The following are some of the letters originally written to Swami Narayana and afterwards enlarged and edited by Swami Rama himself for publication.
1
The dear ones part,
The foes depart,
Relatives die,
Get snapped all ties (alternate reading – Get snapped the ties)
Our systems gay
May have their day
And pass away.
The trees decay,
Birds merrily play
But fall a prey.
The flowers fade,
Light turns to shade,
Our loves are changed,
Beauties deranged,
Names, fames do wane,
All glory is vain!
Fickle, transient is all
This show, it palls.
All objects sweet
Attract but cheat,
They treat, deceive, defeat.
2
Anything the best,
We choose for rest;
The last, the first,
That we choose to trust
When it feels our toes,
Lo! Down it goes.
No sooner we love
Than things dissolve,
Of confiding we think
And in foam we sink.
3
Is all at last
A dream of past?
Is nothing true,
He, I, or you?
Is all a myth,
This kin and kith?
Oh! Where shall I turn?
To whom return
The heart that burns,
The breast that yearns?
Oh! Unrequited Love!
O! Innocent stricken Dove!
4
See, in this scene of changing shows
There is a changeless One that glows.
In seeming death, decay and pain,
It changes dress but comes again.
Love That, nor dress, love Him, nor things
He changes the dress and flings;
Old garments gone,
Fresh forms puts on.
He is neat and clean
And whenever seen,
New forms He wears
Unthought of, rare.
One order passed, another came,
In both is He the same.
How sweet is loss, privation!
He bares Himself, ’tis Revelation.
How sweet His stripping grace!
Still sweeter the new face!
The sky, the breeze, the river, rose
Such veils of gauze for self He chose.
Hide as Thou mayst, I feel Thee.
Covers don’t conceal but reveal Thee.
The forms are chased by one another
That we may see the One they cover.
5
O! What a rosary!
This world, I see,
One bead is told,
You say it dies;
Another passes and another and another,
Yet the thread survives.
That thread Divine
Is mine, is mine!
The golden thread I cherish;
Let pass the forms or perish.
6
These fleeting forms
Mere morning charms!
They dawn and die
Mayavic lies!
These things that seem
Are nothing but dream
Of that Eternal Sun,
The Changeless One…
7
On foes and friends
I won’t depend.
I won’t recline
On shows divine.
For bodily health,
Or earthly wealth,
What care I?
My Love and I!
To the seeming things
I will not cling.
These forms of dress—
Mere pawns of chess
I’ll see them all
Not moved at all.
There, that and this
I will not miss.
My Love is found,
It’s all around.
Oh! Him I trust,
Love Him I must.
The One in plurality,
The only Reality!
My all in all
On Him I call!
My friend so true
My chela, Guru,
My father, child,
My fireside!
My husband, wife,
Myself, my life,
My only right.
The Light of lights
My storm, my calm,
My balm, my Ram. Om!
Rama lays claim to no mission. The work is all God’s. What have we to do with the examples and precedents of Buddha and others? Let our minds respond to the direct dictates of the Law. But even Buddha and Jesus were forsaken for all their friends and followers. Thus out of the seven years of the forest life, Buddha passed the last two years entirely alone and then came the effulgent Light, after which disciples began to flock to him and were welcomed. Be not influenced by the thoughts and opinions of well-meaning respectable advisers. If their thoughts had been at one with the Law, they might have created shiploads of Buddhas by this time.
Slowly and resolutely as a fly cleans its legs of the honey in which it has been caught, so remove we must every particle of attachment to forms and personalities. One after another the connections must be cut, the ties must snap, till the final concession in the form of death crowns all unwilling renunciations.
Mercilessly rolls on the wheel of Law. He who lives the Law, rides the Law. He who sets up his will against God’s will (i. e. the Law) must be crushed and suffer Promethean tortures.
The Law is Trisul (the Cross), it pierces the little false self. He who suffers willing Crucifixion, to him the world is a Garden of Eden. To all else, it is a paradise lost. The Law is fire, it burns up all worldly attachments (sneha), it scorches the ignorant mind, yet it purifies and destroys all kinds of spiritual plague germs.
Religion is as universal and vitally connected with our being as the act of eating. The successful atheist knows not the process of his own digestion, as it were. The Law makes us religious at the bayonet’s point. The Law flogs us up to wakefulness. There is no escape from the Law. The Law is real and all else is unreal. All forms and personalities are mere bubbles in the ocean of the Law. Reality has been defined as that which persists. Now, nothing in the world of forms, no relationships, no bodies, no organizations, no societies could ever persist so tenaciously as this Law of the trisul, the Cross.
Why do deluded, short-sighted creatures love appearances (personalities) more than the Ideal Law? Because of ignorance, persons and other appearances seem to them persistent realities, and the Law an intangible evanescent cloud.
Through hard knocks and painful bumps, they may be saved if they happen to learn the lesson which the grim Dame Nature intends to teach, trisul (the cross), or trisuli ( Siva ) is the only Reality and all personalities and objects of affection are passing phantoms, merest shadows, fictitious ghosts. The apparent bitters and sweets, the seeming beauties and monstrosities are only masks put on by the Biharee Ji (the Playful One) to open our eyes to His glory at last.
When we believe in the forms of foes and friends as real, they deceive and betray us. But we make the matters still worse when we begin to retaliate and impute to them motives and evil natures. The first faithlessness on their part was due to our assigning through love that reality to them, which belongs to God alone. Now, that we resent, we intensify our previous error through hatred assigning still greater reality to their forms, and thus invite more pain. Beware! This trisul (Perfect Renunciation, Siva) is the ultimate purpose in life. It is a living reality, something more concrete than stones, and well might it be represented by stone Lingam. It strikes harder than stones to correct the forgetful mind. To remember it perpetually is of vital necessity.
Mohammedans and Christians are not wrong in calling this Law or God Ghayyur (Jealous) and Qahhar (Terrible). Indeed, it is no respecter of persons. Let any one set his heart on anything whatever of this world, and unavertedly the wrath of Nature must be visited upon him. If people are slow in learning this Truth, it is because they have little power of correct observation; they usually, in matters concerning their own personality, do not like to see the cause in the phenomenon itself and they would readily blame others for their own faults and know not to retrospect as a disinterested witness their own moods of passion and feeling and the consequences these entail. Betrayed we must be, when we trust the forms, or when in our heart of hearts we give that honour to false things and personalities which is due only to the One Reality, i.e., when we let idols sit on the throne of our hearts instead of God. The method of agreement and difference establishes the Law of the Unsubstantiality of Not-God, knowing no exception.
How often are we not the cause of perfect gentlemen no longer remaining as good as their word, by setting our heart on their promises, and believing in them more than in God? How often do we not bring about the death or ruin of our children by the Law-forgetting love for their bodies
(forms)? How often do we not make friends faithless by depending on them and placing in their persons that innermost faith which is due to God alone—i.e., The Jealous Law? How often do we not bring living Gurus down from their spiritual heights by making them trust on us and on our faith in them, whereas the Law must make us deny them even more than”three times before the cock crows”?2 How often is not our heart-dependence on wives the cause of domestic strives and of far worse scenes? Take anything more serious than God, and Divine Love must stab you with piercing glance.
To talk of no unworthy loves, let us take the case of Gopikas who set their hearts on the form fascinating of God-Incarnate, and yet they had to shed bitter tears of blond, for their mistake. That embodiment of chaste affection, Sita, believed in the reality o£ the form glorious of Divine Rama, yen she, O even she, had to pay for the error in being driven into the hissing forests by the Jealous Amoorta (formless) Rama or the Real Rama, her Master, the Lord of each and all.
Translation:
The Brahman must desert him who sees the Brahman not in Self. The Kshatriya must forsake him who feels the Kshatriya to be elsewhere than-in Self. The people (or the worlds) must banish him who regards the Lokas (the people) separate from Self, the gods must abandon him who looks upon gods as different from Self, the objects or things must give him up who realises the objects as elsewhere than in Self. Anything and everything must reject him who does not take anything and everything as one with Self. That Self is Brahman, that Self is Kshatriya, that Self m the people, that Self is the gods, that Self is things, that Self is each and all.
Shruti, Veda.
The seeming objects which attract are apparently equivalent to the innocent form of Krishna. The dragon of mind (Manas) readily takes them in; but on getting inside, they stab from within, pierce the dragon’s belly, and people begin to complain: -”O, my heart is broken! I am undone! I am undone!”Why did you let yourself be deceived by names and forms? Love the Reality only. Cling to God alone. Take in God, assimilate God, walk with God, be God, behave God. That is life. Not till you have given them up, you will see the infinite faithfulness and love which is in the things of this world.
Dear Ones! God alone is real and all else unreal.
La illah il lillaha
It is true Muhammad has been misunderstood and often wrongly followed, bat anyone who sees the Truth, must reverently bow before the idea, although only one-sided, of putting an immediate end (by sword) to the lingering, chronic tortures of those who are dying by inches through practical non-belief in the only Truth”There is no Reality but God.”Christ teaches practically the same lesson, Buddha the same, and, of course, every one of our own Rishis in one form or another preaches the same thing. But what of that, their preachings and teachings could never have survived if they had not found hearty response in the private experiences of those who heard them, and if they had not been borne out, verified, and time and again re-discovered by the truthful, the sincere devotees of Light in all ages.
The Law of Renunciation is a stern Reality. No flimsy phantom this! Nations could not be all deluded and carried away by the mere chimerical hallucinations of prophets and leaders. Centuries and centuries could not be run away with by the mere fancy of poor cranks.
People not knowing the real cause of their miseries, which is falling out of tune with the Law, begin to fall foul with the outside symptoms of their malady, i.e., the apparent circumstances. Let the good or bad talk or conduct of people be washed out of consciousness even as misty dreams are consigned to oblivion. Dreams may be nightmares or sweet dreams, we do not try to adjust them or quarrel with them; but rather our own stomach it is that is straitened. So good or bad folks that meet us ought to be entirely ignored, and our spiritual condition improved. Let not these Seeming evils or lucks stand between thee and God. There are no insults and faults immense enough to satisfy me in the act of forgiving them.
Let nothing be prized higher than God, nothing valued equally with God. Compliments, criticisms and diseases are equally fatal if we regard Self as subject to them. Feel yourself God and sing songs of joy in Godhead. Look upon compliments and criticisms even as Rama looks upon physical ailments merely as footmen from God’s Durbar who with all the authority of the supreme Government say,”Get out of this house (body-consciousness, at once!”They obey me when I occupy the Durbar throne; they whip and stab me when I enter into this hovel – the body-consciousness.
Even governments whose so-called laws do not conform to the divine Law of the Trishul (the Cross) work their own destruction. Shylock-like laying stress on personal rights, thinking this or that mine, feeling a sense of possession, saying”the law grants it”is to contradict the real Law according to which the only haq (right, prerogative) we have, is Haq (God) and every other right is wrong. If nobody else recognises this principle, the Sannyasin at any rate ought to work it into life.
The Law is all pervasive, is the higher Self of each and all, and is Rama in this sense. Yet it must kick out and kill out the personal self. It is cruel, but its cruelty is the quintessence of love, because in this very death of the apparent self consists resurrection of the real Self and life eternal. He who keeps the false self and claims for it the prerogatives of the King-Self, must, as it were, be devoured by vultures on the height of vanity. The freedom of Vedanta is no impunity from Law for the limited local self i.e., personality and body. This is turning GOD into the very reverse. Millions of beings perish every hour through this mistake. Thousands of heads are sinking into pessimism, and hundreds of thousands of hearts are breaking every minute, by the foolish reversal of the order of the Law. Freedom from Law is secured by becoming the Law, that is, the realization of shivoham.
That dupe of the senses, who counts on what are called facts and figures, and rests on the foundation of forms, builds on the foam and sinks. He builds on the rock in whose heart of heart,
God is Real, the world unreal
and the Law a living force.
Let this body be freely called policy-player, selfish, vain, proud, or anything else, let it be what they call insulted, kicked, killed, what is that to me, the Self of all?
I am Truth the inevitable,
I am Law the inexorable;
To know Me is to obey Me,
To obey Me is to prosper.
Oppose Me, it will not annoy Me,
Ignore Me, I cannot be anxious,
But will calmly destroy him who slights.
This is no empty threat. It is too terrible a truth.
Let us have at least as much respect and regard for Truth (God, Law), as we have for the feelings of persons. If the hearts of persons ‘break by our faithful, innocent loyalty to the Divine Law, we cannot be held responsible for that. To us, it should, by all means, be of far more serious concern not to break the Law. By yielding to the whims of those we call our dear and near, as against the Law, we invite calamity over their heads as well as ours. There is none nearer than God, none should be dearer than God, Truth (Law).
For Thee, for Thee alone, 0 Lord! 0 Law! I was keeping the mind in my body.
Yajur Veda
In Vedic days, on certain occasions, unmarried girls assembled round Fire with folded hands, turned round the blazing one, and sang this song :—
Tryambakam yajamahe sugandhim pativedanam.
Urvarukamiva bandhanaaditau muksheeya mamutat.
Translation: —
Let us be absorbed in the worship of the Fragrant One, the All-seeing One, the Husband-knowing One. As a seed from the husk, so may we be freed from bondage here (the parents’ house), but never, never from there (the husband’s home).
That prayer of the ancient Aryan maidens is springing deep from the very bottom of Rama’s heart, and tears, O! Tears are pouring madly along with it.
O God! O Law! O Truth! Let this head and heart be instantaneously rent asunder, if any other connection lodges there but Thee. Let this blood be curdled immediately, if any other idea flows in the arteries and veins along with it but Thee. Another Shruti:—
Aaham jaani garbhandamaa tvam jaasi garbhandham
Translation—
As a woman of a man, so shall I learn of Thee, I shall draw Thee closer and closer, I will drain Thy lips and the secret juices of Thy body, I will conceive of Thee, O Law! O Liberty!
Is not Rama married to the Trisul, married to Truth and Law that other attachments and other connections are still expected of him as of a harlot?
This is no blind impulse, nor is this a selfish policy to harm anybody. Why, what has innocent Kama committed that ye would drag hirft into narrow limitations of personal relationship? Spare him, pray, spare him. For your own safety’s sake, spare him. Leave him alone. In this lies the good of your country and of humanity. Do you suppose that he will die in loneliness without the tender cares of his body on your part? No, God is real, and life in God knows no hardship and this body cannot drop before it has done the work of God.
It is not good to be meddling with anybody’s sacred vows. He will let nothing stand between him and his ideal, no, not even death. Let no one try to shape his career according to notions borrowed from a godless reading of history. Away with your loves and homages to the seeming Rama! These are an insult to the Real Rama—the Self of all. Hands off! Wake up from the dream of forms. Shake off the illusion of personalities and body consciousness even as Rama has shaken off dyspepsia by a life of Law. Burn up sense-attachments by focussing the scorching light of Self on them. Give no quarters to wordly impressions in your heart, keeping it all the time brimful of the Real Rama.
“War harchiz juz dilbar bawad
Az shahr-i-dil birun kunam”
Translation—
Any other thought besides that of the Beloved let me expel from the city of my heart.
Is not God at least as sweet as any sense object?
People hesitate to love God, because they think they receive no response from Him as in the case of fictitious worldly objects of love. It is the foolish ignorance that thus deludes them. O Dear! His breast instantaneously, nay, simultaneously heaves with thy breast in responsive impulse.
Look not, in the apparent friends and foes, the cause of their conduct. The real causation rests with your Real Self alone. Look out!
As a little bird just learning to fly, leaving one stone or twig, parches on another similar support, then on another and another, but cannot leave entirely those ground objects and soar into the higher air, so a novice in Brahmajnana while disengaging his heart from one thing or disgusted with a particular person, immediately rests on something eke, then clings to another similar delusion, does not give up dependence on frail reed or straw, and quits not in his heart the whole earth. An experienced jnani would turn the apparent faithlessness of one earthly object into a stepping stone for a leap into the Infinite. The art of religion consists of making every little bit of experience an occasion for a leap into the Infinite. The seeming things being all of a piece, while giving up one thing outwardly he makes it a sign and a symbol for renouncing all inwardly.
Deplorably dense must he be who does not recognize the piercing Truth that (Trisul) Death of the selfish personality alone is the Law of life. The Trisul shakes off personalities. The shaking of off personalities is Resurrection of Life Eternal. Live ye forever! Farewell.
DEATH IN LIFE
When Rama left Lahore, he was reading in those days, the Persian version of Vishnu Purana, one of the boldest treatises on Advaita Vedanta. It is the Latin translation of the Persian version to which Emerson and Thoreau and others of the same calibre and character refer so enthusiastically in their writings. The Punjabi Vishnu Purana also is a reproduction of this Persian work. The Anuhhava Prakasha of the Black Blanket Baba is an improvement on the Punjabi Vishnu Parana. This is the work which shows on what heights the man used to live, and in its pages we catch the glimpses of his inner life. Here is the secret of the millions’ worth of work being silently done to-day through the name of one whose only garments as well as the house were no more than a black blanket, who was not much of a scholar either, and who used to beg his meals from door to door, lest he might not prove a burden on any single family. Bridges are being put up on tempestuous rivers, roads are being made, Dharmashalas being erected, food and clothings distributed, education being imparted, and the work given to the workless hands on the burning sands of the plains and the lofty heights of the Himalayas in the name of the Kali Kambli. Plans and policies can achieve nothing more than mist and smoke. Real work is not done through worldly designs. Work is done through God-life. For some the busy life among the crowds is an unconscious aid to live the divine mood; for some solitude is a conscious help; for some calamities are opportune blessings to that effect; for some, while writing books, the heart is pressed by the Master’s pen; some, while lecturing, lose their opacity and the Master’s Light shines through them; some, while bearing the brunt of battles, making their breasts the targets for bullets, renounce body-consciousness, and become known to the world as heroes; some while devoted to art, rise to the Immortal Beauty. Even the thief when breaking into a house, if successful, mark ye! that so far as his success goes, it is due only to his falling into that trembling indescribable, wordless, thoughtless state of resignation, and an entire dependence and suspense in the Unknown Infinite. As to the wickedness of the deed, that is, taking seeming riches to be real enough, for such an attempt, he, of course, invites the wrath of Law on his head.
Work is done just in how far we were alive, i.e., dead in the all. This life, that is, death works and not our solitude, society, means and measures. The ignorant biographers watch only the outside bearings and attribute the achievements, now to the style of writings and then to the number of followers etc., ignoring the real soul of success, as if my work depended on what birds are perching on the tree under which I sit and write. Our circumstances and opportunities are nothing. The ancient sage sees aright when the warrior’s victory he attributes solely to the Inner (Indra) and Outer God (Varuna).
“Suda samindravarunaa vam saavatam”
Rig Veda
Every day we see before our eyes, as Bullah Shah would put it,”sparrows vanquishing eagles”i.e., our most favourable and promising bubbles bursting, and in the words of Christ, our rejected bricks being glorified as the corner-stones of huge mansions. No depending on seeming circumstances, no worldly wisdom is the least factor in victories. All our connections, friendships, riches, expectations, promises and other means (i.e. to say our world) are the merest deception, vanity of vanities. It requires no subtle wisdom of Sureshwara or Shankara to show their nothingness. To those who have eyes, every little bit of experience as a dread camion thunders out this Vedanta.
Our Mahatmahoods, reformerships, honours, offices, relations are no more than dreams of the List night, past incarnations, cloud-forms, twilight-ghosts and goblins of diseased phantasy. When we are out of tune with Rama, we do not see the way, miss the path of Law and we must suffer. While in God, the right methods, the right impulses, right inclinations, spontaneously well up in the heart and lead us to the rich landscapes, mountain scenes, refreshing springs of peace, prosperity and purity; or the blissful light in us of itself draws life and love towards us.
This, the lesson of ego-sacrifice, lay at the bottom of the most complicated, grand and imposing Yajna ceremonies of Vedic periods. The Law of Life in Death, I find as stern and solid a reality as the Rudra was to the ancient Rishis. Disregard it and bang fly the arrows to your heart and sides.
“Namaste rudramanyava utota dvasave namah.
Baahubhyam uva ten amah”.
Translation:—
Salutations to Thy indignation, O Rudra (i.e., the Law), Salutations to Thy unerring arrows! Prostrations to Thy untiring arms!
In every little experience of ours is folded the whole of history. We do not read it. It is as easy to become a Buddha or Christ as to remain a poor Paul, provided we pay the proper prices, i.e., evacuate the local self and let God work through us. Two swords in one sheath we cannot have. The Lord of lords we can become if we develop the power to believe not in the praise or blame which is heaped on us, if we escape the ‘fever of doing’ if to win, to gain the day be not our object, if to be the Truth more than to advocate it, engage our energies, and if we work appropriating as little credit to ourselves as the sun for shining all the time. The very moment we begin to believe what people say about us, there is a dead stop. The world is not. The world is not and their talk is nothing. God is the only reality.
Some think ‘Pain’ is indispensable for development of character, as fire is for purifying gold. Nature allows no progress without struggle. Perhaps it has always been so up to the present day. Hut is that a reason why it should thus continue forever? It is true! No chemical can operate unless it passes through the nascent state. The seed grows through reduction into the substance. Metals are welded by matriculating at the melting point. The man of outward shows and feelings, encouraged at the seeming hopes and bright prospects, pins his faith to individual appearances, rushes onward, but full soon does he receive a knock on the head or bump on the forehead. The shock melts him, brings him to the nascent state and the condition of life being fulfilled; forthwith comes success to greet him. Let the reports be what they may, if Law is Law, Christ could not have suffered except by somehow forsaking the God-Ideal or stumbling in the path of death-in-life. Persecution, however, soon restored him to his balance and a few hours of absolute self-crucifixion in the Timeless All before the seeming crucifixion took place, brought him to life for all times. But persecution and pain as such are not necessarily succeeded by success and joy, often one trouble simply heralds a whole train of others, and they say misfortunes never come singly. If through the warning of one calamity we wake up to the blessed mood, the sunshine of life and light falls on us there and then, but if the cold of initial misery intensifies our law-breaking, worse disasters are invited by us. The Law inexorable, perhaps mysterious also, not being understood and kept, the struggle must continue showering hard bumps and knocks over our heads. Those survive that pass through the indescribable”nascent state,”the only condition for fitness. Once they had engines without governors, and the steam-struggle was unmanageable. But now that the governors have been invented for engines, why should there be any unnecessary waste of power. So, the Law of life, the governor, being secured, there is no reason why pain and struggle should still be permitted to rule mankind like lower animals. To work as centred in the physical personality is no crime in the eyes of the limited worldly governments, but that is the only crime with the Universal Supreme Government, all other faults being its different branches. There is but one disease and one remedy. To break the Vedantic law—Brahma satyam jagat mithya—is the root of all maladies, now assuming the shape of one trouble and then of another. And the cure is to wake up into our Real God-head. Self-deception once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally more and more.
Is Rama’s talk merely a recluse’s reverie and of no use to the men of society? The water in the reservoir has no vegetation about it, but could that be a reason why the fields should refuse to be irrigated by it in order to bear their own harvests? Rama states simply the Law which is every one’s own life. I find all the laws of the world—chemical, biological, psychological and all to be no more than particular expressions of the One Law—the Law of laws referred to above. The law of Causation, the worldly relationships, hopes, duties, are all mere transition points, passing standards of judgment, wayside inns, the dolls of the spinster, the yatammum of the waterless Arab. Once the sun shines in the horizon of our consciousness, once we wake up to the true nature of things, all causations and laws begin to revolve round as planets and satellites, nay, they approach us even as children do their mother at the dinner time.
Quotation of Sama Veda
Man has to learn to die quite as naturally and simply as the child has to learn to walk. This death means the state where the servant is no individual servant, the disciple no disciple, the Raja no Raja, the friend no friend, and the enemy no enemy, the people’s promises no promises, threats no threats, provisions no provision, rights no rights, all is God. There is but One Reality. When the heart beats at one with it, the whole world pulsates at one with the heart. When the mind gets out of tune with it (i.e., rests on shows), the whole world vibrates differently from the mind. So long as we feel an impulse to defend the body and retaliate on behalf of personality, returning tit for tat, we are dead. There is no safer test of greatness than the faculty to let mortifying and insulting expressions pass unheeded. When a gentleman passes from the lawyer’s bar to the judge’s bench the attitude of the whole court towards him changes. So, when we rise from the advocate’s position to that of the disinterested God-light, the whole world must re-adjust her relations to us, and their lines of business with us must point differently as the compass needle shifts its pointing through the motion of the ship. Do they cheat you? It is because you have defrauded God out of you. Truly observes Professor James: Life is based on the fact that materia1 sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.”Animals are led by the material sensations alone. Man’s Divinity is redeemed only when the invisible laws, nay, the Law, which is enveloped in darkness for the animal man becomes to him a solid, stern fact of facts, and on the other hand, the seeming fleeting forms, the so-called hard cash etc., which are the guiding stars of the ignorant, disappear for him in the daylight of the Divine Presence.
Yaa nisaa sarvabhutanaam tasyaam jaagarti samyami
Yasyaam jagriti bhutani saa nisaa pasyato muneh.
Bhagavad Gita
SUBLIM COURTESY—THE LAW
Khalil an roz ba atish hami guft
Agar muye za man baqist darsoz
Badu mi guft an atish ki ai shah!
Ba peshat man Bumiram tu dar afroz.
Sense in English:—
Abraham, while about to be burnt alive, asked! Fire:”If say even an hair of my personal consciousness still clings to this body, pray, spare it not, burn it, burn it please.”The fire went out as if reverently to make this reply:”Live ye, my lord! Let me die at your feet.”
Such is the Law Divine. God shall not be outdone in politeness of manners.
Rucham braahma janyanto devaa agre tadabruvan
Yastvevam brahmano vidyattasya devaa asan vase
Yajur Veda Samliita
Sarva Evenam bhutaanyabhiksharanti
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
Sarvaasmai devaa balimavahanti
Tattiriya Upanishad
Translation:—
Gods, the progenitors, at the very beginning spoke to the lovely lover of Brahma:—
O one with Brahman! Whoever may thus know Brahman, we gods have to wait upon him as obedient attendants. All beings bring presents before his throne, all laws offer sacrifice on his altar.
A GREAT OBJECTION TO VEDANTA
Vedanta kills out feelings and blears the aesthetic vision; it inculcates callousness, naturelike rectilinear conduct, no regard for relations.
Yes. It does so. To its true votary, Truth, the Reality, must gain such enormous dimensions that things, persons, causations, and opinions should become vanishing quantities. But if human or rather animal feelings are washed out, Divine feelings begin to overflow instead. The artificial lights are replaced by the laughing sunlight which bathes all surroundings in joy, although it is no respecter of persons.
“Never before could I have believed it,”says an Englishman of great spiritual experience”but I see it all now. There is nothing like it—no happiness— when you have clean dropped thinking about yourself. But you must not do it by halves, while even there is a least grain of self left, it will spoil all; you must just leave it all behind and vouchsafe to the personality and mind just that much sympathy as to any stranger—no more, no less.”
Leaving your year-long plans and purposes, leaving good name and reputation and the sound of familiar voices, untwining loved arms from about you, putting off the cherished personal self, as we slip off gloves, brushing aside the fears of disease and banishing the hopes of appreciation, pass disembodied out of yourself. Leave the husk, leave the long, long prepared envelope. Pass through the gate of indifference into the Palace of Mastery, through the door of Jnanam (Knowledge Divine) out into the open of deliverance. Give away. Dispossess your mind of all you have, become poor and without claims, and behold! You shall be Lord and Sovereign of all things.
Sriscate Lakshmisca patnyau ahoratre parsve
Nakshatrani rupam aswinau vyaattam
Ishtam manishaanaam
Yajur
Meaning:—
Success and prosperity are thy maid-servants, day and night thy right and left sides, the splendour in stars thy looks, Heaven and Earth thy lips parted (in smiling). If ye desire anything, desire that.
RAMA.