IN SEARCH OF MASTERS PART 2 - Wolter A. Keers on Bhagavan Ramana Maharishi

Just as Ma Devaki mentioned, "Many a day and, night I have shed tears and wept profusely, wandering in search of a great preceptor, a self-realized soul" and eventually found one in the form of Yogi Ramsuratkumar, many others too had the yearning to meet their guru. For some, the mere utterance of a word or phrase turned them into seekers on the path to the Godhead.

Photo courtesy of  http://www.ayanoma.nl/wolter_keers.html

Wolter A. Keers (1923-1985 AD) summarized his search in a phrase in The Heart of the World from Fragrant Petals, published by Sri Ramansramam, "Leading to a desperate search for someone who might enlighten me, and ending in the unbelievable event of finding just such guidance."

It's always a particular word uttered that strikes an individual to seek the unfathomable divinity. The mention of Arunachala drove Ramana to arrive in Tiruvannamalai. Similarly a visiting clergyman from Indonesia who stopped by at the home of Wolter A. Keers parents, spoke about his travels through British India. Wolter, who was five then was struck by that phrase Bristish India, as if splitting him in two. He writes, " I was numb with still, amazed wonder with some inexplicable recognition of something extraordinary, something absurdly desirable, and something like the ultimate good, almost like God, even."

Later, in his twenties, he decided to find himself a guru coming to the conclusion that if he did not find one, life would not be worth living anymore. The next shock or rather explosion in him came when he was given a book, Jnana Yoga by Swami Vivekananda by a friend of his mother at about this time. He found all his feelings verbalized in this book. The book, Hidden Wisdom, the Dutch edition of Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India did the rest. As it was a period of war, Wolter had to wait further to go over to India to meet Ramana. Meanwhile, he started meditating on Ramana's photo that came with the book.

This practice was not enough, Wolter realized.  And he also realized that he had to be in the living presence of the guru. He had to see Ramana. He prayed that Ramana helps him fulfill his wish to see him in person.

Several years later Wolter finally made his way to Ramana. Wolter began to tremble all over as he set his eyes on Ramana for the very first time. He describes the thoughts that went through him at that moment. "Here I was but what on earth could this mean, I, this transparent thing and there, there, there, on that chair, light Itself, radiant as I had never seen anything or anyone."

Ma Devaki too mentions in the video interview in the last post, how Yogi Ram Suratkumar was in the physical form one moment and become a column of light spanning the earth and the sky, the other moment.

Wolter continues, "Ramana's look itself spoke, "So, finally, you are here!" That moment Wolter felt blazing light penetrate through him. "He was looking not at you but into you, all without effort." Ramana's look took him beyond the phenomenal. The light swept away all the darkness in him in one stroke.

But the moment he stepped away from Ramana's presence, he came back to his old self. Wolter wanted more. He wanted lasting liberation from ignorance. One day determined to receive an answer, he bombarded Ramana through his thoughts while sitting quietly opposite in Ramana's presence. "Bhagavan, of what use is all your radiance to me, if I cannot solve my problems, the moment I left you?" Ramana took no notice of him. Wolter bombarded him even more. Then suddenly Ramana looked at him with a smile, a look that meant, "What do you want?" Ramana's eyes emitted light and fire: his look penetrated Wolter's chest, physically. His heart chakra from warm became hot like fire and started to spark too. Wolter says it was an event outside of time and space as he did not know how long it lasted. His body finally could not stand the strain, his chest ready to explode. That's when Wolter asked that Ramana let him go. Wolter had received what he had come for. This mere initiation led to total transformation in him. And all this happened even without hearing Ramana speak. His looks itself did wonders. Wolter realized that "Communication in silence was clearer than any explanation in words could have given." And Ramana's smile .. "It always contained a word"

Wolter in another article in RamanaSmrti [A Birth Centenary Offering - 1980], wrote how Ramana opened his heart. 

In literature, all over the world, one finds magnificent descriptions of sorrow. But who can describe happiness? Happiness is a state without ego and therefore without a someone in it to describe it, or even to remember it. What we remember is its afterglow, its reflection in feeling and body, not the moment when we were present as happiness itself, as happiness only.

He was a bomb, exploding the myth of my life until then, within a few minutes, and without a word.

He writes further, how he interpreted Ramana's "Who Am I?" question?

His famous, to some, notorious question, “Who Am I?” immediately got a totally new color. For several years, at home, I had been meditating on it, and it had something of a mystical, logic and a philosophical ring about it. Now it turned into, “Who on earth do you think you are, that you should be so important as to cultivate a garden full of problems and questions”? And this was not by way of condemning my ‘self’, my ego as it is usually called in Vedantic circles — but the question took this form in a sphere of utter astonishment: how, boy, tell me, how have you been so misled as to think that you or your ego had any importance? Instead of seeing that an ego is a mere stupidity or the belief in a fantasy, you have been cherishing it and even cultivating it by feeding it with important questions and problems. Your life until now was led by the belief in something totally imaginary.

Again, there was no condemnation in this — it was a discovery, something revealed to me, suddenly, and leaving me in utter amazement. Perhaps that is what triggered it. His mere presence revealed to me how utterly stupid I had been until now, that it was love which revealed it, not the criticizing father-knows-better attitude that we know only too well. My darkness was revealed by the mere confrontation with light — light that did not condemn me or wish to change me, but accepted and loved me totally and unconditionally; light, as I understood later, that saw me as nothing but light.

... in love there is no ‘I’ to enjoy anything and that love is our real nature; that there, we are present as love, not as an ‘I’ that loves. It seems so obvious, so evident, that “I love” and unfortunately “I hate”, also from time to time. The question “Who am I” helps us to get disentangled from the ever-so obvious. When we face this question, one day the trap will release us. 

What he wants is the death of you as a body and you as a mind. He or his words propagate the total disappearance of everything you call ‘I’ and at all levels. What we now call “my body” is a standpoint that must go. There is no such thing. What we now call “my thoughts, my feelings” must go. There is no such thing as ‘me’ or ‘mine’. And when the illusion of ‘me’ goes, that which we call a body now, will be seen as non-existent, unless in imagination; what we now call “my mind” will turn out to be non-existent, unless in imagination. Whose imagination? The ‘me’ is part of the imagined, just like the dreamer is part of the dream. When the dream disappears, so does the dreamer.

.. The real death, they seek is the disappearance of the idea I-am-this-body and I-am-this-mind. When thought is seen as nothing but consciousness or clarity, as nothing but a little whirlpool of light, thought disappears and light remains. This is the real death that we seek, and the return to life as really is, ever now.

From Face to Face with Sri Ramana Maharshi, originally published in 2005 by Sri Ramana Kendram, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India.

By sitting in Bhagavan’s presence there was a confrontation between illusion and truth, and in that confrontation illusion could not sustain itself. Whatever transformation took place in his presence happened of its own accord, not because he desired it or willed it. Darkness was exposed to light and ceased to be dark. Light did not orchestrate it in any way. It simply expressed its inherent nature. If you ask me how all this worked, my answer is, “I don’t know.”

Wolter mentions an important perspective of a guru, that the guru does not allow anyone to grip hold of him, nevertheless he is always there for you. Wolter fills us in the years after his meeting with Ramana.

I have described my “adventures” with Bhagavan elsewhere [The Heart of the World, The Mountain Path, January 1977 and later published as an anthology Fragrant Petals in 2000] How I rebelled at one moment, finding that this all-overpowering bliss and radiance left me the moment I left the Ashram premises, and how he then broke through my inner walls; how, as my stay with him had unfortunately been only less than two months, as his body was gradually dropping away like a worn-out leaf from a tree, not all problems and questions had been answered and dissolved; how, very soon after his “departure” I got his darshan and he referred me to a person, most venerable and exalted, who in the course of the following years allowed me to be in his nearness until he could say that his work on me had been completed.

When I arrived, regarding myself as a poor man in need of help, he revealed to me that I was more than a millionaire, and the source of all things. Nor has Sri Ramana Maharshi asked anything from me — not even my love or respect. It was his mere presence that uncovered or unleashed in me what cannot be described by words such as love or respect; it went deeper than the deepest feeling. My meeting with him was in no way a matter of giving or receiving, even though for a long time I thought so (he had given me his love, I had given him my heart). It was the naked, radiant confrontation of illusion and truth, in which confrontation and illusion could not stand up. It was wiped away, but not because He wanted it. He wanted nothing, and accepted me as I was. He did not wish to change me, but he saw me as I really was — a whirlpool of light in an ocean of light. Perhaps it was the radiant certainty that he was, that broke through my fears and desires and enabled me to let go of the desire to enrich an imaginary “me”. Does it mean something to you when I say that what he meant and means to me, is the mere fact, that he was what he was, and is what he is? This certainty made me face and later realize the ageless, timeless, unimaginable fact, so utterly simple — “I am what I am” — the Unthinkable.

For more see  https://www.innerdirections.org/wolter-keers-on-ramana-maharshi/
http://realization.org/p/wolter-keers/what-does-he-mean-to-me.html