This website used to contain more than one thousand pages. We removed all of them from the Internet last summer after a company threatened to sue us concerning a copyright and demanded a large payment.
We are now checking those pages and restoring some of them to this website one at a time. The process will be slow and gradual.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS WEBSITE is to inform people about Self-realization. We define Self-realization as the state that Sri Ramana Maharshi was in. We use him as our standard or benchmark because his life is extraordinarily well documented. Hundreds of people who knew him, including many who lived with him or visited him frequently at his ashram, have described him in published books and interviews.
Another possible definition of Self-realization is, “Permanent absorption in the source of the mind.” This makes clear that Self-realization is not concerned with the mind; it is not a mental state. This makes it different from other kinds of enlightenment that people often talk about, pursue, and experience.
We frequently use terms like enlightenment, awakening, waking up, etc., as synonyms for “the state that Ramana was in”. We do this to make our prose less monotonous. This is not how most people use those terms.
This site began in 1999. It has always been staffed by volunteers.
The site has never sold anything or published paid content or accepted advertising. It does, however, receive a small commission when somebody clicks one of its Amazon links and buys something. The buyer pays the normal price and Amazon pays the commission. In the early years these commissions offset the site’s expenses but nowadays, due to the advent of cheap ebooks and a decline in our web traffic, this is no longer true.
This page was first published on August 24, 2023 and last revised on November 18, 2023.