Talk On Vivek Chudamani

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

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after to struggle hard and regain our true divine glory through the delicate process of Self re-discovery, is here explained in this stanza.
Just as a ghost-vision is possible in a way-side post only when there is the ignorance of the post, so too, it is the ignorance of the Self in us that gives birth to the 'thought flow,' called the mind. The mind projects the sense-organs at the level of the body, and beyond them it gives us the apparent vision of the Five Great Elements and the world of senseobjects. The Pure Consciousness or Life gets reflected in the 'pool of thoughts' and, in our pre-occupation with our mental life, we come to misunderstand that we are this egocentre-which is nothing else but Life conditioned by our own thoughts in a given scheme of time and place.
The sorrows of life, the limitations in the equipments, the imperfections of the world, the concept of likes and dislikes, the pulls of pleasures and pains, the tearing forces of merit and sin....all these are affected by this Ego. To end the Ego's ignorance of its divine, free nature, its eternal and divine aspect of bliss is the tomb of the mortal and the field where he himself realizes and attains his immortality.
Ego is ended only upon its own funeral pyre lit by itself into a conflagration of Knowledge. The fire arising out of constant discrimination between the Real and the unreal, between the Self and the non-self, between the Spirit and the matter, is fanned into a blazing brilliance through steady Vicār in which all the effects of ignorance along with the very route of their cause, the spiritual ignorance, are burnt down.
Where the light has come to shine, there darkness cannot remain; where Knowledge has come to rule, ignorance must quit. Where the cause has been eliminated, the effect cannot remain; thus, where ignorance has ended all its effects—the five Kośas constituting the three bodies—the three planes of consciousness : the world of the waker, dreamer and the deep-sleeper—the realms of pains: made up of the sense-objects, the feelings and the ideas-all these must end instantaneously, totally.