In Shri RAMANA MAHARSHI one meets again ancient and eternal India. The Vedantic truth –
the truth of the Upanishads – is brought back to its simplest expression but without any kind of betrayal. It is the simplicity inherent in the Real, not the denial of that complexity which it likewise contains, nor the artificial and altogether outward simplification that springs from ignorance.
That spiritual function which can be described as “action of presence” found in the Maharshi its most rigorous expression. Shri Ramana was as it were the incarnation, in these latter days and in the face of the modern activist fever, of what is primordial and incorruptible in India. He manifested the nobility of contemplative non-action in the face of an ethic of utilitarian agitation, and he showed the implacable beauty of pure truth in the face of passions, weaknesses and betrayals.
The great question “Who am I?” appears, with him, as a concrete expression of a reality that is lived, if one may so put it, and this authenticity gives to each word of the sage a flavor of inimitable freshness – the flavor of Truth when it is embodied in the most immediate way.
The whole Vedanta is contained in the Maharshi’s question “Who am I”? The answer is: the Inexpressible. (SPHF)
If “no man cometh unto the Father, but by ME,” it is because this “ME” as such possesses a saving and unitive virtuality; every subjectivity as such is in principle a door towards its own transpersonal
Essence (NA: It is in this sense that a RAMANA MAHARSHI could reduce the whole problem of spirituality to the single question: “Who am I?” Which does not mean — as some imagine — that this question can constitute a path; on the one hand, it indicates the incommunicable state of the Maharshi, and on the other the principle of spiritual subjectivity, of the progressive participation in the pure Subject at once immanent and transcendent.). (“The Enigma of Diversified Subjectivity”)