Confessions of an Ex-Atheist Part 2 — The Crack Widens

If you read the previous [chapter](http://chapter 1), I had stopped the narrative at the point I watched this documentary, two years after my amazing psychedelic trip!

The “trip” had made me question my understanding of the Universe as I couldn’t explain what I’d experienced. As I watched the documentary, something deep started to resonate for me.

The documentary is about an Indian sage called Ramana Maharishi. Growing up in Delhi, I had never heard of him before, although he is extremely well known in South India, and has followers worldwide. The documentary is mostly about the life of Ramana Maharishi and just touches upon his basic teachings. However, something in those words spoke very deeply to me. For the first time, I heard someone describing their entire existence and life in a state similar to what I’d experienced in my trip!

It opened a very tantalizing door to the possibility of being in my “trippy” state permanently and without resorting to chemicals. I still can’t explain it but merely looking at his visage in the documentary felt like fireworks within me. I couldn’t sleep all night and just kept reviewing and thinking about what I’d heard and seen.

I started to read all I could about his teachings and very soon landed on one of his classic books; an 12-page short treatise simply titled Nan Yar or “I (am) Who”. I devoured the book and literally felt like my mind was blown on every page. All of the words spoke deeply to me and I felt like an entire universe of knowledge had opened up to me. (In retrospect, I laugh now at the experience since I literally had understood nothing of what Maharishi wrote at that time. My capacity to understand the true depth of his teachings was extremely limited.)

The main Ramana teaching that really appealed to me was the concept of non-duality, the crux of which is that we are one with the Ultimate (replace with your favorite word for God here!). Ramana taught that we only need to look deeply at our own experience to reach the source or “truth” behind everything. His method of self-enquiry simply asks the follower to ask one simple question relentlessly — who is it that knows? e.g. if you have a thought, ask who had the thought. Then who knew about the one who had the thought. And so on. Just follow that chain, until you will eventually arrive at just pure silence.

This is a gross simplification of the process but I found the method very “scientific” in its approach. No dogma. No absolutes. Ramana’s teachings are very prescriptive and yet empowering. They encourage the follower to conduct their own experiments and reach their own conclusions. I will probably write about in more detail some other time.

A couple of things might have primed me for my experience with Ramana Maharishi. First, for some reason, I was completely open to his ideas. Again I don’t know why but I was willing to suspend my usual disbelief and skepticism and just absorb his words. I now know that this openness is essential to getting to the root of most spiritual teachings. Second, and possibly as important, I didn’t have to “undo” any ideas since I came to his teachings with a blank slate. Nothing to unlearn. The result was a total surrender and acceptance of his concepts and ideas.

Yet, despite my admiration and dedication, when I tried to implement and use his teachings in my daily life, I felt woefully ill-equipped. I just couldn’t bridge the concepts that Maharishi was talking about, and that I believed in with my heart, with the practicalities of daily life and my intellectual mind.

Then, another friend of mine introduced me to Rupert Spira …