Proof copies of Rama's own eleven private notebooks, kept in San Francisco in 1903 — his rawest, least-edited material, closer to a commonplace book or journal than a prepared lecture — followed by a sequence of poems and, fittingly, his own original essay on mathematics from his pre-Sannyas years as a professor.
The very first of the eleven notebooks opens not with doctrine but with a small, dry joke about ignorance: a foolish man, insulted as 'no man,' seeks out someone to confirm his manhood — and receives only the deflating half-answer 'you are not not-man' before his interlocutor falls silent, leaving the fool no better off than before.
Reviled as 'no man' after some fault, an ignorant man approaches another to be reassured of his own manhood. The wiser man, recognizing his stupidity, only offers the technically true but useless statement 'you are not not-man,' then falls silent. The fool, still no wiser, asks in frustration why his enlightener has stopped enlightening him — entirely missing that a purely negative, technical truth was never going to satisfy the deeper confusion driving his question in the first place.
“Even error has some foundation in truth… The right punishment of one out of tune is to make him play in tune.”
This first notebook sets the tone for all eleven: compressed, sometimes cryptic observations that reward slow re-reading far more than the polished, fully-developed lectures of the earlier volumes — genuinely private thought rather than public performance.
A cluster of terse aphorisms built around a single central image: the difference between living as a beggar, forever short of what you seek, and living as a 'reckless monarch,' toward whom every good thing naturally gravitates because nothing is desperately sought.
“So long as you beg, you will never find; put yourself in the position of a careless (reckless) monarch and every object will seek your presence… Shop keeping and beggary is no prayer or religion.”
This notebook's central image — the beggar who never finds versus the reckless monarch toward whom everything gravitates — captures in miniature the whole Vedantic argument against seeking: desperate pursuit repels precisely what unconcerned abundance attracts.
One of the longest and most intellectually wide-ranging notebooks, opening with an image of gradually refined scientific measurement (a supposed straight line turning out to be a curve, then an ellipse, then something else again) as a model for how spiritual understanding, too, is subject to continual refinement.
A man knows that ghee (clarified butter) can be obtained from a cow, but lacking any method, simply walks around the cow crying 'O Ghee, O Ghee!' — getting nothing, since the ghee is not on the cow's surface at all. Even once he learns to milk it, he still cannot find the ghee directly in the milk; a further, definite process (churning) is required to draw it out. Rama applies this directly to Western seekers who cry 'O God, O God!' without any systematic method: the cow is the soul, and Divine Consciousness, like ghee, requires a specific, learnable technique to be drawn out, not merely fervent longing.
“Just as in the body, the establishment of an insubordinate centre—a boil, a tumour…means disease; so in the mind, disease begins when a passion asserts itself as an independent centre of thought and action.”
This notebook insists, more explicitly than most, that spiritual attainment requires definite method, not merely intensity of longing — crying for God without technique is exactly as futile as circling a cow crying for ghee that will never appear without the right process.
Opens with a striking, almost proto-ecological reflection: the real Law of Nature, Rama proposes, is not each creature's struggle for its own survival but a 'strenuous struggle for the Existence of others' — individual perishing so that offspring and community may flourish, nutrition (selfishness) always subordinate to reproduction (charity).
“No struggle for one's own Existence but 'strenuous struggle for the Existence of others' is the Law of Nature… Nutrition (i.e. selfishness) is subordinate to reproduction, i.e. charity or unselfishness.”
Nature's deepest law, in this notebook's compressed argument, is already unselfish at its biological root — individual sacrifice for the continuation of others — making Vedantic self-transcendence not a departure from nature but its fullest, most conscious expression.
Opens with an image of Napoleon flying fearlessly through a rain of bullets, unscarred, declaring 'the bullet is not yet cast which should kill Napoleon' — used by Rama as a picture of total, unshakeable inner conviction, before the notebook closes with an extended, admiring quotation from Henry David Thoreau on the Bhagavad Gita.
Moths are drawn to a lamp and die in its flame, yet the lamp itself never leaves its fixed position to pursue or gather them in — it simply remains what it is, and everything that is drawn to it comes entirely of its own accord. Rama offers this as 'the Secret of Magnetism': real spiritual power draws the world toward itself precisely by staying utterly centered, never chasing or soliciting attention.
“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and the cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvad Gita… How much more admirable the Bhagvad Gita than all the ruins of the East.” — Thoreau, quoted by Rama.
Both of this notebook's central images — the bulletproof Napoleon and the unmoving lamp — converge on a single teaching: real power, whether courage under fire or genuine spiritual attraction, comes from unshakeable centeredness, never from anxious effort or pursuit.
A wide-ranging notebook mixing sharp social observation (quoting Macaulay's biting comparison of the East India Company's treatment of India to the Church's treatment of a heretic) with reflections on evolution and a recurring call to equanimity in both victory and defeat.
“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving… No joy over victory, no grief over defeat.”
This notebook's juxtaposition of hard-edged political critique, scientific definition, and spiritual aphorism shows Rama's mind ranging freely across registers in private that rarely appear together within a single public lecture.
Opens with a memorable image distinguishing visible fame from actual greatness: fame is compared to a jutting crag that projects dramatically from a low mountain, while far higher, grander elevations may go entirely unnoticed simply because their outline is less unusual or attention-grabbing.
“Fame is a jutting crag which may project from a very low mountain. Far higher elevations may not catch the eye if their outline is not unusual.”
The central warning of this notebook — that fame is often just an accident of unusual shape, unrelated to actual height or worth — is a useful corrective for any reader tempted to measure spiritual or personal significance by visibility or recognition.
Unlike the other notebooks, an editorial note here explicitly states that this one consists 'almost the whole' of quotations gathered from other sources, with only a small portion in Rama's own original English — making it less a record of his own thought than a window into what he was reading and treasuring from others.
“Allah does not count from life the days spent in chase.” (Arab proverb, quoted by Rama.) “Exercise would cure a guilty conscience.” (Plato, quoted by Rama.)
This notebook offers something the others don't: a direct look at which outside voices Rama himself found worth preserving and returning to, revealing 'inspiration' for him as something actively gathered and curated from many traditions, not only self-generated.
A notebook built around a sequence of sharp ethical aphorisms on the deep equivalence of seemingly opposite moral positions — opening with the striking claim that to steal and to be stolen from both reflect, in their own way, a 'thieving mind,' before moving into an extended reflection on non-resistance to evil.
“Resist not evil; resist not at all; stand still and see the glory of the Almighty defence… Does not the air breathe as kindly and as willingly into the lungs of the criminal as of the saint?”
This notebook's ethical aphorisms consistently work by collapsing assumed moral opposites (thief/victim, criminal/saint) back into a shared underlying reality — not to excuse wrongdoing, but to locate genuine morality one level deeper than surface judgment of others.
Opens with a striking Biblical inversion — 'Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you' — before developing the theme that Heaven and Hell are not external destinations but depths and heights already contained within every human being.
“There are depths in man that are the length of the lowest Hell as there are heights that reach the highest Heaven; few are not both Heaven and Hell made out of Him, made by Him, everlasting Made and Mystery as he is.”
This notebook's warning against seeking universal approval, paired with its relocation of Heaven and Hell inside the human being, together argue that genuine spiritual seriousness is measured by inner depth and moral courage, never by how comfortably one is received by the crowd.
Opening with Rama's own compact summary of his entire teaching — 'the whole world must move with One who lives as one with the whole world' — this final and longest notebook ranges especially widely across philosophy of religion, engaging directly with the distinction between 'Practical Reason' and 'Pure Reason.'
“The whole world must move with One who lives as one with the whole world.” — Rama.
Fittingly, the longest and final notebook opens with Rama's most compact self-summary — a single sentence that could stand as an epigraph for the entire seven-volume collection: universal motion and individual realization are, properly understood, the very same fact.
Following the eleven notebooks, this section gathers a sequence of Rama's poems in his characteristic register of cosmic address and defiant, ecstatic assertion — addressing 'great Heart' and 'Love greater than all' as an 'eternal huntsman' riding over forests, mountains and seas, with 'the hungry winds and waves' themselves reduced to mere hounds in the pursuit.
“O man, O child of Man! Thou frail and baffled bird… I take thee up into this height of bliss, and shew thee all the kingdoms of the Earth, yea, all the kingdoms of the hearts of men. Gaze long in silence, friend; gaze long for all are thine.”
This closing sequence of poems shows the same cosmic, unbounded consciousness explored analytically across the eleven preceding notebooks now given full, unrestrained lyrical voice — reason's carefully built case for non-duality breaking, at the volume's end, into pure song.
The volume's closing section reprints, in full, the same original English essay on the importance and study of mathematics that also appears in Volume IV — written years before Rama's Sannyas, while he still held his university post, and preserved here as part of the complete record of his surviving writing.
Closing the complete seven-volume collection with Rama's own mathematics essay is a fitting final gesture: a reminder that the ecstatic mystic of the notebooks and the disciplined, rigorous professor who wrote this essay were, across a single short life, the very same person.
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