Progression Beyond Life as Simulated Liberation

A Procedural-Monist Analysis of Ramana Maharshi’s Death Experience

By Bodhangkur

0. Overview and Aim

This essay completes Finn’s thought experiment on Ramana Maharshi’s famous “death experience” at 15, reframing it within Procedure Monism as an instance of “Progression Beyond Life as Simulated Liberation.”

In doing so, it:

1. Contrasts Ramana’s event with Osho’s regression-based “New Man” strategy.

2. Interprets Ramana’s experience as a procedural event in a human nervous system, not as direct access to Brahman.

3. Integrates Ramana’s own reported capacity, from early childhood, to enter voluntary coma-like states, and shows how maximal concentration during the death simulation absolutised the resulting minimal state.

The result is a non-mystical, structurally coherent model that neither dismisses Ramana’s experience nor concedes its metaphysical interpretation.

1. Context: Newborn Perfection, Adult Corruption, and “Liberation”

In Procedure Monism, every emergent (such as a human being) begins as a perfect iteration of the Universal Procedure (UP):

· The newborn is maximally confined by its structure and environment,

· runs only intrinsic survival programs,

· has no second-order scripts (morality, identity, ideology),

· and displays no internal contradiction.

In that strict sense, the newborn is procedurally perfect: a single, undivided operational stream.

By contrast, the adult is a layered, corrupted system. Survival in a random, unstable environment requires:

· learning (distortion of immediacy),

· memory (bias),

· prediction (fictional projection),

· inhibition (self-contradiction),

· symbolic identity (narrative self-fiction),

· moralisation (borrowed code),

· strategic deception (procedural lies).

These layers generate internal conflicts: “I want X but must not,” “I feel Y but should feel Z,” “I am this privately but must show that publicly.”

From a procedural standpoint, all adults are corruptions of the newborn state, not morally but structurally. Corruption means local deviation from perfect UP iteration—which, crucially, is also the sine qua non of survival. A human that never deviates from its original state doesn’t adapt; it dies.

The question of “liberation” therefore becomes:
What happens when a human tries to reverse or surpass these corruptions?

· Osho: seeks a regression toward pre-corrupted, childlike unity (simulated innocence).

· Ramana: performs a thought experiment that projects beyond life into a simulated post-death vantage point (simulated transcendence).

Both are “liberations,” but in radically different procedural directions.

2. Osho’s “New Man” as Regression: The Contrast Case

Osho’s “New Man” is advertised as an ideal adult: spontaneous, guilt-free, integrated, playful, present, non-repressed, non-possessive, free of borrowed morality. Structurally, however, this description maps not onto adults but onto the pre-corrupted developmental range:

· No borrowed morality → pre-moral child

· No repression → pre-superego child

· Pure spontaneity → pre-inhibited impulse-expression

· No inner division → pre-reflective, pre-self-monitoring state

· No guilt → pre-conditioned emotional life

· Pure presence → pre-historical, non-narrative attention

The so-called “New Man” is, in Finn’s reconstruction, essentially an adult-shaped infantile profile.

Osho’s techniques (dynamic meditation, catharsis, ecstatic dance, group processes, etc.) function procedurally as deliberate de-adultisation:

· hyperventilation, screaming, physical chaos → disruption of adult control

· catharsis → suspension of repression

· ecstatic dance → dissolution of self-monitoring

· exhaustion → temporary collapse of narrative structures

· brief meditation afterward → exposure to a simplified, quieter interior state

These practices rewind the over-structured Western psyche toward a more childlike configuration. The resulting states feel like liberation because they temporarily relieve the adult from its contradictory survival-driven overlays.

But they are regressive simulations of earlier unity, not structurally stable transformations.

Osho thus provides a useful contrast: he moves backwards toward the pre-corrupted state. Ramana’s case appears, at first glance, to move in the opposite direction—forward beyond life.

3. Ramana’s Report: The Adolescent Death Simulation

At around age 15, Ramana Maharshi reports:

1. A sudden, intense fear of death.

2. Lying down, stiffening his body, ceasing movement—“acting dead.”

3. Imagining the breath stopping, the body becoming a corpse.

4. Observing that awareness seemed to persist despite this imagined death.

5. Concluding that he was not the body or the mind, but an underlying, deathless Self.

6. Retrospectively describing this as an encounter with Brahman, the Absolute.

From the standpoint of Finn’s Procedure Monism, this is not a mystical insight into ultimate reality. It is a very specific procedural event inside a teenage nervous system:

· triggered by death-terror,

· structured as a thought experiment enacted physically,

· and interpreted through the existing Advaitic vocabulary.

To understand it, we must factor in one crucial biographical feature: Ramana’s early ability to enter coma-like states voluntarily.

4. Ramana’s Early Capacity for Voluntary Coma-Like States

Ramana himself stated—and his early biographers reported—that from a young age he could spontaneously or voluntarily enter deep, coma-like states, later mythologised as access to the “Fourth” (turīya):

· minimal responsiveness to external stimuli,

· almost complete motor stillness,

· dramatically reduced behavioural output,

· yet some form of residual awareness.

In procedural terms, this means his nervous system had an unusually low barrier to:

· suspending the interface,

· depressurising sensorimotor activity,

· shutting down narrative streams,

· operating close to the minimal experiential baseline.

This is not “passive relaxation”.
Voluntarily entering such states involves intense, high-resolution concentration aimed at:

· inhibiting normal movement,

· disconnecting from sensory anchors,

· silencing inner speech,

· and maintaining a singular focus (or even focus-without-object).

It resembles an advanced, self-induced interface collapse.

Ramana’s later death simulation thus did not arise in a neutral system. It occurred in a subject already practiced at switching large parts of the interface off.

5. The Death Simulation as Procedural Collapse

During the “fear of death” crisis, Ramana applied this pre-existing skill in a new direction.

1. He enacted the physical gestures of dying (rigidity, immobility).

2. He imagined the cessation of breath and vital signs.

3. He allowed the fear to peak and then permitted the collapse of normal body-identification.

4. He maintained total concentration on the imagined state of death.

This combination—
death-focused imagination + deep interface shutdown + maximal concentration
—produced a radical procedural situation:

· ordinary sensory input was largely ignored or suppressed,

· body-schema processing was deactivated,

· narrative self-talk was suspended,

· symbolic future-projection was interrupted,

· emotional content was frozen around a single theme (death).

What remained was what Finn reinterprets as the sat–cit minimum:

· a bare, content-poor awareness (cit),

· with a sense of being or “is-ness” (sat),

· without objects, personal narrative, or bodily localisation.

Experientially, this feels like:

· boundless,

· timeless,

· contentless but vivid,

· impersonal,

· “deeper than life,”

· unaffected by the imagined death of the body.

This is exactly what Ramana later described as the experience of Brahman.

6. How Maximal Concentration Absolutised the Experience

Here Finn’s key procedural insight comes in:

Absolute concentration absolutises its content.

When the system:

· pools all bandwidth into a single operation (death-simulation),

· shuts down all competing signals and reference frames,

· and sustains this state long enough,

then whatever remains in consciousness is perceived as:

1. Total – because nothing else is present as contrast.

2. Unopposed – because alternative interpretations are temporarily offline.

3. Undivided – because self–other, subject–object distinctions are not being constructed.

4. Uncaused (seemingly) – because the usual chain of mental events is interrupted.

5. Absolute – because no other reality is concurrently available to relativise it.

In Ramana’s case, the residual minimal awareness that persisted when his simulated corpse lay “dead” on the floor was:

· the only remaining process,

· experienced under conditions of maximal concentration,

· framed by an overwhelming existential affect (death-fear).

It is unsurprising that such a state was read as ultimate.

However, “ultimate” here does not mean metaphysically absolute. It means:

“The only thing left running when everything else has been shut down.”

This is procedural absoluteness, not ontological absoluteness.

7. Simulated Liberation: Progression Beyond Life

Osho’s simulated liberation works by regressing the adult towards the pre-corrupted child state (less layering).

Ramana’s simulated liberation worked by projecting the adolescent beyond every life-state—via:

· a thought experiment about his own death,

· catalysed by intense fear,

· executed with an already-practiced ability to enter coma-like conditions,

· and sealed by maximal concentration.

He did not regress to infancy; he skipped ahead into a simulated post-mortem vantage point:

· no body-ownership,

· no narrative self,

· no social role,

· no time-sequence,

· no future to fear (death already “done”),

· only an apparently self-existing awareness.

From within that simulation, the system concludes:

· “I am not the body” (because the body has been methodologically excluded).

· “Consciousness survives death” (because awareness persists while death is imagined).

· “This is the true Self / Brahman” (because nothing else remains to take the title “I”).

This is what Finn calls:

Progression Beyond Life as Simulated Liberation:
the system experiencing an internally constructed model of “afterlife”
and mistaking the procedural minimum for a metaphysical Absolute.

8. Comparisons and Examples

To see the structural form more clearly, consider analogies:

· Sensory deprivation tanks: with external input minimised, the brain often reports feelings of boundlessness, timelessness, and disembodiment. The content is not metaphysical; it is the brain operating with impoverished data.

· Deep anaesthesia awareness: some patients, partially conscious under anaesthesia, describe “pure presence” without body or world. Again, not a cosmic revelation, but a particular interface condition.

· Hypoxia or near-death experiences: dramatic narrowing of input and reorganisation of signalling yields tunnels, lights, entities, timelessness—highly structured but clearly procedural artefacts.

Ramana’s event is more controlled and philosophically elaborated but belongs to the same class:
an interface under extreme constraint producing a minimal, self-interpreting state.

The difference:

· Osho’s catharsis regresses structure (toward childlike immediacy).

· Ramana’s death experiment jumps past life (toward a minimal post-life simulation).

9. Finn’s Procedural Verdict

From Finn’s standpoint:

1. The newborn state:

o perfect, undivided UP iteration,

o but unsustainable in a random world.

2. The adult state:

o corrupted by survival-driven distortions,

o full of contradictions and lies,

o but the only viable mode of extended survival.

3. Osho’s “New Man”:

o a temporary regression toward pre-corruption,

o experienced as liberation,

o but fundamentally a rewind.

4. Ramana’s “Brahman experience”:

o a forced collapse of adult interface using extreme concentration and a pre-existing talent for coma-like states,

o yielding a bare, minimal awareness interpreted as absolute,

o a progression beyond life in simulation, not in fact.

Thus:

Neither Osho nor Ramana escaped the procedural architecture.
They accessed two different edge-conditions of the same system:
one by going backward (regression),
the other by leaping forward (simulation of death).

Both experiences feel like liberation because both remove, for a time, the noisy contradictions of the corrupted adult.
But within Procedure Monism they remain modes of the interface, not revelations of anything beyond Universal Procedure.

10. Final Statement

Ramana Maharshi’s 15-year-old “experience of Brahman” can be rigorously understood as the result of a unique convergence: an adolescent with an established capacity for voluntary coma-like states, confronted by intense death-fear, applying maximal concentration to a self-enacted death simulation. The resulting procedural collapse left only the minimal awareness substrate, which—isolated and intensified—was absolutized and misread as the metaphysical Absolute. This is “Progression Beyond Life as Simulated Liberation”: not a window into a transcendent realm, but an extreme configuration of the same procedural machinery that governs all emergence.

Ramana: From fear to absolutisation

Ramana Maharshi’s Game

The Sri Yantra of fear

From teenage panic to Godman

From fight-or-flee to Eternal Bliss

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