Maharshi's Gospel - Work and Renunciation 7

[Guest guest]

( 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. )

 

..... continued,

 

 

Disciple : Is it then like sleepwalking?

 

Maharshi : 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 next morning he says to the mother, "Mother, I did not take 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 falls 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 jagratsusupti, 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

can not 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.

 

 

 

(From Maharshi's Gospel, published by Sri Ramanasramam and available for

download from http://www.ramana-maharshi.org/ )