Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are… - Sam Harris

Forces of digestion and metabolism are at work within me that are utterly beyond my perception or control. Most of my internal organs may as well not exist for all I know of them directly, and yet I can be reasonably certain that I have them, arranged much as any medical textbook would suggest. The taste of the coffee, my satisfaction at its flavor, the feeling of the warm cup in my hand — while these are immediate facts with which I am acquainted, they reach back into a dark wilderness of facts that I will never come to know... Where am I, that I have such a poor view of things? And what sort of thing am I that both my outside and my inside are so obscure?

To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden

While the philosophy of Advaita, and Ramana’s own words, may tend to support a metaphysical reading of teachings of this kind, their validity is not metaphysical. Rather, it is experiential. The whole of Advaita reduces to a series of very simple and testable assertions: Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness — free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.