| Listen to Prabhaata-rashmih Audio |
Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru.
Last night we had a good discussion as to how the entire world we see around us including our own body is first and last a creation and also a display of our own mind. In understanding and admitting this, what is your problem?
Whenever I see a tree, I am not seeing the tree at all. Going to the tree, touching and feeling it, I am seeing the tree, standing wherever I am, and the tree which I see and experience is the tree which the mind imprints in itself. When the mind imprints an object or anything whatsoever, that imprint is the mind and mental alone.
When I write, when I draw an elephant on a board with a pen, the board elephant is nothing but the powder of the pen. Is it so very difficult to understand? There the elephant as well as the powder coating of the elephant on the board, both of them are identifiable equally as objects. Both are equally before the eyes. Here, the mind creation is not before the eyes, it is inside the body. That is the only difference. But it is a mind picture that I always see.
In Aparokshanubhuti, Sankara makes many beautiful observations and analysis. One such is that
These are verses which require longstanding introspection. Tyāgaḥ prapancarūpasya chidātmatvāvalokanāt. This prapanca is there. You don’t question it. It is there. But the prapanca which you experience and say “is there”, that prapanca or world, on the basis of what are you saying there is a world? Somebody came and told you that “There is a world. Please believe me.” No! We are experiencing the world ourselves. And it is on the basis of this experience that we say “There is a world around us, there is a body for me”. The ground, the foundation is your experience. The experience itself is not material or energial. It is not physical. A dead body cannot experience. Experience can only be had by a living body. If a dead body cannot experience and a living body alone can, it stands to reason that the experience is due to the living presence in the body. That living presence is not either an object or matter or energy. Neither matter nor energy will be able to produce experience. They are inert.
So the world that you refer to is a world which you experience within you. In other words, it is a world caused by and sustained by the consciousness that you are. The word “cit” refers to consciousness. What is the consciousness? Consciousness is that which cannot be defined by virtue of which one becomes conscious of. You can become conscious of other things as well as you can become conscious of yourself. You say “I am” and the “others also are”. “I am” as well as “others also are”, both are notions produced by your consciousness. So he says, understand this truth. The world is a product and outcome of your experience. So the world is experientially there. And this experience is inner and personal. It is never bodily or sensory. Experience by itself is inner. Let us call it mind, mental.
So he says, chidātmatvāvalokanāt. You take a mirror. So many different colourful objects are reflected in the mirror. You stand in front of a mirror and you see yourself in the mirror. The person you see inside the mirror, is it not mirror born and mirror sustaining? Is it not a mirrorly person that you are seeing?
There are so many trees, even vehicles are reflected in a lake when the vehicles pass around a lake on the road. All of them are reflected in the water. So the car that you see, the trees that you see inside the water, are they not watery trees and watery car? In the same manner, the world that you experience in your own “cit”, consciousness is actually a consciousness world. Take away from your mind the idea that they are separate objects made out of matter. We don’t know. So far as we are concerned, they are experientially present and the experience does not belong to the object, it belongs to you, if at all the subject.
So he says, can you take your stand on this understanding that all experiences are inner and personal and experiences are produced by the consciousness and all the experiences whether they are of objects, this or that, all of them are inward entities?
Once you understand this, he says, tyāgaḥ prapancarūpasya. Whatever we call as the objective universe, tyāgaḥ, abandon it. Chidātmatvāvalokanāt, by perceiving that, all the things that you are feeling, perceiving, finding, interacting with, all of them are inwardly present. Because they are inwardly present, that inwardness is only because of the consciousness. So they are all consciousness products, outcome and processes. If you can think in this manner, the separate concrete idea about the world will be replaced by this spiritual awareness. This is called tyāga, he says.
Tyago hi mahatām pūjyaḥ sadyo mokṣamayo yataḥ
Tyago hi mahatām pūjyaḥ. This kind of a renunciation is possible only for great and knowledgeable people. Ordinary people will not be able to come to this conclusion because the objective presence is so much that they refuse to go into the fact that any object entity is never seen by us outside our body. It is inside. I see a huge tree, my mind pictures it. Bodily I am limited, the tree is much huger than I am. How can I contain physically a tree, then how do I see it? I see it mentally. My mind is not limited by the body. Consciousness is what is called infinitude, it has. It is the ‘I’ that creates distances. It is the ‘I’ that creates variety. It is the ‘I’ that creates colours. And all these are mental imprints. Once you understand this, the delusion, the attraction, the repulsion and so many other sentiments and emotional turbulences these objects create are obliged to subside in your own mind.
Chidātmatvāvalokanāt, tyago hi mahatām pūjyaḥ. Those people who have the power of introspection, those people who have the refinement of intelligence, who are guided by that higher refinement, they alone will be able to take recourse to it. And what is the result?
Sadyo mokṣamayo yataḥ. The immediate result is that you get free, become free. Free from what? Free from all the obsessions, delusions and the consequent attractions and repulsions. I can only think of Janaki, Janaka’s daughter Sita, such a great woman, she simply was deluded and allured by a golden deer. Within fifteen minutes, she was in the pushpaka vimāna of Rāvaṇa as a slave of Rāvaṇa. This is what is going to happen. This is the highest but you will have small degrees of this kind of an attraction and repulsion.
Live in this world knowing what it is. Deal with it for what it is worth. Don’t think that your fate and your plight are determined and overpowered by the world. No experience or interaction or interactional outcome with this world should overpower your mind. On the other hand, the mind should overwhelm all kinds of interactional impacts and inputs from the world. This will happen when you plunge into your body within your body and you are able to picturize, experience by meditation and otherwise, especially by listening to the Guru’s words, the scriptural words, you will be able to realize your own inner spiritual dimensions, magnificence, majesty, profundity and splendor.
Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru. Jai Guru.