The Real Reality

III

The great Teacher is trying to bring home to us Truth. What we consider as eternal and permanent ? body, mind, and intellect ? is not so. 

Once a person came to a Divine and said: Oh Holy Man, a person is breaking away with his last life-breaths. The Divine inquired: What is his age? The gentleman replied: Seventy-two years. The Divine said: What are you saying my friend? The ailing person has been breaking away with his life-breaths for all these years. There is nothing strange if he is now finally doing away with what is yet left.

Just consider when a child grows in age. His parents feel delighted as he adds another year to his life. They do not know the fact that the child, instead of adding anything to his age, is losing it year by year. We are all in a state of continuous delusion. 

Kabir beautifully describes our wrong notions about the world and the worldly things: 

The still point in the swiftly revolving wheel, in spite of its extreme velocity, appears to be stationary; and when the water in the milk is fully evaporated by boiling, the residue is said to be Khoya (lit. lost though actually it is the real substance ? milk-cake); an orange so beautiful in colour is called na-rangi (lit. colourless); seeing such delusive scenes, Kabir could not but shed tears of remorse.

As said before, the delusion begins with our wrong conception of the human body, which we consider to be permanent while it is not. How can we get the real conception of this? Only when we, by a practical process of self-analysis, get an actual out-of-body experience. It is then that we know that the body is not something permanent, and it has got to be vacated one day whether we will it or not. Until this experience comes through practical demonstration, we cannot know the impermanent nature of the body. Have we not carried these bodies on our shoulders to the cremation grounds or burial places? But with all that we never for a moment think that we, too, will have to leave the body one day. Isn?t it a great delusion? 

Nanak, therefore, says: 

Oh Nanak! without analysing the Self from the body, we cannot get out of the veil of delusion.

We have not the least control over our mind and our senses. We are merely their slaves and dance to their tunes. No doubt, eyes cannot but see and ears cannot but hear. But this seeing and hearing is just of a superficial nature. We have no control over them. We must know how to perceive and how to understand and when to do so at our will. But, unfortunately, we have not yet become the master of the house in which we are living. Our conscious attention is just slipping out and flowing into the world. We are adrift on the sea of life, rudderless and steerless. We have not developed any roots in us. It is, therefore, of paramount importance to direct and channel our attention in the right direction. We must know where the roots of life lie in us or, in other words, where the seat of the soul is. Man is like an inverted tree with its roots upwards at the eye-focus and branches, limbs, stretching downwards. So we have to invert our attention from downwards to upwards. All acts on the plane of senses, whether good or bad, will keep us down in bondage. But when we learn to live in the Light and Life of God, then the Reality and the real nature or things will dawn on us. 

This living in the Light of Life is what matters the most. It gives us right understanding and correct lead. It takes us from untruth to Truth, from darkness to Light, and from death to Immortality.

While living in the body and leading the life of the body, we cannot understand what is what. We come into the world simply to score our old accounts of give and take. All our relationships ? father and son, husband and wife, mother and daughter, brother and sister, and vice versa ? are the result of past karmic reactions. It is said that the pen of destiny moves in accordance with our deeds. What we sow we must reap. We come with fate writ in our forehead: Even the body itself is the result of our karmas, and it is rightly said to be Karmansharir. It is the destiny that casts our mould. Without body there can be no deeds, and without deeds there can be no body. It, therefore, behoves us happily to pass our days and ungrudgingly give what we have to and what we must, for there is no escape from it. We have, of course, to be careful not to create new relationships and sow fresh seeds. This is the only way to get out of the abysmal depths of the karmic ocean. 

This world is a pantomime show. It is a stage on which we come, play our part, and then depart. Why has this stage been set? Nobody can say. We can, however, go to the stage director to understand the purpose and plan of stage-setting. There is some Power that is upholding all this play, and we are mere actors or puppets on the stage of life. We cannot, however, escape from this stage until the part allotted to us is performed. He alone knows how long this play is to last and in what way each one of us is gathered up. The rich and the poor alike have to quit sooner or later, each in his own turn, and carry the load of his deeds ? good or bad ? with him. 

The purpose of human life is to know the secret of life. But, strange as it may seem, we remain indifferent to it. We bring with us quite a heavy load of karmas in the form of destiny or fate, leaving behind a large storehouse of deeds sown and garnered in the distant past to be utilised in the distant future in course of time. The destiny or fate has, of course, to be gone through with smiles or tears, as the case may be. While doing so, we unfortunately go on adding to our storehouse by sowing fresh seeds in the present span of life. Thus we are forging, from day to day, new chains with which to bind ourselves.

Is then there no way of escape from this intricate karmic web? The Saints tell us that there is a Way out. If we could but understand the law and the will of God, we cease to be the doer of deeds. Then we would see the invisible hand of God working in all directions. In this way from doer we become mere seers or onlookers. Acts alone do not amount to guilt unless they are accompanied by a guilty mind. Once we rise above the mind and transcend all the mental zones, we outstrip all the contagion of the deeds lying in store. In the Light and Life of God, all the unfructified karmic seeds become infructuous. On the contrary, we delight in enjoying the sense-pleasures, little knowing that they, in their turn, eat into the very vitals of our system.

The Hindi word Ann, food, means what is eaten and what eats away. Have we ever realised that in course of time we become so weak and incapacitated by constant use of our senses that the senses themselves refuse to take any delight in the sense-objects. We always try to pamper the body and bodily senses as if they are with us eternally. Herein lies the great delusion. 

Desires are the root cause of all our troubles. What the mind wishes is a kind of desire, Kaam. When we feel, rightly or wrongly, that there is some hurdle in getting our desire fulfilled, we often get angry, Krodh. The more there is delay in getting the thing desired, the more we long and pine for it. This is called greed, Lobh. When once, by fair or foul means, we get hold of the thing desired, we hug it and do not want to part with it. This is termed attachment or infatuation, Moh. When the thing desired is in our possession, we begin to gloat over it and ascribe the success to our own endeavours. This connotes egotism, for one claims the thing in his own right and refuses to be thankful to God ? the Giver of all gifts. I-ness and my-ness coupled with extreme selfishness are the essence of egoism and egotism, both being born from ego. This is styled as Ahankar or victory of the little self in us. In this way we are, all the time, engaged in getting and spending, unconsciously doing shameless deeds of rapine and snobbery.