In the summer of 1896, a schoolboy of sixteen sitting alone in an upstairs room of his uncle's house in Madurai was overcome without warning by a violent fear that he was about to die. He did not send for anyone. Instead he lay down, stiffened his body, held his breath, closed his lips, and set about enacting the death as thoroughly as he could in order to find out what would happen.
What he reported was that the body could be treated as a corpse, carried out and burnt, and that something remained wholly untouched by the process, and that this something was what the word I referred to. The fear did not return. He described the change as permanent and immediate, and said that from that point interest in study, in food, in company and in his own future simply fell away.
Some six weeks later he left home with a small amount of money and a note saying that he was going in search of his father and that no money need be spent looking for him. He travelled to Tiruvannamalai, at the foot of the hill Arunachala, which he had known of since childhood as a name and which he now regarded as his father. He arrived at the great temple, and he never left the town again in the remaining fifty four years of his life, spending the first years in near total silence, in the temple vaults and then in caves on the hill.