Talk On Vivek Chudamani

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

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The teacher, in this stanza now under discussion, has started delivering the answer to the student's question. Psychologically, when the questioner is extremely upset, due to any fear or agitation in him, he is not in a mental mood to receive any philosophical idea, even when elaborately explained. Therefore, a sympathetic teacher, if he knows the art of his job, should, first of all, pacify the student and give him hope and spiritual solace. Then alone does he become fit to receive the logical conclusions arrived at by a fully rational philosophy. Thus most fittingly, the master, with a fatherly consideration and love, is here assuring the student that what he fears from is only a myth.
This is not a false assurance, an idle hope, given to the student just to save him from his own imagined fears. From the stand-point of the master he views and sees clearly the spiritual, destiny and the divine perfection which lie in the innermost core of the disciple. Change is only at the level of the mind and intellect. The Pure Consciousness, Eternal and Infinite, when functions through these equipments, gathers unto itself a delusive vision which interprets a world in terms of change and plurality. Death is then, not a phenomenon in the spirit but is a hallucination of the minds. Therefore, with all confidence, the teacher assures the student, 'There is no death for you.'
The theory may be consoling and the assertion quite hopeful, but if there is no practical method to realize it in our life it has no place in the Hindu philosophy. Therefore, the teacher asserts here, 'There IS a way of crossing' this sorrowful Ocean of changes and pains.
The stanza also, in its own words, indicates that this is not a theory of his own intellect, but that this is the Real Path, hallowed by the foot-prints of the ancient Seers, who had themselves crossed over from the finite to the Infinite Divinity, using this same route. We are assured that what is to follow now in the teacher's discourse is an exhaustive discussion upon this sacred Path of Self-realization, the efficiency of which has been endorsed by an endless array of brilliant Rishis of old.