Happiness and the Art of Being

Happiness is our true nature, our essential being.  The transient happiness that we seem to derive from external experiences actually arises only from within ourself, and is experienced by us due to the temporary calming of our mind that occurs whenever any of our desires are fulfilled.  So long as our mind is extroverted, attending to anything other than our own essential self-conscious being, we can never experience perfect, permanent and unqualified happiness.  To experience true and eternal happiness, we must unqualified happiness.  To experience true and eternal happiness, we must attain the experience of true self-knowledge-absolutely clear consciousness of our essential being.  Such is the truth revealed by Bhagavan Sri Ramana.  The philosophy of Sri Ramana derives solely from his experience of true, absolute, non-dual self-knowledge, an experience that transcends all thought, both rational and irrational.  However, since we imagine the existence of duality, multiplicity and relativity, we seem to lack the non-dual and absolute knowledge of our own essential self-conscious being that Sri Ramana experienced as his natural state.  Therefore he presented his philosophy to us in terms of a rational and logical analysis of our present experience of ourself as a finite individual consciousness, in order to enable us to be firmly convinced of the absolute reality that underlies this finite consciousness that we now mistake to be ourself.  However, the spiritual teachings of Sri Ramana are not only a rational philosophy, but are also a precise science and art.  He intended his philosophy to serve only as the theoretical foundation upon which we should practice the empirical science of self-investigation, which is the art of keenly self-attentive and therefore perfectly thought-free being.  This book, Happiness and the Art of Being, is an in-depth exploration of both the philosophy and the practice of the spiritual teaching of Sri Ramana.  The author, Michael James, spent more than eight years studying the original Tamil writings of Sri Ramana and of his foremost disciple, Sri Muruganar, in minute detail under the clear guidance of another close disciple, Sri Sadhu Om, and since the passing away of Sri Sadhu Om in 1985 he has continued to study and practice the spiritual path revealed by Sri Ramana.