Self – Knowledge, also known as Atma Vidya or Brahma Vidya, is Arsha Vidya, meaning the knowledge of Rishis. If forms the subject matter of Vedanta. It is world’s most ancient knowledge which has survived to this day in its pristine purity because of its validity and vitality. It imparts the knowledge that the self, the first person singular ‘I’ as in ‘I am’, in Purnam or limitless fullness meanings a fullness which is beyond all limitations such as decay, disease and death and that its nature is Ananda meaning happiness.

It is harnessing of this happiness dimension of the Purnam Knowledge that promises of anxieties and tensions, frustration and stress that takes a heavy toll of people’s health in the modern world and it is this solution that this book offers. Happiness and health being the obverse and reverse of the same coin, self-knowledge, which ensures steady happiness, can alone free the mind from the destructive tendencies which in fact are the brood of self-ignorance and thereby ensure sound health. The failure to understand the subject matter and the nature of the methods adopted by scriptures has given rise to a number of confusions in the minds of both teachers and students.

This book seeks to steer clear of confusions and presents the spirituality in its pristine purity and clarity.

Kumble Bhoja Rao (b.1929), holding a master’s degree in English literature and a bachelor’s degree in law, started legal practice as a full-fledged advocate at Mangalore in Karnataka, only to switch over to a career with a wider horizon, journalism, dear to his heart. As a young man in his early thirties, he gained recognition as a thinker and writer of rare caliber by winning the prestigious Blitz prize, with his article entitled “The Quest for a Warless World”, in a competition marking the journal’s 20th anniversary on the topic of India’s National Mission. As one with a spiritual bent of mind, Bhoja Rao, even as a teenaged student, was profoundly impressed by Mhatma Gandhi’s book ‘Gita My Mother” and the works of Swami Vivekananda. Since his retirement at the age of sixty from the Press Trust of India, after a distinguished tenure as a special correspondent and a news editor, Bhoja Rao has been engaged in a committed pursuit of Vedanta, for the last more than fifteen years.

A spin-off of Bhoja Rao’s deep study of Vedanta was the clear insight he gained into the correlation between self-knowledge, which is the subject matter of Vedanta, and an individual’s discovered the all-important fact that knowledge once gained in gained for good and, therefore, it is only knowledge-based happiness which remains steady and unabated and can be the basis of steady and sustained health.