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 a child; the child saw in a mirror the image of a little boy, his own image, and somebody told the child that in the mirror was a very beautiful, dear little child, and when he looked into the mirror, he saw a dear little boy, but the child did not know that it was his own reflection, the child took it to be some strange boy in the mirror. Afterwards the mother of the child wanted to persuade him that the boy in the mirror was only his own reflection, not a real boy, but the boy could not be persuaded, the boy could not understand that in the mirror there was not really another boy. When the mother said, 'Look here, here is a mirror, there is no boy in it,' the child came up to it and said, 'O mamma, O mamma, here is the boy! Why, the boy is here?' When the boy was saying, 'here is the boy,' in the very act of saying 'here is the boy,' he cast his own reflection in the mirror. Again the mother wanted to persuade him that there was not a real boy in the mirror, then again the boy wanted to have a proof or demonstration. The boy went up to the mirror and said, 'Look here, here is the boy,' but by the very act of proving that there was no object in the mirror, the boy put the object in the mirror.
Similarly, when you come .up and say, 'why the world,' 'whence the world,' how the world,' the very moment you begin to investigate the origin and the why and wherefore of the world, that very moment you put in the world there, you create the world there.
MORAL: The very question about the why and wherefore of the world posits the idea, of the world where there is really no world.