In plain words
When all these are yours, then who are you? Only when you are other than these do they become yours, isn't that so?” I said. Hearing these words, everyone went on reflecting: “Rāju is telling nothing but the truth. We say ‘this is mine, that is mine’, but who we are is not known to us,” they said. “I have come for this very purpose: to make you recognise that,” I said.
“What sees is the eye. What thinks is the mind. The eye sees this handkerchief. But to say that this is a handkerchief there has to be a basis, hasn't there! You say this is a ring. How did you come to know this? You will say you knew it through the mind. Where did this mind come from? That you do not know. You think you know what you do not know. Whatever that unknown is, that itself is you,” I said.
From that day on, many sādhakas, people who enquired with a spiritual outlook, began coming to me. “What Rāju says is true. But how are we to recognise our true nature?” they kept debating among themselves. They went on expounding the whole of Vedānta, but what they said was not clear even to themselves. “This ring is mine, this body is mine, this handkerchief is mine: so you say. But you are not finding out who ‘I’ is. You must try to recognise that. All that is fashioned of the seen vanishes some day or other. What appears to the eye is the seen. The one who sees is the seer. ‘Yad dṛśyaṃ tan naśyam’: whatever appears to the eye, all of it is bound to perish! The seen that appears to the eye is nothing but illusion, not truth.”
H.S. Venkataramana was a man of good qualities. I used to go to school right past the front of his house. He would sit on the raised ledge at his door, waiting for me. The moment he saw me: ‘Rāju! Come,’ he would call. Taking me inside, he would try to give me coffee or tiffin. He realised that these things fashioned of the seen could not draw me. Everything is right here with me. Before that I used to call him ‘Sir’. But from that day I went on calling him ‘Ramana’. “You are not my teacher, and I am not your disciple. The bond of guru and disciple is merely worldly.