question

 

Asahel Curtis - Two mountaineers (identified as Jack and Miss Nettleton) sit on rocks, 

with arms around each other and backs to camera, on (or near) the summit of Mt Rainier, 1909

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When Papaji met Ramana Maharshi, and asked him, "Have you seen God?" Maharshi replied, "Anything that you see cannot be God. 

Whatever you see must be an object of your senses. God is not an object of your senses. God is the one through whom all things are seen, tasted, touched, heard and smelt, but He himself cannot be seen because He is the seer, not an object of sight."

[...] Name and form are past bondages. The fact is, that which IS, is only one. It is omnipresent and universal. We say ‘here is a table’, ‘there is a bird’, or ‘there is a man’. There is thus a difference in name and form only, but That which IS, is present everywhere and at all times. That is what is known as asti - Existence, omnipresent. 

To say that a thing is existent, there must be someone to see — a Seer. That intelligence to see is known as bhati - Consciousness. There must be someone to say, ‘I see it, I hear it, I want it’. That is priyam - Love. All these three are the attributes of nature — the natural Self. They are also called Existence, Consciousness, Bliss (Sat-Chit-Ananda).

[...] Talk of the ‘witness’ should not lead to the idea that there is a witness and something else apart from him that he is witnessing. The ‘witness’ really means the light that illumines the seer, the seen and the process of seeing. Before, during and after the triads of seer, seen and seeing, the illumination exists. 

It alone exists always.


—Ramana Maharshi

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