How a Teenage Panic Attack Became the Birth of a Godman

By Bodhanagkur

There are many paths to spiritual greatness: years in the Himalayas, decades of austerity, a few well-timed visions, a war, an NDE, a wife who tolerates nothing, or a small spiritual thriller publishing house hungry for miracles.
But nothing — absolutely nothing — works as fast as a good old-fashioned teenage panic attack.

Yes, dear reader, that’s how one of India’s most revered, beautiful sages supposedly entered the pantheon: not by studying the Upanishads, not by meditating in caves for years, not by defeating a demon — but by being ambushed at sixteen by the same adrenal blast that causes exam failures, unsuitable marriages, and late-night calls to therapists.

Let’s examine how this very human spasm of terror eventually hatched a Godman.

Act I: The Adrenaline Apocalypse

Picture it: Madurai in India, 1896.
A Tamil Brahmin adolescent suddenly feels a fear of death.
That’s it.
The entire spiritual fireworks show begins with the same biological cocktail that makes people faint in elevators.

He doesn’t tell anyone.
He doesn’t call for help.
He doesn’t pace or scream or run.

Instead, he performs the most teenage response imaginable:
he storms out of his identity.

He asks himself:

“What dies? This body? Surely not me.”

A few Vedantic ideas his culture fed with breakfast surface:
body inert, awareness not inert, etc.
And voilà — interior re-identification achieved.

No lightning.
No Brahman descending.
No cosmic drama.
Just a frightened boy reassigning his pronouns.

Act II: The Story Begins to Grow Muscles

Fast-forward a decade.

People ask, “What happened to you?”
He says something modest like:

“I saw that the body dies but the ‘knowing principle’ does not.”

Reasonable.
Clean.
Philosophically digestible.

But then biographers arrive.
Biographers always ruin everything.

He spins the story Vedanta style.

Suddenly:

· He is lying “like a corpse.”

· Limbs stiffen.

· Lips seal shut.

· Breath held.

· Cremation grounds imagined.

· Rigor mortis enacted.

· Fear of death vanishes “forever.”

· Absorption in the “Self” continues “unbroken.”

The whole thing swells into a Bollywood prequel to Enlightenment.

The panic attack has now become a metaphysical coronation.

Act III: The Capital-S Problem

The original Tamil said:
ātma = my self, the knower.

But English translators, drunk on metaphysical enthusiasm, like Brunton, wrote:

Self — with a capital S.
Which in spiritual fiction publishing circles, like the Theosophical Society in Madras, means:

· Brahman

· Absolute Reality

· Cosmic Consciousness

· The One Without a Second

· God, give or take a few syllables

Thus:

“I realised my inner self does not die”

became:

“I realised the immortal Self, the very Brahman, the Essence of All Beings, etc., etc.”

With one keystroke, a personal phenomenological moment becomes a universal metaphysical revelation.

A typographical ascension.
Holiness by capitalisation.

Act IV: The Ashram Industrial Complex

Once the story acquires drama and the capital S begins to glow, the rest is inevitable:

· Mother arrives.

· Followers arrive.

· Publishers print.

· Photographers snap.

· Western seekers swoon.

· Donations flow.

· The ashram grows.

· Silence becomes a commodity.

· And the teenage panic attack becomes the founding myth of a sage.

By the 1930s, Ramana is not a boy who reassessed a fear.
He is a Godman who “realised Brahman instantly and permanently,” while other mortals are still looking for parking.

Act V: The Teaching Beneath the Myth

Ironically, what the man actually taught is far more sober than the story built around him:

· Look at the “I” that owns your thoughts.

· Remove everything that is not that.

· See what remains.

· Don’t make a fuss about it.

No thunder.
No cosmic upgrades.
No spiritual theatrics.

Just the neutral reduction to bare self-experience (‘Soham!’)—
a procedure which, if done thoroughly enough, does feel absolute.

But absolute-feeling experience does not make one the Absolute.
Unless, of course, a translator capitalises your pronouns.

Epilogue: How to Make Your Own Godman

1. Be young.

2. Have a panic (or love) attack

3. Reinterpret it using whatever metaphysics your culture provides.

4. Wait for biographers.

5. Make sure they use capital letters.

6. Build an ashram.

7. Say very little.

8. Let others fill in the silence.

And that, dear reader, is how a frightened sixteen-year-old became a timeless, spaceless, formless, capital-S Self.

Sometimes enlightenment isn’t descended from on high.
Sometimes it’s just adrenaline with a good editor.

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