Sri Gajapathi Aiyyer was a distinguished lawyer and a devotee par excellence of the Maharshi. He came to Ramana Ashram in 1936. He stayed for perhaps six months and kept meticulous diaries of the meetings in Bhagavan’s Hall.

These diaries are the core of the manuscript known as Aham Sphurana [‘I’-Pulsation]. It seems that in the 1950s his friend, Swami Rajeshwarananda, wanted to publish these notebooks. At that time the ashram didn’t have the necessary resources. 

Now some seventy years later a manuscript has appeared, Aham Sphurana, which appears to contain the material from Sri Gajapathi Aiyyer’s Red Notebooks. It may well be that other material has been added. It is a huge text of more than 1000 pages. 

In December 1948 Sri Gajapathi Aiyyer and his friend Swami Rajeshwarananda took a trunk containing half a dozen notebooks to Ramana Ashram and it was unpacked in front of Bhagavan. 

Gajapathi Aiyyer ran through the books patiently. They are hardbound notebooks, all of the same variety, done in beautiful red rexine. The pages are serially numbered from one to three-hundred, in black ink. The pages opening on to the left-hand side have their number inscribed at the top left corner and those on the right-hand side at the top right corner. The pages are lined with bluish lines in narrow spacing, and filled with young Gajapathi’s meticulous note-making competencies, all written in pencil. 

(See back of book p. 231 for four of these original pages – Ed)

Bhagavan smiled and said: See, how nicely the child has written everything!

Swami Rajeshwarananda: Gajapathi feels that he has committed an offence by chronicling your words without having sought out your permission.

B: Does not matter.

Gajapathi: I only wrote for my own recollection; if shown to others, will it not lead to confusion? Bhagavan gives specific advice to individual persons on spiritual matters; if shown to an unrelated person will that person not erroneously think that the advice is also applicable to his own case, and so mislead himself, with unwarranted consequences? Yet Swami Rajeshwarananda wants to make it available for all in the ashram to inspect.

Swami Rajeshwarananda: Bhagavan’s words are more solemn and sacred than the Upanishads [sacred Hindu scriptures] even. Why opine they could mislead anyone?

B: Somebody may have the same doubts as that of the entries in these books.

Gajapathi: But Bhagavan gives different responses to the same question to different persons, depending upon individual temperament!

B: If the reply found is not satisfactory, the search continues! The earnest seeker does not make himself content with the receipt of a response felt by him to be unsuitable, or only partially satisfactory. An intellect made subtler and subtler by repeated and prolonged submergence in Being, will automatically reject advice that directs it away from the Heart. 

Practising firm Permanence in the Shining of the Heart strengthens the faculty of intuition to the extent that it seeks out, time and again, only those words that redirect its course toward the self-resplendent Heart; such discrimination is not a function of the fictitious sense of individual free will; rather, it is automatic and comes by God‘s Grace to the sincere seeker.

Gajapathi was about to say something, but it was time for the veda parayanam [Vedic chanting in Ramana ashram] to begin.

Bhagavan, reaching for his stick, remarked before leaving:

There is a destiny guiding the course of events. One need not fret about anything, imagining oneself to be personally responsible for it.