A devotee once told Sri Ramana Maharshi that he had a good mind to resign from his job and remain with him always. The reply undid the plan at its root: “Bhagavan is always with you, in you, and you are yourself Bhagavan. To realize this it is neither necessary to resign your job nor run away from home.”

Across the conversations gathered here, from Be As You Are, Day by Day with Bhagavan, Letters from Sri Ramanasramam and Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Bhagavan returns again and again to one point: renunciation is in the mind, not in the forest. What must be given up is not home, work or family, but the notion “I am the doer”, the identification of the Self with the non-self. “Is the home in you? Or are you in the home?” he asks one seeker. To another he says that the very desire to renounce is the obstacle.

Yet this is no licence for comfortable worldliness. Complete renunciation, he says elsewhere, is the index of fitness. When the inner expansion comes, one drops from home “like a ripe fruit from a tree.” Till then, it would be folly to leave.