Parables of Rama
by Swami Rama Tirtha | 102,836 words
Stories in English used by Swami Rama to illustrate the highest teaching of Vedanta. The most difficult and intricate problems of philosophy and abstract truths, which may very well tax the brains of the most intellectual, are thus made not only simple and easy to understand but also brought home to us in a concrete form in such an interesting and ...
There was this question put to a Sage, "How is it that when Christ was crucified, he did not feel the cross?" At that time the Sage had some cocoanuts around him. (In India, people visiting friends or sages always bring fruits and these cocoanuts had been brought to the sage). One of the cocoanuts was raw and the other was dried up. The sage said, "This cocoanut is raw. Now if I break the shell what will happen to the kernel?" They said, "The kernel will be cut or broken also, it will be injured." 'Well," said the sage, "here is the dried cocoanut, and if I break this shell, what will happen to the kernel." They said, "If the shell of this cocoanut is broken, the kernel will not be injured, it will be unharmed." He said, "Why?" They said, "In the dried cocoanut, the kernel separates itself from the shell, and in the raw cocoanut the kernel attaches itself to the shell." Then the sage said, "When Christ was crucified what was crucified?" They said, "The body." "Well," said the sage, "here was a man whose body or outer shell was injured or crucified, but here was a man who had separated the immutable Self, the true kernel, from the outer shell; the outside shell was broken but the inside was intact; so why feel sorry, why weep or cry over it? In the case of other men, as in the raw cocoanut, the kernel attaches itself to the shell and so when the shell or body is disturbed, the kernel or inside is disturbed or injured also, and that is the difference."
The weakness or disease in you is this attachment to the shell, this clinging, this slavery so the shell. Thus giving up this clinging, this bondage to the shell is death from the stand-point of worldly men. From the stand-point of your present vision, that is death, and unless you suffer this death and detach yourself from this shell and the concerns of the shell, you cannot conquer death, you cannot rise above anguish; misery, or pain. Let the body become as if it never existed. A man of liberation, a free man, is one who lives in Divinity, in Godhead, in such a way that the body was never born.
MORAL: All the miseries, pains and sufferings exist only so long as there is the attachment with the body; but they cease to exist as soon as detachment takes place.