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 ...

Story 37 - A Terrible Absurdity

The Crazy Man

There was a man in India, who was half crazy, and just as in the month of April, people make April fools in America and elsewhere, in the mouth of March in India people play all sorts of jokes with their friends. The merry-making young man of the village thought it high time to have some Fun with this man. So they made him drink some wine, and made him tipsy, and then sent to him his most intimate and most trusted friend and companion. When this trusted friend came up to this man, the friend began to cry, to weep and wail and shed crocodile tears, and said, "O, I have just come from your house and found your wife widowed, I found your wife a widow." And the crazy fellow also began to cry and shed tears; he also began to bewail the widowhood of his own wife. Finally, others came and said, "Why do you weep?" The crazy man said, "O, I weep because my wife is a widow." They said to him, "How that can be? You say your wife is a widow. You are not dead. How can your wife become widowed, unless you, her husband, die? You are not dead; you are bewailing the widowhood of your own wife that is self contradictory." The crazy fellow said,

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"O, go away, you don't know, you don't understand, this my most trusted friend told me, he had just come from my house, and said that my wife was widowed. He was an eyewitness to that fact, he saw her widowed.'5 They said, "Look here, what a terrible absurdity is this!"

This terrible absurdity is being perpetrated by all the sects and religions of this world and by all the vain, proud, fashionable people of the world. They don't look with their own eyes, they don't think with their own brain. Here is your own Atman, your true Self, the Light of lights, Pure, Immutable. The Heaven of heavens within you. Your real Self, your own Atman is ever alive, ever present, never dead, and yet you cry and weep and shed tears and say, "O, when will happiness come to me," and you invoke the gods to come and help you out of your difficulty. There you prostrate yourselves, adopt sneaking habits, look down upon yourselves. Because such a writer, such a divine or saint, called 'himself a sinner, because he calls you worms, therefore you must do that, your salvation lies in thinking yourselves dead. This is the way people look at matters; but it won't do.

MORAL: Man though himself the source of all happiness yet cries for happiness and. thinks himself sinner or miserable, because others call him so,—a terrible absurdity.

Vol. 1 (263-264)

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