Translated essays from Rama's own Urdu magazine, the Alif, begun in 1900 while he was still Tirtha Ram the householder — drawn from his study of the Brahma Sutra, Gita, Yoga Vasishtha and the Upanishads. The volume closes with the extraordinary, literal final words Rama ever wrote, left unfinished on his table the morning he went to bathe in the Ganges and never returned.
Rama opens Volume V's Q&A-style essay by arguing religion is as natural to human beings as rising is to flame — not an optional cultural addition but a structural need, like food for the body or light for the eye, without which no genuine success, health or peace is actually possible.
“The best form of religion is to do away with egoism and to merge in the universal Self to such an extent as to be oblivious of the little self.”
This opening essay sets Volume V's practical register: religion here is not doctrine to be debated but a structural necessity for a functioning human life, with concrete daily disciplines prescribed rather than abstract assurances offered.
Addressing the audience as 'Dear Atma (Own Self),' Rama asks a deceptively simple question: what single power moves both the tongue that speaks and the ear that hears? His answer — one Power alone, threading through every apparently separate body — becomes the basis for a lecture that explicitly refuses to be a lecture at all: Rama insists he is merely thinking aloud to himself, and invites the audience to listen the same way.
“I sing to hear my own song, I do not mind, if anybody understands it or not… There is One and only One Omnipotence interpenetrating all the bodies, like a thread passing through the beads of a rosary.”
Universal unity, in this lecture, is demonstrated less by argument than by collapsing the very format of teaching itself — if speaker and hearer are moved by the same one Power, then a lecture given to 'others' was always, secretly, self-address.
Building from a Punjabi saint's couplets on the folly of diving deep into the sea for a small pearl while ignoring the mountain-vast Self already within, Rama develops an extended, richly poetic meditation on non-duality using the recurring image of infancy's total, thoughtless contentment.
Rama asks the reader to remember being a baby, utterly indifferent to kings and magistrates who wished to fondle and caress, caring only for the mother's lap — tearing up valuable books without a thought, spoiling the fine clothes of the wealthy who held them, entirely unconcerned with 'this world or the other.' This state, in which 'there is neither mine nor thine, neither good nor evil,' is offered as a natural, already-experienced glimpse of the very non-dual freedom Vedanta describes as the goal of a lifetime's practice — something every reader has already tasted, however briefly, and merely forgotten.
Non-duality, this essay suggests, is not a foreign state to be painstakingly constructed but a forgotten native condition — the work of Vedanta is remembering the boundless carelessness every reader once lived in without effort, as an infant in its mother's arms.
Picking up directly from 'Non-Duality's' image of forgotten infant contentment, this essay turns that memory into an active tool for self-examination — using a striking natural-world image to explain why simply ignoring one's misery, rather than confronting it directly, guarantees continued suffering.
When a cat stalks a pigeon, the bird closes its eyes as though this makes it disappear — but the cat sees it perfectly well regardless, and will surely catch it. Rama uses this to warn against spiritual avoidance: ignoring one's actual condition does not free anyone from it, any more than the pigeon's self-blinding protects it from the predator it refuses to look at. By contrast, he notes, a man can sometimes save himself from an actual lion or tiger by steadily outstaring it — direct confrontation, not avoidance, being the real path to safety.
“So, too, if you ignore your miserable condition, you would not be free from your miseries… you can often find a solution of your troubles, if you indulge in self-introspection.”
Eternal Bliss (Anand) is not attained by pretending suffering isn't happening — Rama insists on clear-eyed self-examination as the actual doorway to the bliss non-duality promises, refusing any shortcut that substitutes philosophical assertion for honest inward looking.
Rama explains a diagram of concentric circles as a tool to help the reader recognize their own imprisonment in narrow, self-centered living — and closes with an extraordinary sequence of Persian couplets on the total cost of union with the Beloved, each stanza demanding total annihilation of a different kind before intimacy becomes possible.
“Until you are pierced through with a thin wire like a pearl, you cannot adorn the ears of your Beloved… Unless your ego is crushed like a powder under pestle of knowledge, you cannot catch the eyes of the Beloved.”
Being merely biologically alive and being truly alive, in Rama's Vedantic sense, are shown here to be entirely different conditions — the poems' violent imagery (piercing, grinding, cutting) is not despair but an honest reckoning with how total the ego's surrender must be before real life, real union, becomes possible.
A collection of first-person reflections, opening with a Sama Veda mantra on immortality through relinquishment, and closing with Rama's own personal resolve — modeled explicitly on the Mahabharata hero Bhishma's unbreakable vow — never to be turned from truth by anger or any worldly pressure.
Rama quotes the legendary warrior Bhishma's own pledge: that the sun could turn cold, the moon hot, the very elements reverse their natures, and still he would not deviate from the path of Truth. Rama adopts this as his personal motto, resolving specifically 'never to yield to anger' regardless of provocation — and reasons his way to equanimity by trusting that 'whatsoever happens, happens for our best,' even without full personal certainty of this, simply because he has 'no reason to disbelieve' the great souls who have said so.
“Whatever I have taken to be the Truth, I must act upto it, even though the whole world may oppose me… If I fret or frown, I will be a fool like an ignorant child who is afraid of a police constable whose sole duty is to serve and protect.”
This chapter offers rare direct access to Rama's private resolutions rather than his public teaching — a vow of equanimity under provocation, grounded not in naive optimism but in a considered, Bhishma-like refusal to let circumstance dictate inner state.
Continuing directly from the previous chapter's Bhishma-pledge, Rama pivots into practical guidance for how Vedanta should actually be studied — not as detached intellectual exercise but as a discipline pursued with the same total, unbreakable commitment Bhishma modeled toward truth itself.
“The solid earth may give up its property, water may lose its taste, light may fail to be the source of visibility… but I will not turn away from Truth.”
Vedanta, in this chapter's argument, cannot be studied at arm's length — the same total, unwavering commitment Bhishma brought to his vow is presented as the actual prerequisite for genuine understanding, not merely an inspiring historical aside.
The volume's longest and most sustained philosophical treatise, opening by directly confronting Darwin's claim that competitive struggle is necessary for evolutionary progress. Rama concedes the point for 'lower kingdoms' but argues human beings, as the highest evolved creatures, are called instead toward sympathy and peaceful coexistence — then extends the argument through six further movements (Illusion, Evolution, Know Yourself, God Alone is Truth, Unreality, All in All) into a full statement of Advaitic metaphysics.
On a dark, star-filled night, a newly married couple lie clasped together in bed — yet the bridegroom is dreaming he is anxiously answering exam papers in a Lahore town hall, while the bride dreams she is locked in a furious quarrel with her sisters-in-law. Their bodies remain peacefully entwined while their dream-selves suffer real anguish and conflict. Rama uses this to illustrate how Maya operates: the apparent world of struggle and evolution, however vivid and real it feels from within, is exactly this kind of dream superimposed on an underlying peace (Brahman) that never actually moves at all.
“Man has to change this animalism into 'right is might.'… As a terrified man sees only the snake, and not the rope, yet the snake never existed there, so, although you see this world, the fact is that the world was never there. It is all Brahman and nothing but Brahman.”
Across its seven interlocking sections, this essay builds Rama's fullest sustained case that human progress requires cooperation rather than competitive struggle, and that the apparent solidity of the striving world is itself only a vivid, shared dream superimposed on a peace that was, is, and always will be Brahman alone.
Rama traces the universal human hunger for freedom across every scale imaginable — from a schoolchild's eager wait for Sunday holiday, to office workers cheered by the mere mention of a day off, to the crores of people who have shed blood in history's wars and revolutions, all the way up to the Sannyasi who stakes everything on Mukti, the ultimate freedom from body and mind.
“I welcome thee, Freedom. Thou art the soul of happiness and the object of hopes. The whole world is mad after thee… All the religions of the world have but one aim. It is to achieve Freedom, Mukti, Salvation.”
By tracing one continuous thread from a child's excitement for Sunday to a martyr's sacrifice for liberty, Rama argues that every scale of human freedom-seeking, however small it looks, is secretly already reaching for the same ultimate Mukti that Vedanta names as life's final goal.
An unusually raw, vulnerable piece of writing: Rama directly addresses the Ganges and the Himalayas, recalling his own earlier days of seeking peace among them with 'anaemic looks, dejected heart and tearful eyes,' openly questioning whether the total, effortless bliss of Turiya (the fourth, transcendent state) is achievable outside scripture at all, or only ever described there.
“Rama is wandering like a mad man in the thick mountainous jungles, bare head, bare feet and bare body with only a few copies of the Upanishads in his hands… Will that time be ever ripe, when favours and frowns, sins and sorrows will have no impact on Rama?”
This chapter offers something rare in these volumes: not the finished, ecstatic Rama of the platform lectures, but the searching, still-uncertain seeker who first came to the mountains — valuable precisely because it shows realization as a real struggle undergone, not a status simply announced.
A short, aphoristic essay distinguishing wisdom from mere learning: learning looks backward to accumulated fact, while wisdom looks forward, defined precisely as 'knowing what one ought to do next' — with virtue as nothing more than actually doing it.
“Wisdom has been defined as knowing what one ought to do next. Virtue is doing it… Where thought does not go over into action and precept into practice, there results mental dyspepsia or spiritual constipation.”
A compact but pointed corrective to any purely bookish or contemplative approach to Vedanta: knowledge that never converts into action, this essay insists, is not wisdom at all, whatever its intellectual sophistication.
A remarkable and poignant closing chapter: opening playfully with Rama's amused answer to a magazine letter asking whether a saint must wear ochre robes, this essay was, according to an editor's footnote, the very last thing Swami Rama Tirtha ever wrote — left half-finished on his table when he went to bathe in the Ganges below Tehri on 17 October 1906, from which he never returned.
Rama begins answering a reader's question about whether saintliness requires coloured robes, arguing (as he does throughout these volumes) that true freedom depends on no external cult, robe or fashion — sainthood is found equally in palaces and huts, on snow-covered Himalayan peaks and in the 'dirty water in deep valleys.' The essay is still building toward its full argument when it simply stops. An editor's note explains why: Rama left the piece 'half done to take his bath in the Ganga flowing below,' and was 'accidentally lost in its swift current,' his body never recovered. The essay's final surviving lines — 'I touched this, I touched that… None can find Me, none can catch Me' — were written by a man who, within hours, would prove those very words true in a way no reader, least of all Rama himself, could have anticipated.
“I doff my hat and off I am. Here I go and there I go. None can find Me, none can catch Me.”
Volume V closes not with a formal conclusion but with an interrupted sentence — the last surviving trace of Rama's living hand, breaking off exactly where the river took him, and leaving 'Stamped Deed of Progress' unfinished in the same way, perhaps, its author would have wanted his own teaching to remain: not sealed shut, but open, for each reader to complete for themselves.
Volume VI gathers further devotional and philosophical poetry — “Love's Consecration” and reflections on the unchanging Self. Ask for it next.
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