Talk On Vivek Chudamani

Author(s): Chinmayanand Swami
Publisher: Chinmay Publications Trust

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tellect, together called the 'ego' and it is these identifications that give us our sense of limitations. The limitations are not of the Self. The Self knows no limitations. It is Infinite. It is absolute. It is perfection. While forgetting our Real Nature we come to estimate ourselves to be something other than ourselves, and this misunderstood personality is the sufferer, the finite mortal. To rediscover ourselves is to end all our sorrows. This is the consummate point of evolution pointed out by Vedanta.
A Lalaji having a substantial meal retires to a comfortable bed with his wife and children to take rest. There he starts his dream and experiences that he is a destitute thrown out into a wide world wherein, in a jungle, famished and broken he is running for safety and shelter when a lurking wild-beast follows him with equal hunger. The Lalaji runs, pants and toils to save himself and consequently jumps into the Ganges, and the touch of the cold water makes him wake up only to find that he is profusely perspiring in his own little room.
The dreamer Lalaji, because of his misunderstandings about himself, forgetting his own real nature in which he is in all security sleeping with his wife and children in his own house, came to identify himself with his own mental creations and thus became the destitute of his dream. The moment he woke up, he rediscovered his real nature and he need not then run to the cupboard to take his gun and open the door to walk into the darkness, if not to kill, atleast to frighten that lion for once! The moment he woke up, he understood that he had never a hunger and that he was never in a jungle and that the lion was nothing but a delusion of his own creation.
Thus, in the ignorance of our real nature we start identifying with our ego-centric concepts—such as “I am the body”, “I am the mind”, “I am the intellect”—and thereafter the conditions of the body, mind and intellect become my conditions in my stupidity! To end this ignorance is to gain the Wisdom of the Reality.