Daily Inspiration Quote by Ramana Maharshi

Ramana Maharshi pulls off a kind of metaphysical judo here: he takes “mind,” the thing most modern people treat as their identity, and demotes it to a costume. Not a generator of consciousness, not its driver, but consciousness wearing constraints like a uniform. The phrasing matters. “Has put on” implies choice, or at least a reversible adoption, not an intrinsic defect. “Later you take on limitations” turns what we call growing up, socializing, even becoming a “person,” into a gradual narrowing - a story of contraction rather than progress.

The intent is surgical: cut the knot between awareness and its contents. If mind is just consciousness-with-limits, then anxiety, ego, and narrative selfhood stop looking like deep truths and start looking like temporary architecture. That’s the subtexted promise: liberation isn’t self-improvement, it’s subtraction. You don’t build your way to freedom; you notice what’s been layered on.

Context sharpens the edge. Maharshi’s Advaita Vedanta lineage treats the Self (Atman) as identical with ultimate reality (Brahman). His teaching method, self-inquiry (“Who am I?”), aims to expose the mind’s boundaries as inherited habits: language, memory, desire, fear, social roles. Calling the original state “unlimited and perfect” isn’t motivational fluff; it’s a doctrinal claim that flips the usual Western ladder of achievement. The rhetoric is deceptively simple, almost childlike, because the target isn’t belief - it’s identification. If you can feel, even briefly, the difference between awareness and the mind’s limits, the quote stops being an idea and becomes an instruction.