Spiritual Stories

Author(s): Raman Maharshi
Publisher: Ramanasramam Tiruvannamalai

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between themselves was that if one of them owed the other a game or two, the same should be redeemed the next day. One evening they parted with a game to the credit of Kamal. Next day, in order to claim “the return of the game”, Kamal went to the boy's house, where he saw the boy laid on the verandah, while his relatives were weeping beside him. “What is the matter?” Kamal asked them. “He played with me last evening and also owes me a game.” The relatives wept all the more saying that the boy was dead. “No,” said Kamal, “he is not dead but merely pretends to be so, just to evade redeeming the game he owes me.” The relatives protested, asking Kamal to see for himself that the boy was really dead, that the body was cold and stiff. “But all this is a mere pretension of the boy, I know. What if the body be stiff and cold? I too can become like that.” So saying Kamal laid himself down and in the twinkling of an eye was dead.
The poor relatives who were weeping till then for the death of their own boy, were distressed and dismayed, and now began to weep for Kamal's death also. But up rose Kamal on his back, declaring, “Do you see it now? I was as you would say dead, but I am up again, alive and kicking. This is how he wants to deceive me, but he cannot elude me like this with his pretensions."
In the end, the story goes, Kamal's inherent saintliness gave life to the dead boy, and Kamal got back that was due to him. The moral is that the death of the body is not the extinction of the Self. The Self is not limited by birth and death, and its place in the physical body is not circumscribed by one's experience felt at a particular place, as for instance between the eyebrows, due to practice of dhyana made on that centre. The supreme State of Self-awareness is never absent; it transcends the three states of the mind as well as life and death.