Swami Ramakrishnananda says :

[Guest guest]

This is excerpted from " The Secret of INNER Peace " by Swami Ramakrishnananda.

Also, I added some comments labeled as " My comment: "

 

 

Once a man walked into a psychiatrist's office and said, " Doctor, please help

me. I think that I am God. " " Hmmm, very interesting. Tell me, how did it start? "

" Well, first I created the sun, then the moon, then the earth and the stars ...

"

 

Though this man was merely suffering from delusion, ultimately the truth is that

we are all God.

 

The Taittiriya Upanishad (2.6.3) says, " The Supreme Being thought, 'Let me be

many,' and He created all that we perceive. Having created it, He entered into

it. " According to Sanatana Dharma, there is only God, and nothing else.

Ultimately, Amma says, this world of apparent differences is an illusion, and if

we want to realize the Supreme Truth, we have to go beyond the mind completely

for the source of the illusion is the mind itself.

 

En route from one city to another on one of Amma's Indian tours, as usual Amma

stopped to serve lunch to the tour group. After everyone had finished eating,

Amma asked an eight-year-old boy named Ramu a question: " Where is God? " Ramu

pointed up to the sky.

" No, inside, " Amma said. " God is inside of you. " And then pointing to the 400 or

so people circled around her, " God is inside each and everyone of these people

here. We should serve everyone, seeing them all as embodiments of God. "

 

Amma then asked the boy to explain his concept of God. " God created the world

and all the people, " Ramu said.

 

" The world is not God's creation, " Amma replied. " It is your creation. "

 

Voluminous works like the Yoga Vasishtha have been composed in order to illumine

this profound truth: the en¬tire universe is nothing but a projection of the

mind. Ramu stood perplexed. Then, staring up into Amma's eyes, he fi¬nally,

without confidence, said, ''Amma is joking. "

 

Amma says that anything that we see in this world, we see through our

preconceived notions. We perceive the world through the limited instruments of

our mind and intellect-that is why the scriptures say that what we consider as

the truth is not the absolute truth, but only a relative truth-created by our

mind.

 

[My comment: at best the mind creates relative truths, and at worst just plain

lies. Perhaps, that's why Amma sometimes says that the mind is a big lie.]

 

In a similar way, Amma says we consider this world to be real, but in fact it is

just an illusion. Let us take the example of a clay pot. Before the pot came

into being, the clay existed. And if the pot is dropped and broken into pieces,

the pot as a separate entity disappears, but the clay that formed the pot is

still there. Thus the pot has no existence of its own; it is nothing but clay.

For a period of time the clay took the form of a pot-being of temporary nature,

the pot was only relatively real. Because it has no independent existence apart

from the clay, we can say that, in the ultimate sense, the pot does not exist-it

is an illusion.

 

[My comment: here " illusion " means that phenomena is only temporary and is

continuously changing. This is why many( perhaps most ) conclusions reached from

world experiences or even personal experiences are faulty due to personalized

assumptions without seeing the whole picture. In the book " The Four Agreements "

it is explained how the mind is conditioned by making false assumptions about

our experiences, believing that they are truth, and then personalizing them as

our identity. Part of the solution is 1) do not take anything personally 2) do

not make assumptions.]

 

Likewise when Amma told the boy, " The world is the creation of your mind, " she

meant that the world of duality is an illusion created by our mind. In fact,

there is only Brahman-there is only God. But in our present state, we see and

experience so much duality in the world.

 

Amma says what we call the illusion of duality does not really exist-it is like

darkness. We cannot remove darkness as such and place it somewhere. The only way

to overcome darkness is to turn on the light. As soon as we turn on the light,

darkness disappears. Likewise, when the light of Self-knowledge dawns within us,

the darkness of duality disappears, and we see oneness everywhere.

 

[My comment: let's keep our eye on the goal of Self-Realization, God's Love, and

selfless service instead of weird stories and gossip. As the title of one book

says " End Your Story, Begin You Life " and remember, " you are not your story or

anybodyelse's story. " You are the spacious loving awareness in which all stories

arise and disappear.]

 

Don't worry, be happy !

amarnath