Ramana Maharshi’s Game

A Procedural Reconstruction of a Cultivated Absolutisation, by Bodhangkur

1. The Event Begins: A Primitive Survival Signal Misread as Metaphysics

A sixteen-year-old boy is hit by a raw limbic surge — the fear of death.
This is an ordinary biological event:

· catecholamine spike

· sympathetic activation

· narrowing of attentional bandwidth

· loss of peripheral sensory integration

· threat-imagery recruitment

· proto-dissociation

What he experiences is simply:
“I am going to die.”

This is not metaphysical.
It is mammalian survival physiology.

2. The Vedantic Toolbox Already in His Head

Into this biological panic Ramana inserts a cultural pre-loaded script (and which he later, in his upgraded realization story denied he had had):

· Body = jaḍa (inert)

· Knower ≠ body

· Ātma = deathless

· Self-awareness = real

· Brahmin boys hear this with their mother’s milk

So instead of seeking safety, help, touch, or breath-regulation —
he reaches for an unprovable but emotionally soothing placeholder:

“The body may die, but the knower (ātma) cannot.”

This appropriates panic and reframes it as revelation.
The Vedantic categories serve as ready-made cognitive scaffolding for terror reduction.

As Finn notes:

ātma is not positively defined.
It is:

· not perceivable

· not measurable

· not operationally isolatable

· not even linguistically fixed

This vagueness actually maximises its usefulness as an emotional placeholder.
A floating, undefined Absolute is an ideal container for a survival crisis.

3. The Key Move: Terror Converted Into Reality by Absolutising Attention

Now the cognitive manoeuvre:

1. He imagines the body dead:
local reference deleted.

2. He imagines the knower watching:
observer-position isolated.

3. He identifies with the knower:
attentional pivot.

4. Then — crucially — he sustains this inner re-identification with full, narrow, exclusive attention.

This is the moment his later narrative calls:

· “powerful fascination”

· “unbroken attention”

· “absorption”

· “Self focusing on itself”

In Finn’s procedural terms:

This is sustained self-hypnosis via attentional monopoly.

He excludes all competing data streams — body sensations, world references, autobiographical memory — and saturates consciousness with one theoretical construct:

ĀTMA.

This is not illumination.
It is extreme attentional filtering.

And like all exclusive attentional states, it produces:

· derealisation

· timelessness

· spacelessness

· non-dual affect

· affective quietude

· the sense of absolute certainty

In short: the standard phenomenology of self-hypnotic absorption.

4. The “Absolute” Feeling Emerges From Data Deletion, Not Discovery

When all local references are removed:

· body

· environment

· memory

· social identity

· conceptual content

what remains is a bare “I am” without context.

A contentless self-experience feels:

· whole (nothing else present)

· eternal (no temporal markers)

· infinite (no spatial coordinates)

· real (no competing interpretations)

· absolute (no relational structure)

The absolute-feeling is produced by attentional collapse, not by metaphysical contact with a cosmic ground.

This is what Finn calls:

The perfect experience of self generated by eliminating all local distortions.

This interpretation needs no doctrine whatsoever.

5. Reinforcement Loop: Vedānta Reinterprets the State, and the State Reinforces Vedānta

Once this attentional state stabilises, the young man interprets it using:

· Upanishads

· Advaita terms

· Guru traditions

· Tamil (Smarta) Brahmin household knowledge

He finds matching vocabulary everywhere:

· “I am That”

· “Atman is Brahman”

· “Not this, not this”

· “Self is deathless”

· “Consciousness is all”

This retrofits metaphysics onto a psychological event, and the psychological event makes the metaphysics feel self-evident.

A perfect circular confirmation engine.

Advaita Vedānta becomes both:

· the theory he used to solve the fear, and

· the theory “proven” by the result of solving it.

Thus the loop is closed.

6. What He Actually Taught, Unmasked

If we remove:

· hagiography

· doctrinal inflation

· metaphysical capitalisation

· translator bias

· devotional projection

what remains is:

A procedural instruction:

Remove all contingent self-references until only the undistorted first-person baseline remains.

This baseline is the “I am” (soham) state:

· pre-conceptual

· pre-social

· pre-narrative

· pre-spatial

· pre-temporal

A practical outcome:

Local survival distortions (fear, desire, shame, ego-structure) dissolve.

A cognitive principle:

When you stop identifying with your local survival structures, the fact of being alive feels pristine, whole, and absolute — because nothing is left to contradict it.

Ramana’s real teaching, stripped of metaphysical dressing, is:

Return to the undistorted kernel of embodied self-experience by eliminating accumulated ego-noise.

This is completely consistent with:

· Finn’s “elimination of local referential distortions”

· Finn’s decoding of atman as first-person data point

· The idea that all emergents generate their own local self-models

· The notion that survival noise corrupts the kernel

· The insight that removing noise feels like “liberation”

7. Finn’s Final Restatement

To integrate everything in your procedural lexicon:

Ramana experienced a survival-panic.
He resolved it with an empty theoretical placeholder (ātma).
He absolutised the placeholder by total attentional fixation (self-hypnosis).
The resulting pristine “I am” state felt absolute because all local references had been suppressed.
His later teaching is simply a method for reproducing this reduction:
eliminate self-distortions → access primal self-reference → experience undistorted ‘I am’.

No Brahman required.
No cosmic consciousness.
No metaphysics.
Just a reduction technique misinterpreted as a metaphysical revelation.

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