritual, Divine Self-Realization, inherently Free of, but not strategically separated from, all conditionally patterned forms and states...) (Ibid, p205)

The first six stages of life are the six stages (or developmental phases) of human (and universal) egoity -- or of progressively regressive inversion upon the psycho-physical pattern (and point of view) of self-contraction. (Ibid, p164)

Daist apologists, who previously looked to Ramana as the very pinnacle of spiritual realization, now began pointing to Ramana's periods of silence and apparent inactivity as a sign of this "exclusive inversion".

Adi Da, they pointed out, has fully expressed the Divine through his insatiable appetites for sex, drug use, and hard drinking. Adi Da is immersed in life, they said, his body radiating the Divine in a way that no previous master ever did. According to Daists, Ramana Maharshi represents the weak, the ineffectual, and the castrated state of withdrawal from life. Ramana "hides in the cave of the heart", dissociating himself from all others in egoic identification with the samadhi of "witness consciousness".

What is silence? It is eternal eloquence." -- Ramana Maharshi

In their statements about Ramana, Frank and his minions demonstrate that they do not yet understand that the Heart-Realization Ramana described is truly all-inclusive. All of existence is contained in the Heart, and Heart-Realization is not "a developmental phase of the ego", but truly and completely the demise of the impulse that sees vital/practical action as a "problem" to be solved by a "doer". When this imaginary "doer" (or ego) is no longer the focus of consciousness, there is only the Natural State -- the force and awareness that is Being Itself. The "doer" can't invert upon Being Itself. Being Itself destroys all such attempts to "hide in the cave of the Heart". And when Being Itself is Realized, the world is seen for what it is -- the selfless Nature rising out of the Heart.

The Heart is the Self. It is not within or without. The mind is sakti. After the emergence of the mind the universe appears and the body is seen contained in it. Whereas all these are contained in the Self and cannot exist apart from the Self.

There is no inside or outside to the Self. The Self is Pure and Absolute. Just as a big banyan tree sprouts from a tiny seed, so the wide universe sprouts forth from the heart.

The fact is that God is all. There is nothing apart from Him. See yourself first and then see the whole world as the Self. If you are the Self, the world appears as Brahman.

-- Ramana Maharshi      

In living contradiction to many of the great teachings he has mimicked, Frank's "realization" is in fact not realization at all, but the self-apotheosis of an egoic "doer" -- an exaggerated fifth stage yogic answer to the "problem" of getting by in this world as an isolated genius in a crowd. You spend a weekend with a well-known guru like Muktananda, letting him possess you with his "shakti force" until you are "God-Realized." He gives you a name and an official letter granting you permission to hang out your shingle in his lineage. A week or so later you go into business as a "Spiritual Adept", and this is how you will make yourself rich, acquire properties and expensive toys, and take coup on thousands of young women.

From the point of view of Maharshi's realization, no such self-apotheosis or yogic siddhis or worldly ambitions are needed. Simply find out "who" you are, as Being Itself, and then you will completely understand the world from the position of Being, in which no separate subject exists, and in which the "problem of the doer" has utterly vanished.

Contrary to how Ramana is painted by Daists and others who have seen a few photographs of him lounging about, Maharshi was fully engaged in the life of his ashram. According to reports he was the first one up every morning, going immediately to work in the kitchen, directing the kitchen workers and cutting up vegetables for the day's meals. He was the most unpretentious of men, i.e, a true realizer, who made himself constantly available to everyone. He had no illusions that you can "teach" people anything by parodying (or "reflecting") their sins. And whereas Frank has always claimed that people "can't see" his real purity due to their egos, Maharshi made his purity visible to all.

Ramana described his Silence as expressing his continuous involvement with the world -- his "real work" he called it. The "heat" of Ramana's Silence was profound and undeniable. He was a powerfully attractive being, who drew thousands upon thousands of people to him, year after year. He sat in the communion hall and conversed with visitors day after day, right up until he died. (Frank, on the other hand, gets physically ill at the sight of his own devotees, claiming that it nearly kills him to be with such "beginners".)

If Frank had anything even close to Ramana's power he wouldn't need to carry on like a clown the way he does, endlessly mind-gaming, endlessly changing his appearance, endlessly trying to distract people from noticing "the man behind the curtain". He also would not be such a whiner and a scold, IMHO.

Frank is a clear example of "the ego standing apart" -- the mad subject that thinks it can swallow God whole. Put the writing of this "spiritual genius" aside for a moment and see how he runs: he wants all of existence to revolve upon his physical needs and desires, exactly like a baby whose primary adaptation is to impulsively demand all the food and attention it can get. If it is fed, if it gets "Big Gifts", then the infant is "happy" (or at least satisfied) for today. If gifts are not forthcoming, he throws a tantrum.

The honest fact is that Frank is a prime example of the very worst trait of Americans who go the East seeking the ultimate: he literally believes that "God realization" can be owned by the ego and amplify the ego to cosmic proportions. The proof of this statement is the unfolding of his life since his possession by "the goddess" in the Vedanta Temple in 1970. From that day forward he embarked on a megalomaniacal (yet sophisticated) program of transforming himself from a human being into "The First Last and Only 7th Stage Adept Realizer", the one man in all of history who could claim to be wiser and more compassionate and spiritually fruitful than Buddha, Krishna, Jesus...and Ramana Maharshi.

And in so doing he became an example to be studied, a cautionary tale to be told to your grandchildren.

There are no grades of Reality. There are grades of experience for the jiva and not of Reality. If anything could be gained anew, it could also be lost, whereas the Absolute is central -- here and now.

-- Ramana Maharshi