Learned...

1. Why do people call me learned?

What is the mark of real learning?

Learning that all garnered knowledge of things

is empty ignorance

and that true knowledge

is the search for the Knower.


2. Those who,

learning to forget completely all objective knowledge,

turn inward firmly and see clearly the truth,

abide serene.

Those who try to recall forgotten things pine bewildered,

fretting over false phenomena.


3. When knowledge marred by doubt and error

disappears in true Awareness clear and pure,

one thus established firmly in Self-Being,

free from falsehood,

has crossed over to the further shore of the river of knowledge.


4. Even the knowledge sense-perceived of the world without

has for its ground the Self above.

To search for knowledge somewhere else apart from That

is but to grasp the shadow,

not the substance.


5. Whatever notion may arise,

never to let it live or grow,

but to turn it that very instant,

firm and stern,

back to its source and merge it there,

this is robust, intense detachment.


6. Many are the ills that flow from mixing with mad folks

afflicted with turbid minds and rattling tongues.

Best friendship is with those good men whose minds are dead

and who abide in the pure silence of awareness.


7. Those who do not dive into the Heart

and there confront the Self in the five sheaths hid

are only students answering out of books

clever questions raised by books,

and not true seekers of the Self.




The above Sri Ramana Maharshi quotes are from the book
The Seven Steps to Awakening.