Happiness and the Art of Being: A Layman's Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of the Spiritual Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana

Happiness is our essential being. The transient happiness that we seem to derive from external experiences actually arises 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 attends to anything other than our own essential self-conscious being, we can never experience unqualified happiness. To experience infinite happiness, we must experience 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 self-knowledge, an experience that transcends all thought. However, because we imagine the existence of duality, we seem to lack the non-dual knowledge of our essential self-conscious being that Sri Ramana experienced as his natural state. Therefore to enable us to be firmly convinced of the absolute reality that underlies the finite consciousness that we now mistake to be ourself, he presented his philosophy to us in terms of an analysis of our present experience of ourself. However, the spiritual teachings of Sri Ramana are not just 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 is an in-depth exploration of both the philosophy and the practice of the spiritual teachings of Sri Ramana.