Only Cure That One Basic Disease: Mistaken Identity

I have to record my gratitude to Maharshi for his insistence on the ever-present accessibility, the naturalness, the obviousness, of Self-realization. Many a time, I had been informed and had read, that Enlightenment is, of all states, the rarest and the remotest and the most difficult—in practice, impossible—and here was a great sage telling us that, on the contrary, it was the easiest. Such, indeed, was my own experience, and I had never been intimidated by those religious persons who were careful to tell me that I couldn’t see what I saw. Nevertheless, for me it was marvelously refreshing to find that Maharshi never sent inquirers away with instructions to work for Liberation at some distant date. It is not, he insisted, a glittering prize to be awarded for future achievements of any sort; it is not for earning little by little, but for noticing now, just as one is. Other sages, of course, have stressed the availability of this, but here Maharshi is surely the clearest, the most uncompromising of them all. How wonderful to hear him saying, in effect, that compared with Oneself all other things are obscure, more or less invisible, fugitive, impossible to get at; only the Seer can be clearly seen.

I thank him for his uncompromising attitude to people’s problems. For him, all the troubles that afflict humans reduce to one trouble—mistaken identity. The answer to the problem is to see “Who” has it. At its own level it is insoluble. And it must be so. There is no greater absurdity, no more fundamental or damaging a madness, than to imagine one is centrally what one looks like. To think one is a human being limited to this perspective is a sickness so deep-seated that it underlies and generates all one’s ills. Only cure that one basic disease—mistaken identity—and all is exactly as it should be. I know no sage who goes more directly to the root of the disease and refuses more consistently to treat its symptoms. WHO AM I? is the only serious question. And, most fortunately, it is the only question that can be answered without hesitation or the shadow of a doubt, absolutely.

I thank Ramana Maharshi above all for tirelessly posing this question of questions, for showing how simple the answer is, and for his lifelong dedication to that simple answer.

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Douglas Harding is the author of may books including the classic work On Having No Head . . .