Video 65

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna read by Swami Atmajnanananda (07/16/21)

foreign words are like nectar bringing life to squirt souls they are praised by poets and removal sin they are auspicious to hear wonderful and exalted those who spread these words throughout the world are truly giving souls welcome everyone and good evening to our class on the gospel of israel krishna we have a room full of devotees here so for one ah okay two and uh we are on page 242. this is the chapter with the devotees of the chinese war part one and it is june 10 1883 and srirama krishna has been talking to them of course is there and uh some devotees uh rakhal m latu kishori ramallah al-hazra and other devotees nothing exists ex exists except the one that one is the supreme brahman so long as he keeps the i in us he reveals to us that it is he who as the primal energy creates preserves and destroys the universe okay one thing that i've always noticed about sriramic krishna is that he combines philosophy and psychology that is never simply that this is the way it is but if i think this way if the feeling of i is there if i'm in a certain stage of spiritual life then i look at things this way and that'll be the truth then there's no absolute truth with him because absolute truth is experience and it's beyond words and everything else so this is very interesting because he says this very often so long as he keeps that i in us now the center of eye disappears then so many other things disappear uh will self will if the eye is gone then there's no one to do anything a distinction between myself and somebody else all sorts of things that disappear but as long as that eye is there then we have a certain way of living in the world and understanding things it's a little bit like uh shankaracharya's division of different levels of truth that paramartica and the viewer except for suramar krishna the the hadika is equally real this is what he uses different language of course that will talk about the lila nanitia and this or the real absolute and the relative so for him the relative is equally real so this is very important because the center of eye is something which we all have and shirami krishna says that we may reason and understand that the scent of i is something not based on truth that the real ego is something insubstantial that the sense of eye is based on some false thinking and everything we may understand that but the very next second it comes back this is this is uh so natural to us this scent of i that even the god realized soul has a sense of i even tupperware had a sense of ego only his of course was that complete that ripe ego the the child of the divine mother or one with god whatever it is so he says so long as he keeps the eye in us that means that always when when that scent of i is removed then we go into samadhi or con temporarily of course i mean we we want to be able to eliminate that that selfish eye again the psychology psychology comes into it this incentive of i which is really a sense of pride that we want to get rid of but the center of our eye in the sense that uh i feel myself to be an individual existent being we all have that even the god relay soul has the scent of i with a very enlightened sense of eye it's not based ours is based on false identification with with the body and the mind and and the personality and our religion and our country and so many different things that type of false identification now uh here he's talking about keeping the sense of eye after having some type of realization so he says as long as he keeps the eye on us he reveals to us so he's talking about someone who's had some some higher type of experience that it is he who has the primal energy creates preserves and destroys the universe there's a lot a lot in this one sentence this primal energy this shakti adi shakti now we have two ways of understanding this that one is that the shakti belongs to brahman the power that belongs to brahman now he's not saying that he's saying that he who has the primal energy so this is what he said to not in that day who was this colleague the same one that you call the brahmanai kali only with together with that power when the powers is active so he reveals to us that it's he who has the primal energy so as saguana brahman not in that aspect which we call the supreme brahman but in brahmin which is actionless and which is beyond everything transcendent so this imminent aspect uh that uh then we can say that this enrollment together with shakti is the cause of the universe otherwise we have a problem we have a very big problem if we start out with this concept that brahman is actionless brahman alone exists roman can't do anything the problem doesn't have any will have any desire then how do we explain the universe some of you will say well it's a false appearance or it's our misunderstanding but where did we come from we have to be there to misunderstand it so there has to be some something if there's some maya it has to affect brahman also there has to be something to make this this creation take place i always go back to my my dreamer and sleeper thing if a brahman is like like the sleeping individual then what causes that sleeping individual to have a dream can we really answer that question it just emerges no sleeping individual decides well i have a dream now no it just seems to to emerge out of it that's that inherent shakti that belongs to the sleeper that he is a potential dreamer why and how it happens it has its own rhythm and then psychological ways of we don't really understand the same with this universe it has its own patterns and yugas and all of that why it happens and lasts for certain like that we don't really understand so then he goes on that which is brahman is also the primal energy so this is that same thing not uh not brahman and the primal energy he's he's saying that this primal energy is not some blind power other times he'll say that they're they're inseparable ramadan shakti he's using this this term shakti in two different senses one as the power that belongs to roman the other as a brahman and that power together then it's identical with the divine mother or khali otherwise it's just a power that fire has the power to burn uh he gives so many different examples uh but he never considers this power to be separate this is why he uses those uh illustrations in the sankey system the the productivity is something separate from the purusha krishna uh and following of course the vedantic view says that how can this power not inhere in something and how can something exist with that how can we have a substance without an attribute and how do we have an attribute without a substance do we ever see the color red except when there's an object that's red it has to be this the attribute of a certain thing and do we ever see a thing that doesn't have any uh qualities at all doesn't have any width or length or breadth or color or form or pattern or anything impossible they go hand in hand this is his understanding of brahman shakti they go hand in hand they can't be separate and when he talks about the divine mother he's talking about that same brahman together with that shakti power once a king asked the yogi to import knowledge to him in one word the yogi said all right you will get knowledge in one word after a while a magician came to the king the king saw the magician moving two of his fingers rapidly and heard him exclaimed behold o king behold the king looked at him amazed when after a few minutes he saw the two fingers becoming one the magician moved that one finger rapidly and said behold o king behold the implication of the story is that brahman and the primal energy at first appear to be two but after attaining the knowledge of brahman one does not see the two then there is no differentiation it is one without a second advaita non-duality now the eduaidens have to have some way of explaining how we can have brahman alone but also maya then where does maya come from they say we don't have to talk about where it comes from because it doesn't have any permanent reality it can disappear with knowledge so it's not that same problem that now we've introduced the second category the uh like sankia well they'll have prakriti and purusha they'll have two main categories but this this maya is something a little different that it can't be said to be a real existent thing because uh it ends with knowledge and it can't be said to be non-existent because the effect is this whole universe and this maya it has this cosmic aspect that which causes this brahmin to go from being uh just the sleeper to being the dreamer to becoming who was born with it you all we're talking about brahmin now we're talking about brahman we're talking about brahman now yeah of course we're we're if we ask the question then why first of all we're trying to figure out why we're born at all why is there any creation at all if we start out with the brahmin then then how do we explain this creation at all once we have the creation then of course if we're uh if we're part of this dream then we're from the very beginning of the dream we assume that that's who we are we don't know who we are the kato punished says we don't know where who we are because the senses go outward and we identify with external things and when we grow up we this this is the way it works but that's different that's this uh we all have a little bit a little bit of this maya there's ignorance we're talking about it as a cosmic cosmic function there are two different ways that it works this maya very often we'll use this term of idea for the individual ignorance and maya for this cosmic so with this maya see we have maya here we have shakti here we have parakurati here we have different ways of trying to explain but brahman needs something there has to be something else if we if we simply leave brahman here all alone then then we can't explain anything gives his own explanation for that he says is when uh the the shakti is is in a potential form yeah so and then of course i i'll give swami swaniji's explanation that you have a woman right then the woman becomes a mother gives birth to a child so the the mother form will be the shakti this will be ramen see before the child is born she's only a woman so that's the the near-going brahmin aspect after the child is born she's a mother and a woman that never ends that's the that's the essential aspect that's near going to brahman so even even so we can't say that well now the universe is here there's no near going to berman that's always there only the the uh shakti and the qualities and everything that were potential before are now active that's the only difference so near going to brahmin will be that that aspect if you want to say that it's not really an aspect because it's the essential part but uh it's it's that transcending aspect so if we go into nirvikalpa samanthi we'll understand what neoguna brahman is there's a pure consciousness otherwise we can't even that we can't say so taqwa says everything else has become muchishta uh touched by the tongue but we've never been able to say exactly what roman is like this all doll trying to explain what it's like when it's become one with the ocean we can't explain it the master was very happy to see a musician who had come with the devotees from belgoria some time before srirama krishna had gone into an ecstatic mood when hearing his devotional music at the master's request the musician sang a few songs one of which described the awakening of the kundalini and the sikh centers now we'll have another understanding of shakti as it works in the human body through this kundalini yeah this is also supposed to be the the divine mother dwelling in the muladhara who can work her way up and and unite with shiva in the sahasrara so this is partly partly poetic and partly psychological psychologically true but there's a beautiful poetry to it divine mother is coming into union with the with shiva but there is something that that changes physiologically and of course from experientially as we go that corresponds to the descriptions of the different centers awake mother awake how long thou hast been asleep in the lotus of the muladhara fulfill thy secret function mother rise to the thousand pedaled lotus within the head where marishiba has his dwelling swiftly pierce the six lotuses and take away my grief o essence of consciousness master the song speaks of the kundalini's passing through the six centers god is both within and without from within he creates the various states of mind after passing through the six centers the jiva goes beyond the realm of maya and becomes united with the supreme soul this is the vision of god god is within dwelling within is that power of individual consciousness god is without supporting the whole universe the ground of the universe we have this this philosophical concept of ground that nothing can exist unless uh there's something to to hold it up not physically always but something has to have a necessary uh preceding cause to it we can't have an effect without a cause and there has to be something all the mid otherwise there's a chicken of the egg we keep going back and back and back and back so there has to be a ground upholding the universe and this ramen itself is that so we can't simply have waves without an ocean there has to be that that ocean has to be there so that'll be the ground and the waves will be the [Music] manifested phenomena that uh emerge out of the ocean so that's the roman exists uh outside as the upholder of everything if we go back to the dream and and the dream is not to be taken literally that this is just just a dream nothing exists there's some objective reality to this universe we we assume but uh in the dream what is upholding the the dream universe where does that dwell huh it dwells in consciousness it's a projection of of consciousness of the mind of the of the of the dreamer and where does that consciousness dwell an active force of awareness within the actor so god is drawing both within and without uh we feel it within as our own sense of of awareness of i our own feeling i exist and there's also the the explanation for the existence of everything else so god exists both within and without otherwise this idea of within and without and all pervading this is because we're taken from the standpoint of of this this universe otherwise we say everything exists within god does god exist within everything or everything exists within god there's a little section in gita about that and then it says it was actually beyond both both are true from different points of view one cannot see god and this maya steps away from the door now this will be both that cosmic maya which is causing us as individuals to to be in a state of delusion so you're right we are we're all born with this maya in the sense that uh we're not born with self-awareness what what happens uh this is this is very nicely explained in the child psychology where we look at the evolution of the child and development of the child how this sense of ego comes and how the small child has no awareness of anything interior no awareness of mind and i've told this story before that i was having a conversation with my niece once i don't know how old she was six years old or something like seven something very she was young and we had a friend who had a child who had some type of uh disability mental disability some something we never quite analyzed it exactly so she was asking why does he act that way so i said you know sometimes you you get sick and there's something you get sick in your body he has something like that in his mind and she looked at me and she said what's the mind and i didn't even try to explain that i realized that uh up until a certain state of development there's no awareness that we have a mind we only know that the world that that fills the mind we don't know about this the cells within or uh have any sense very small child there's no distinction between its own body and the mother's body doesn't even see objects there's an infant just see colors and shapes and forms and as this sense of eye so this tucker likes this idea of ego or hong kong that it's something that develops is it something that ripens this is a really unripe ego this is before it's even an eye the child small child doesn't have an ego up until a certain age when it can distinguish itself from from everything else so they say when the child learns to tell a lie there's a one state of a stage of development there was a philadelphia philosopher psychologist piaget the french frenchman very famous child psychologist and uh i think it was it was he who said that this is one stage of development when the child understands that there's some privacy of its thought that i know that it's not true but i can say it and you won't know that i'm lying because you don't know what's going on inside my mind that's a stage of development and that ego comes and uh so this is the way it develops this is what kato punished says that the lord created us in such a way that the senses go outward and that's uh then we falsely identify with everything everything else and then with the body and then the mind and then we have to reverse the whole process and that's why it's so hard to do to to stop identifying with all of these external things so uh we need some divine help so that we want that divine maya that divine mother they helped remove this maya which is covering us so one cannot see god unless maya steps aside from the door rama lakshmana and sita were walking to get together rama was in front sita walked in the middle and lakshmana followed them but lakshmana could not see rama because sita was between them so she is representing the divine mother in the form of maya see uh without deluding some type of delusion the universe won't go on so the divine mother wants the play to go on is it that idea in like manner man cannot see god because maya is between them tu mani malik but maya steps aside from the door when god shows his grace to the devotee now we thought that they were one in the same what is this now god in maya now we're just talking about a little this this delusion when that leaves this is this is grace how do we know that uh uh when we're the ones holding the our hands over our eyes how do we how do we do it how do we remove them we have to pray that we have some understanding here we're saying show us the light shows the light then someone has to say no remove it your hands are there so that's that's great swamiji likes that idea he said don't keep crying where's the light where's the light remove your hands from your eyes the light is already there so this is the that grace that we want to at least have that type of understanding when the visitor stands before the door the doorkeeper says to the master sir commend us and we shall let him pass there are two schools of thought the vedanta and the purana now this is all a question of of terminology we may say there are lots of schools of thought what does taco mean here i i mentioned last time that that this is the language that he uses when when he said vedanta he's talking about the path of knowledge and he's talking about basically advaita vedanta and when he says purana he's talking about bhakti yoga and a dualistic world view this is what i was saying in the beginning for takur dualism is not it's not that either dualism is true or the way it is is true this is a world view this is how we view things uh the the devotee prefers to think of this world as real because then the avatar is real and then this devotion is real which requires two to a certain extent so they prefer that this taco is understanding and not that one is correct and one is false that's for the acharyas to argue by the way he didn't he didn't care for that type of thinking so he's basically saying that there's a devotional way of looking at things which is more realistic not dualistic necessarily but realistic so that means as we have a hanukkah point of view we accept is also true and there's another way of looking at things as i'm more like a dream we don't want to get attached to anything we don't care for all this emotion we want to turn within that's this is what he calls vedanta according to the vedanta this world is a framework of illusion oh and by the way he likes the quranic point of view for him what he's now calling the quranic point of view combines them now uh we know that there's a way of looking at these different schools as is all separate the yogas is all separate there's a way of looking at them as as syncretic as as working together as uh that we can resolve one to the other we can understand that how they harmonize with each other and but from from the way he's explaining it now his preference is not to look upon this world is as a dream and false and everything uh see when we when we're within the dream we can say it's only a dream or we can say that that the divine sleeper the divine dreamer has created all of this this magnificent dream world for us there's a different way of looking at the talk what is the practical application of this philosophy that you know it's all changing or everything it's not real when people are interacting what's the practical aspect is it like not to judge anybody because if you are changing unchanging that way it's to know our real nature that is perfect and is divine and it's eternal and is unaffected by anything else and to know that every time we we identify with the body that we feel oh now i'm sick now i don't feel well with the mind now i'm happy this isn't that it's a way to to transcend all of that and and to be impervious to the changes of the world so that no matter what happens that i'll remain established in the south unmoved like mount meru those who can achieve that state they've achieved that state of absolute perfection they can still identify with other things and weep and wail with other people but they know that i i'm beyond all of this that i can't be touched like we were inside of some protective armor it's a fantastic thing and there's no attachment and uh tremendous strength and fearlessness comes from it look at swamiji the tremendous fear that the tremendous strength that he could do anything it comes from this this point of view the other wholly dependent upon mother that's also a beautiful idea i can't do anything mother do everything for me the other is all power lies within me i can do anything they're both beautiful ideas there's a question of what what suits us and can we can we utilize both can there be times when we want to say mother mother and mother swamiji who did both tommy tutti and under did both so that's that's a great challenge if we can do that if we can uh realize that all power or perfection is already within us and at the same time uh fully rely and depend and surrender to the divine mother and then we've we've achieved everything if we can do both but there's tremendous uh efficacy tremendous power that comes from this advice standpoint doesn't uh calculate each other once we recognize maya like i think swami brahmananda was playing with the children he was scaring them and then they said oh it's just a brahmana and so all the fears yeah there's there's a beautiful verse i don't remember it of course but uh it says once we once we recognize maya she runs away uh out of embarrassment or in shame something like that that yeah but it comes back this is this is his point of view it comes back in its own in its own way because because part of this maya is the sense of i this ego so this this ripe ego it still comes back uh and identification of the body would never leaves us i never think that i your body is my body because i see the world to the senses that belong to this physical body but i know that i'm something separate from it so we can say the the first one there's a little maya there false identification but we all have that i mean that that comes with uh with with life with it but on this ultimate type of of understanding that uh i have this transcendent existence that i've been never born that once we have that uh then we're free from maya but as i say a trace can remain with i still feel that i'm this body so taco gives different examples we dream we're being chased by tiger we wake up we say oh there's no tiger but he says still the heart beats a little bit uh the trace from that fear that we felt before so he gives a few examples like that what other examples one other example uh the gold that they slaughter a goat and it's the head is cut off it's completely dead but still the leg will for a little while i will twitch and twitter and everything yeah yeah so uh a little remnant of that maya remains otherwise we can't live in the world even takur said even the avatar has has to have some identification with the body and with the mind and with emotions and everything like that something that's pure gold is useless there has to be a little bit of an alloy mixed with it but it's not harmful he says different so that's why even the avatar has an eagle but it's a ripe ego but the fact that it's an ego at all it means there's a little mixture little maya is there but the real maya which keeps us bound that that's good that once it's recognized then then it's it's gone trace comes back a little bit now taku is going to explain these two schools of thought with antenpurana uh according to two different songs he he uses this example over and over in the gospel uh i were the ones very uh very taken with ron prasad to to the extent where i thought i might do my dissertation on the wrong person so i read a lot of things about him and everything and uh in his village there of course he was a worshiper of the divine mother composed all the songs about the the divine mother in his village there was i can't remember his name summoned something me he was a vaisnava and uh when ron prasad would compose a song and sing a song he would compose uh an answer song huh a something that in you know philosophically it would be something to uh uh to contradict it and and to to so that something's wrong so anyhow he would follow around prasad around so one of the songs that ron prasad wrote was this this world is a framework of illusion and he wrote that song this world is a mansion of mirth so tucker always liked like that he doesn't seem to mention that it's ram prasad and this other guy was really just a thorn in the side of ramparsad yeah but from his philosophical point of view he always took this mention of this framework of delusion as a as a preliminary idea in order we want to have some detachment and everything after realization then we can see that it's a joy so he takes the second one more as this vigna idea the gyani will say no i don't want to get attached everything is suffering this and that he says a little bit too timid he likes this other idea anyhow he'll explain a little bit according to the down to this world it's a framework of illusion that is to say it is all illusory like a dream but according to the purana the book of the books of devotion so it doesn't have to be just to put on us any of these devotional books the mahabharata ramayana even gita to a certain extent it will include all of them he uses put on a just as a generic term according to the quran of the books of devotion god himself has become the 24 cosmic principles worship god both within and without now this is that great dilemma that which one which one is it i'm not this not this not this not this i'm not the body i'm not the mind nonsense we we we have to separate everything out bruhman is not anything that's changing we're starting out with two categories the dwight didn't start out with two categories if you if you want to challenge in a deuter you say that everything is one then while you're always saying the real and unreal and the say you're in the scene huh viveka that means two things huh so ceramic christian says that this is preliminary that in the beginning because everything is all mixed up everything is all mixed up that we have to distinguish one thing from the other until we get to that one thing and then we see that that's the the source of everything else so we do this in 1880 in order to get to the roof then we come back down and we say that that which we said was was different and separate is also a manifestation also a manifestation but in the beginning we don't know how to separate things out i don't know what the difference is between myself and my body and my mind and my senses and all of that so i have to say that that the seer is something separate from the scene or uh the the object of that that i possess has to be different from the possessor i have a body i'm not the body i have a mind i'm not the one we reason like that uh it's necessary because in the beginning we don't know we've everything has gotten mixed up so this is where takwa says that the swan has the ability to to secrete some type of acid which will make the milk separate into curds and whey and can just eliminate the watery part and take the essential part but it's all milk it's all one but still we have to learn to distinguish that way so motionless snake or the snake river for him also as long as we're in the world the snake wriggles but we we know it's the same that's yeah this is always a question uh do do we if we see something as it really is say with uh artificial fruit that if we see it as wax can we still see it as apples and bananas and things like that if we see the apples and bananas are we not seeing the there's always a question in his academics studied the mysticism and everything and many of them say that you either see the world or god you don't see both at the same time now for takur he saw that i whenever he said i see that it's all one you think he didn't see tables and chairs at the time of course he did but it was a deeper type of realization so the god realized so we'll we'll live uh in the midst of the lila but know that it's the same as the nithya that they're both real we live in this does it change this world and we don't see that understand that reality behind it we experience ourselves and we identify with the personality and everything we have some glimpse of course every this is the difference that uh we have no no glimpse of that reality which is upholding this this universe but that which is beyond which is a lying beneath or surface personality that realize that consciousness is is not only not only accessible by us but we can't escape it we know that we exist we use that consciousness we know that we exist that there's no way to get away from that no one can tell us we don't exist and we know that that doesn't mean it's a physical object we know what that means that i exist that as an i but i'm confused about what that i is exactly so this uh vedantic idea of 1880 is that we want to understand that uh awareness is not dependent upon anything else that is absolute and i am that think of the power and strength of it that means that i'm one with everybody else also when i live in the world of duality i feel one with everybody else otherwise i go into that higher state no one else exists at that time but the aside from maybe of you know a very small percentage they really dwight in when he goes into nirvikalpa samadhi and the whole world disappears does not feel that the world really disappeared for everybody else that it continues for everybody else otherwise it's pure idealism there are schools like that but it's kind of a dead-end philosophy do they give the advice in our order do they accept yeah of course of course they may not accept his view of avatar except when he says the avatar is like the window used to which you can see the the field and you know the hole in the wall all of that uh we we had a great monk of our order named and uh he he was a realtor deutschen he didn't go for any ritual or anything like that uh he had his devotion of course but nothing ritual no bowing down they they used to say that uh he would go into the the temple in belgium on these special occasions when tucker is all decorated and everything just to see the decorations and enjoy it and everything but a very loving soul very very loving salt he would spend hours and hours with the devotees he he sat in his office it was near you know if you know the uh the row of offices and near the monk's quarters on the right side near the ganges there there's a big office there it's changed a little bit now he would sit there all day long deputies would come and and he would lovingly serve them and talk to them and everything but straight acted right it's interesting that i'm focusing on right now he uses the same eye to identify with atman because of the existence part that because the absolute exists we exist so from that point of view this i is also a hint of will say that that the real meaning of i is the oddman that's all when i say i know something who is it no that knows something this awareness is present to the self it comes to the mind and everything but the real knower is the self so according to the vedanta this world is a framework of illusion that is to say it is all illusory like a dream i'll talk about that in a second but according to the purana the book the books of devotion god himself has become the 24 cosmic principles worship god both within and without now this this idea of the dream i like it i don't take it literally it has it's a very nice way of understanding uh the dreamer and the sleeper and the actor these three aspects of it but again there's a psychological element to it that those who uh really identify with the witness then it's kind of a passing show then they have a real feeling for the impermanent nature of it people who live a a long life i remember when i was in college i had a friend whose grandmother was 100 years old and we would talk to her and she would say yes i remember when the the horse and buggy was there and then the cars came and then and you just got the sense that to her it was just like a big dream how now people this big thing can fly in the air how is it possible yeah so just a dreamlike sense to it that we don't have to say that i'm really dreaming that i'll wake up then i'll find out that didn't really exist at that time nobody else existed we don't have to take it that way but there's a dreamlike quality to it and sometimes things happen we've all had this experience where uh maybe there's a an accident or something happens uh you know we've uh uh we're late for a meeting and we go to the car and then we close the door and we realize that we lock the keys inside and the car is running and then we think no i didn't really i this has to be a dream huh sometimes it is and then we wake up from it but other times we said oh my did i really do that yeah or you have a car accident not for bid sometimes it has that dream like quality did this really happen yeah we questioned it and then we'll have dreams that are so real that i i have this feeling it may be true it may not be true but that my earliest memory is a dream that i had a nightmare when i was little about trying to climb up this sand and i kept falling down and climbing falling down i couldn't do it uh that that's it was so real it was far more real to me as a child than anything that happened in the waking state and that's that's a memory that uh i still have it and i don't remember anything from when i was three years old or four years old something like that so sometimes the dream state seems more real than the waking state and the waking state seems more dreamlike than the dream when i was a philosophy student in college my first philosophy course first or second question uh i wrote a paper on the reality of dreams here i'm 19 years old i didn't know anything about vedanta but somehow i was intrigued by this question of how is the waking state different from the dream state and i came to the conclusion that uh while we're within the dream it's every bit as real as the waking state while we're awake 100 percent the way that we don't take the idea and i had no idea but when i read about it later i thought isn't that curious but uh so what i would do uh i tried to train my mind that so that i could recognize when it was a dream so what i did was in the in the waking state i would constantly ask myself is this a dream or is it not a dream i so said to train my mind to do it while i was dreaming so how would i do it i would say well now look objectively does this make sense or are you really meeting these people that you knew before and i would conclude yes that that makes sense so i i could uh i could train myself so that while i was dreaming that uh i could reach the point where i would say that no this is a dream a lot of people other people can do it and then the dream would end so i would say no this this can't this can't be happening i know that i've had this type of dream before that i must be dreaming in the dreamer then but every time in the dream when i said i must be dreaming i was identified with a dream character and when i woke up and found myself in bed i would say no i really didn't know when i said i that this is the real eye so it's a very curious type of thing and then i used to have these dreams where i would wake up from the dream and i would still be dreaming i would wake up from the dream within the dream i would say ah and now i figured i'm really dreaming that i would wake up i'd be proud of myself and everything and then i'd really wake up and say i was fooled again you saw me maybe i'm going off talking i don't know earlier experience you told us when you were a child from that time they remember could that be from a past life it could but it doesn't doesn't have to that that wouldn't change the experience of it or anything yeah or the point of the whole thing anyhow we what i'm trying to say is that uh we can utilize this idea that there's a dreamlike quality to this world and that i'm and i'm just watching it to bring some detachment and to to see it as a leela as a play it doesn't mean that we have to say that everything is unreal the dream can be real talk where he uses two different expressions he says to the gyani the waking state is just as unreal as the dream state and sometimes he says the dream state is just as real as the waking state point of view but they mean the same thing but the point is that while we're in the dream state it seems to us a hundred percent real every bit as real as does this we can touch things we can pinch ourselves they say pinch yourself to see if you're dreaming it doesn't work because it's just the dream person that we're pinching so there's no way to distinguish while we're dreaming unless unless we use that logic and say well i know i really can't fly and here i am flying so it must be a dream but otherwise we can do things here and go to disneyland and be have all these things happen or take some drug and we have all sorts of experiences and we wonder is it real what's real what's not real but it's still the waking state so uh it's good to have a little bit of the feeling that this this world is a dream that means it's just floating by uh passing by you know i like that uh children's nursery rhyme row row row your boat gently down the stream merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream huh this is what we're doing we're rowing our boat down the stream what does that mean that means time the stream of time the days are flowing by one after another after another and it has that dreamlike quality and i'm watching i'm the witness of it but let me do it merrily now i don't have to be so attached to it huh so there's a way for even the the bhakta to like this idea that uh this it really fits in with the idea of lila leela in a dream or a little bit similar but not this idea of everything is unreal the dream is also a manifestation of vermin who else can do it how else do we to explain the dream of this world if it's not the dream of the dreamer of the cosmic dreamer so why not accept it that way this is tako's point of view so in the upanishads we have the servant everything indeed all that we say this whole universe is nothing but brahman shankar itaria doesn't give as much weight to that i think his idea is that uh people will will say that old and this is ramen it doesn't mean that it means that once we've had that release it means what taku are saying that everything is a manifestation of roman that it all comes from that one reality not that we're going to say that wood and and brick and stone is is identical with with a brahmin it it may be in some sense the same sense in which we can say that it's all nothing but energy that we can reduce it that way only the vedantan will say reduce it to consciousness itself somehow if we reduce it to shakti then we're closer to this idea of energy we can understand it that way also there's no right or wrong way of understanding because we nobody can come up with any conclusive theory about why and how this universe comes into existence einstein made a beautiful statement i don't know the exact wording of it but he said if we can answer all of the questions about this how this phenomenal universe comes into existence we still won't know anything about about what is it the ultimate cause of everything or the why and how of everything we only deal with with cause and effect one link leading to another link we don't know what what uh the ultimate cause is for anything that's a mystical thing the same thing it's the same thing suppose we know everything about that then how what is the source of even this energy and the black hole and all of that that we don't know either we say that well it always existed or we say some divine power is there we don't that doesn't give us all of the answer the the real physicists the real quantum physicists who uh the real big the the heavyweights huh they knew that they were dealing on the phenomenal level and they weren't giving any absolute answers affordable yeah yeah i think ideas that this is also a theory these are all theories that uh does that consciousness have to be present for prakriti to undergo all of these different changes and evolve and everything don't know these are all these are all this is all specul speculative philosophy that's why tucker says don't get involved in it i mean one of my favorite textbooks in medical he wrote something which i really liked he said multiple etiologies or causes given for certain diseases like crohn's disease so the rest yeah if they're if there are optional explanations for something and multiple causes for things multiple causes we can we can understand a little bit but when we say that there are optional explanations and each one is is as good as the next that means we don't know but i when when when i read emmanuel khan who i didn't like by the way i mean it was just too too wordy and hard to understand but when he the one thing that i always appreciated this critique of pure reason that all of these absolute questions they're all dead in that uh you you can you can take two sides of it that if you say this world was created in time or it always existed and show that there's a fallacy involved with both of them now what do you do we prove one by saying the other is false but then you then the other one is false and yeah so then for his thing was then stop as the wall you can't go beyond that and that uh there's no point in banging your heads against the wall unless we want to crack our heads open there's nothing to be gained by it except that we understand the limitations of the human mind we talk we wanted us to understand that that we can't understand everything through this very meager amount of reasoning power that we have and not just and even if our brains were brilliant brilliant brilliant there's something inherently impossible about answering these absolute questions within time space and causation swamiji explains that also everything is similar bing bang is similar it it uh is very helpful and and it works on a certain level and and uh uh but you know still say we think that uh we've we've figured out that the atom you know has particles and this and that and we know exactly how it works but where did it come from it doesn't help us with that if we if we really want some absolute answer to something and somebody said well did god create it oh okay god created it if we like that idea the good then we live with that otherwise we say oh i don't know but i know that the self is real and i know god dwells within the heart and i know that there's joy in this life seeing that divine presence everywhere there's a few things we can know that are the important things so worship god both within and without as long as god keeps the awareness of i in us it's the second time he's using that statement huh this is what we started out with so long as he keeps the eye on us exactly the same thing as long as god keeps the awareness of i in us so long to sense objects exist and we cannot very well speak of the world as a dream that means unreal we can say it as a dream like quality because time is swallowing it up where did yesterday go that way but not literally like a dream there is fire in the hearth therefore the rice and pulse and potatoes and other vegetables jump about in the pot they jump about as if to say we are here we are jumping this body is the pot the mind and intelligence are the water the objects of the senses are the rice potatoes and other vegetables the eye consciousness identified with the senses says i'm jumping about and sat on under is the fire we don't know the source of things this is this is uh if we if we use the example of the sun being reflected in the container what would material sciences do and certain types of psychology what they'll do they'll be able to analyze exactly how that reflected sun is moving according to the moving of the water or colored according to the color we go to all of that but they'll take that as as belonging to the water itself they won't make that distinction that distinction because we're only looking at it we don't know that there's a sun behind us we're not looking up that way we're looking the other way we don't know that we only see the reflection so we don't know there's ultimate cause of things we see how it's manifest in the world this is our our condition what these god realized souls and and taqwa says how do we know that real sun by the reflected sun but we know when we look in and see that reflected sun we know that it's a reflection we don't think this is just a mind we know that there's a transcendent source for all of that so that's our key how do we know we we don't do it by looking outside we do it by turning inside and trying to find that real eye within that real cells within okay we'll stop here and he the taco will go on with his mansion of mirth brahm prasad and and his friend his nemesis [Music] [Music] we bow our heads before suramar krishna who was stainless of infinite nature whose heart melts in sympathy for his devotees who is an embodiment of the divine and the supreme lord and ever worthy of our worship [Music] peace peace peace