Ramana maharshi teachings
The original set of questions was asked by Sivaprakasam Pillai which was later presented by Ramana Maharshi in prose form. They are direct from his unique experience of self-realization.
#RAMANA MAHARSHI TEACHINGS HOW TO#
Therefore, we need to gather all the data, then we’ll make sure there are no corn flakes box pieces in the mix, and finally we’ll explore how to go about recognizing which combinations of the real pieces might allow us to re-create the picture on the cover of the jigsaw puzzle box.The quintessence of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching is found in a small booklet called ‘Who am I?’ This little booklet contains the first set of instructions given by Ramana Maharshi. before attempting to evaluate the importance or message of the Bible. The first task of my new book, then, was to apply this analogy to sorting out our basic worldview, religious/spiritual beliefs, personal values, etc. So, without cosmology, you’d have all the correct pieces but be clueless about how to assemble them into the picture. Then comes cosmology, which is the part of you that figures out how the real puzzle pieces go together. Without ontology, you’d be trying to integrate corn flakes box pieces into the design, not realizing that they don’t belong. Second comes ontology – which is how you distinguish the ‘real’ pieces from the corn flakes box pieces. That part of you is what you activate when you employ epistemology, which is the art/science of figuring out how you know what you know. Some faculty of yours has to be able to tell the corn flakes box pieces from the genuine jigsaw-puzzle pieces. To make matters worse, the dog has chewed up a corn flakes box, and now pieces of it are in the mix. Imagine trying to collect all of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have been scattered throughout the house by a three-year-old child. And let’s take a look at ontology while we’re at it. In fact, philosophy-the love of wisdom- had several branches among them were ontology (the study of the nature of reality), epistemology (the study of how we know what we know), ethics (the study of moral behavior), and cosmology (the study of the universe-physical and metaphysical.) So, before we can set psychology free, we first need to spend some time looking at epistemology, and cosmology. When I was in the seminary in the 1960s, psychology was included in the philosophy department. In turn this forced me to look at how we know what we know (epistemology), how we decide what is ‘true’ or worthy of belief (ontology) and how we then organize our beliefs into a coherent paradigm (cosmology.) So, I first needed to set psychology free. The case against God is based on his own ‘journals’ (the Torah/Pentateuch) but in order to present my case, I first needed to explain what is meant by the terms ‘biblical revelation’ and ‘the inerrancy of the Scriptures’.
#RAMANA MAHARSHI TEACHINGS TRIAL#
In this book, I put God on trial for crimes against all of humanity. The Biblical Book of Job puts God on trial for crimes against Job and in Auschwitz, a group of incarcerated Jews, led by Elie Wiesel, put God on trial for crimes against Jews. And that was my purpose in writing this book which I’ve titled, Setting God Free: Moving Beyond the Caricature We’ve Created in Our Own Image. In any case, God is given a pass by those who believe in him while, for atheists, these passages are the final proof God is simply the ‘opium of the masses.’Īs a Catholic of 75 years and an ordained priest of 49 years, I’ve taken a very different tack. Instead, they attempt to dodge the issues by claims such as, “He is God, who are we to judge his behavior?” or “God has his reasons, we just don’t understand them” or we succumb to the Stockholm Syndrome whereby prisoners who are being held captive and brutalized by a captor begin to psychologically agree with his rants and viewpoints in order to survive the ordeal.
But God-fearing Bible believers can’t go there. The phrase is, “the difficult passages.” If the chief protagonist were anybody else except God, he’d be immediately branded as a genocidal psychopath. There is a euphemism often used in the Judeo-Christian world to refer to certain parts of the bible.