Ramana Maharshi Says Accomplishments Without Peace Of Mind Is Of No Use

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Devotee: “It seems that this L.N. Sastri is a great poet. Nagamma is all praise for his poems and tells me he is about the best Telugu poet who has come to Bhagavan for the past five or six years.” G. Subba Rao said: “Yes, I agree, he is a great poet.”

Bhagavan said, “He is a pandit in the Raja’s College at Vizianagaram. Nobody would take him for such a great poet. He looks a very ordinary man. He wants to compose extempore poems on any given subject. But all this is only activity of the mind.

The more you exercise the mind and the more success you have in composing verses or doing satavadanam (giving attention to many things at a time) the less peace you have.

What use is it to acquire such accomplishments if you don’t acquire peace? But if you tell such people this, it does not appeal to them. They can’t keep quiet. They must be composing songs.

As Nayana used to say: ‘In going forward one can run any distance at any speed, but when it is a question of going backward,that is turning inwards, even one step is hard to take.’

“Somehow it never occurs to me to write any book or compose poems. All the songs I have made were made at the request of someone or other in connection with some particular event. Even the Reality in Forty Verses, of which so many commentaries and translations now exist, was not planned as a book but consists of verses composed at different times and afterwards arranged as a book by Muruganar and others. The
only poems that came to me spontaneously and compelled me,as it were, to compose them, without anyone urging me to do so,are the Eight Verses to Arunachala and the Eleven Verses to Arunachala.

Source: DAY BY DAY WITH BHAGAVAN From the Diary of A. DEVARAJA MUDALIAR