Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 196

THE FALL.
175
All the rest is an illusion of names and forms. What is the use of your knowledge of good and evil, when there is neither good nor evil? Thus, the prohibition was one of great moment to man; the God within had pointed out the most fatal belief that could be entertained-the notion of the body being the man. Life is self-sufficient and blissful; it is above good and evil both, and has no idea of nakedness or dress. Nudity is felt only when you put limitations on the Self, identify it with tbe body of matter, and consider yourself to be other than God. When you begin to distinguish and differentiate between the outward shapes and appearances of things, losing sight of your inner Reality, you feel as if you had been stripped of your robes, as if your glory had departed from you, or as if you had been picked out of the ocean of Love, and, with a rude hand, cast away into a dreary, waterless wilderness, where there are lamentations and gnashing of the teeth. These dire consequences must inevitably follow a sense of estrangement from God, for it is the Law. It is said :
"As water falling down on an inaccesible mountain-top quickly runs down, thus, seeing qualities of tbe Lord as separate, a man runs down to darkness."-(Katha Upanishad, 17. 14.)
To put the same thing in different words, the failure. to realize that the Atman, i.e., the individual soul, is the true God is the cause of our nakedness. We have left our Godhood, and set up the little body of matter in its stead. What is in reality an ocean now regards itself as a drop, and must remain a drop till it begins to think itself to be the whole ocean again, because the law is 'as one thinks so one becomes.'