Verse 23
कस्त्वं कोऽहं कुत आयातः का मे जननी को मे तातः ।
इति परिभावय सर्वमसारम् विश्वं त्यक्त्वा स्वप्नविचारम् ॥२३॥
Kastvaṁ ko’haṁ kuta āyātaḥ
kā me jananī ko me tātaḥ,
iti paribhāvaya sarvamasāram
viśvaṁ tyaktvā svapna vicāram.
Who are you? Who am I? From where did I come?
Who is my mother? Who is my father? Thus enquire, leaving aside the entire
world of experience, essence-less, and a mere dreamland, born of imagination.
Man is born divine, as he is created by
divine Lord as He himself.
However, ignoring his real identity, man is
caught up in the meshes of Maya and loses sight of his eternal status and on
one hand, he is caught up in worldly desires and on the other hand, he keeps
gathering knowledge, trying to perfect himself somehow.
Man keep walking hurriedly, slips sometimes,
falls, gets bruises, falls sick and again gets up and again walks. Like this he
spends / loses many lives.
Thus, he keeps accumulating Karma, keeps
clearing karma and is caught up in the vicious circle of Birth and death.
A time comes when he starts thinking
seriously about the futility of this world and the purposeless life he has been
leading so far.
He is able to accumulate wealth, he has his
family, has a status in the society, good house to live, servants to work for
him and still, deep within, he is able to feel that there is no lasting peace.
The more resourceful a man becomes in this
world, the chance of his remaining peaceful gets lesser and lesser.
Such thoughts come to him more often at a
time when he has cleared all his acute karma and has lesser karmic balance to
clear.
And, at that time, he starts questioning
himself.
What, after all, is the purpose of this life?
Have I come into this world only to eat,
drink, sleep, make merry, prosper and then, experience my body getting week,
then to fall sick and then to ultimately die?? Is this the purpose of my life?
All along, I have been thinking / believing
that I am this body, but I am told, I am born, I die and am reborn again and
again.
If that be so, I definitely cannot be this
body, because, in one life itself, when man dies, his body is cremated and
becomes ashes, which cannot regain the state of the same body in which he lived
before dying.
If I believe that I am this mind and this
intellect, then, I am wrong because, after all, all these are also gone when
this body is gone.
Is there any other identity for me or I am
just this body, mind, intellect?
If it is so, then, what leaves my body, to
come back when I am reborn, to carry along with itself, all my previous
sanskara, previous karma???
AFTER ALL, WHO I REALLY AM???
Who is my mother, who is my father is a
question which has to be taken in the sense that from where have I come, if I
have been coming and going several times in this world. I possibly cannot be
having the same father and mother every time I am reborn into this world. So, what
is the source from which I emerge, what is the source as which I exist and what
is the source to which I retrace??
With what conviction can one say that the
world is essence less? To justify this assertion; to make it even possible, the
stage of Self-enquiry has to be preceded as we have just seen –
by dispassion, burning desire for liberation, and the
practical renunciation of all the comforts and security of life,
surrendering oneself entirely to the Lord.
When a man reaches this stage, God sends
a qualified Self Realized Guru who knocks his door / enter in his life
mysteriously to reveal the secrets of Self-enquiry.
In such a person alone will Self-enquiry bear
fruit. He alone can honestly declare, “The world is unreal!”
The world that we believe as real is like the
dream that we get. In Dream, we never say that it is unreal. We move around in
dream, so many other characters move around in our dream, so many things happen
there. We even laugh / cry / enjoy / grieve in our dream which all seems to be
so real.
Only when we get up from the dream, we smile
and realize that it was just a dream.
The essence less world is the dream and the
waking up from the dream is attaining the knowledge of SELF, experiencing our
true identity.
Sankara writes in Atma Bodha,
संसारः स्वप्नतुल्यो हि रागद्वेषादिसङ्कुलः ।
स्वकाले सत्यवद्भाति प्रबोधे सत्यसद्भवेत् ॥ ६॥
SAMSARA SVAPNATULYO HI
RAGA DVESHADI SANKULAHA
SVAKALE SATYAVAD BHATI
PRABODHE SATYASAD BHAVET
(The world which is full of attachments,
aversions and so on, is like a dream. It appears to be real as long as the
dream continues but becomes unreal when one wakes up, when true wisdom dawns)
Commentary on this verse is in post 13 in
Atmabodha theme.
Link for that post is given below.
Love
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