Ramana Maharshi about pain in the world

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Question : But we see pain in the world. A man is hungry. It is a physical

reality. It is very real to him. Are we to call it a dream and remain unmoved by

his suffering?

 

Ramana Maharshi : From the point of view of jnana or Reality, the suffering you

speak of is certainly a dream, as is the world of which that suffering is an

infinitesimal part. In a dream you have when you are asleep you yourself feel

hunger and see others also suffering from hunger.

 

You feed yourself and, moved by pity, feed the others who are hungry. So long as

the dream lasted, all this suffering was quite as real as the suffering you see

in the world is to you now. It was only when you woke up that you discovered it

to be unreal. You might have eaten heartily before going to sleep, but you still

dreamt that you had been working hard in the hot sun all day and were tired and

hungry.

 

Then you woke up and found that your stomach was full and that you had not

stirred from your bed. But all this is not to say that while you are in the

dream you can act as if the suffering you feel in it is not real. The hunger in

the dream has to be appeased by dream food. The fellow beings you find hungry in

the dream have to be provided with dream food. You can never mix the two states,

the dream and the waking state.

 

Similarly, till you attain the state of Realisation and thus wake out of this

illusory, phenomenal world, you must do social service by relieving suffering

whenever you see it. But even so you must do it without ahankara that is without

the sense of: ‘It-is-I-who-am-doing-it’.

 

Instead you should feel: ‘I am the Lord’s instrument.’ Similarly you must not be

conceited and think: ‘I am helping a man who is below me. He needs help and I am

in a position to give it. I am superior and he is inferior’. You must help him

as a means of worshipping God in him. All such service is serving the Self, not

anybody else. You are not helping anybody else, but only yourself

 

Source: From The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi Edited by David Godman

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Om namo Bhagavate Sri Ramanaya

Prashant Jalasutram