|
Srimad Bhagvata Mahapurana: Book 11: Chapter 28: Verses 8-17
He who comes to know (what is meant by) this ripeness of Jnana and Vijnana as taught by Me would neither extol nor revile anyone and would move about in the world (free from partiality and prejudice) as the sun. Realizing this world as having a beginning and an end and (therefore) unreal (when conceived as apart from the Spirit) by means of perception, inference, the authority of the scriptures and one's own direct experience, one should move about in this world unattached. Uddhava submitted : Transmigration (or in other words, the experience of pleasure and pain etc.), is undergone neither by the soul, who is the perceiver and therefore self-luminous nor by the body, which is the object of perception and therefore other than the Self. (Al the same) it is experienced, 0 Lord! (The question, therefore, arises:) by whom is it undergone ? The soul is undecaying, unqualified, free from impurities, self-effulgent like fire and unobscured (by the evil of Avidya or nescience) while the body is material like Wood. (Therefore,) which (of the two) undergoes transmigration ?
The glorious Lord replied : So long as there is contact of the undiscriminating soul with the body, senses and vital airs metempsychosis continues to bear fruit (in the shape of pleasure and pain), even though it has no reality. Even though phenomena (in the shape of the Various bodies) do not exist (in the Self), metempsychosis (consisting in the experience of pleasure and pain) does not cease in the case of the embodied soul continuing to think of the objects of senses, even as calamities do not cease to afflict a man in the dream state so long as the dream is not broken, although the objects seen in it (including the body appearing in the dream) do not (actually) exist. Just as the dream experience brings many a woe to a man who has not yet woken-while the same surely does not infatuate him who has woken up-so what brings sorrow to the ignorant does not afflict a wise man. Grief, delight, fear, anger, greed, infatuation, craving and other moods as well as birth and death are seen in relation to the ego and not to the Self. The spirit hidden behind the body, the senses, the vital airs and the mind and identifying itself with them is called the Jiva. The subtle body (constituted of the Gunas and Karmas) is its material manifestation and is variously known as the Sutratma or the Mahat-tattva. Controlled by God (in the form of the Time-Spirit), it revolves in Samsara (the whirligig of metempsychosis). Cutting down with the sword of wisdom, whetted by worship (of God), this (tree of the) ego-sense-which has no root and (yet) stands revealed in multitudinous forms (such as those of gods, human beings etc.), and is entertained in relation to the 'mind, speech, vital airs and body-acontemplative soul roams about on the globe destitute of (all) thirst (for the pleasures of sense).
|
|
