ABSTRACT
Heinrich Zimmer had been interested for years in the Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai, and the first question he asked me on my return from India concerned this latest holy and wise man from southern India. The carrier of mythological and philosophical wisdom in India has been since time immemorial the "holy man" a Western title which does not quite render the essence and outward appearance of the parallel figure in the East. The equation self = God is shocking to the European. As Shri Ramana's statements and many others show, it is a specifically Eastern insight, to which psychology has nothing further to say except that it is not within its competence to differentiate between the two. Psychology can only establish that the empiricism of the "self" exhibits a religious symptomatology, just as does that category of assertions associated with the term "God".
