Spirituality and worldly life

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D. The work may suffer if I do not attend to it.

 

M. Attending to the Self means attending to the work. Because you

identify yourself with the body, you think that work is done by you.

But the body and its activities, including that work, are not apart

from the Self. What does it matter whether you attend to the work or

not? Suppose you walk from one place to another: you do not attend to

the steps you take. Yet you find yourself after a time at your goal.

You see how the business of walking goes on without your attending to

it. So also with other kinds of work.

 

D. It is then like sleep-walking

 

M. Like somnambulism? Quite so. When a child is fast asleep, his

mother feeds him: the child eats the food just as well as when he is

fully awake. But the next morning he says to the mother, "Mother, I

did not take any food last night''. The mother and others know that

he did, but he says that he did not; he was not aware. Still the

action had gone on.

 

A traveller in a cart has fallen asleep. The bulls move, stand still

or are unyoked during the journey. He does not know these events but

finds himself in a different place after he wakes up. He has been

blissfully ignorant of the occurrences on the way, but the journey

has been finished. Similarly with the Self of a person. The ever-

wakeful Self is compared to the traveller asleep in the cart. The

waking state is the moving of the bulls; Samadhi is their standing

still (because Samadhi means Jagrat-Sushupti, that is to say, the

person is aware but not concerned in the action; the bulls are yoked

but do not move); sleep is the unyoking of the bulls, for there is

complete stopping of activity corresponding to the relief of the

bulls from the yoke.

 

Or again, take the instance of the cinema. Scenes are projected on

the screen in the cinema-show. But the moving pictures do not affect

or alter the screen. The spectator pays attention to them, not to the

screen. They cannot exist apart from the screen, yet the screen is

ignored. So also, the Self is the screen where the pictures,

activities etc. are seen going on. The man is aware of the latter but

not aware of the essential former. All the same the world of pictures

is not apart from the Self. Whether he is aware of the screen or

unaware, the actions will continue.

 

The distinction between sleep, Kevala Nirvikalpa Samadhi and Sahaja

Nirvikalpa Samadhi can be clearly put in a tabular form as given by

Sri Bhagavan:-

 

Sleep

(1) mind alive

(2) sunk in oblivion

 

Kevala Nirvikalpa Samadhi

(1) mind alive

(2) sunk in Light

(3) like a bucket tied to a rope and left lying in the water in a

well.

(4) to be drawn out by the other end of the rope.

 

Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi

(1)mind dead

(2) resolved into the Self

(3) like a river discharged into the ocean and its identity lost

(4) a river cannot be redirected from the ocean

 

The mind of the Sage who has realized the Self is wholly destroyed.

It is dead. But to the onlooker, he may seem to possess a mind just

like the layman. Hence the 'I' in the Sage has merely an

apparent 'objective' 'reality'; in fact, however, it has neither a

subjective existence nor an objective reality.

 

- Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

Hari Aum !!!