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 ...
A customer of mystic power once went to a trader in religion, asking the venerable Siddha (or Pir) to teach him some "divine" formula by repeating which he might gain the worldly end nearest to his heart. The Fakir told the Mantram, but imposed a rather queer condition for its fruition. "Let not the thought of a monkey cross your mind while repeating the formula for a prescribed length of time." The poor fellow returned to the Guru next day complaining: "Sir, the idea of monkey could never occur to me, had you not warned me against it. But now the monkey-thought clings to me with monkey-grip, I cannot shake it off."
Thus impurity and other sins would long have left the world, had not our blessed teachers kept them up by continual dwelling on them in condemning them. Adams poor Adam, in the magnificent grand Garden of Eden would never have thought of eating the fruit of particular tree in a neglected quarter, had not the Biblical God distinguished it as "forbidden".
MORAL:—Forbidding such evils, as are unknown to people, is to implant the very evils in them, and hence it is a wrong way of instruction.