Vedic Wisdom - Realisation Of God

Vedic Wisdom

Realisation Of God

All religious symbols and rituals are prompting agents for you to feel and realize the supreme power within you and each of them has a logic and science behind it. They are not God by themselves but divine symbols which can invoke the God in you.

If you are serious and sincere you can realize the God in this birth itself –actually if you are dead determined you can realize him any time –even right now-because he is ever willing to meet you.

In fact realizing God does not involve isolation or rescuing into Himalayas or inflicting any unbearable agony or torture. It is a very simple understanding of a very simple fact.

In fact as Ramana Maharishi calls it is an ‘unrealisation’. Yes, ‘we have to unrealise that our core is not the body or the bodily senses’. We have to just understand that our core is the ‘conscience’ – the God’s spark; which is also the core of every other being.

Similarly Shankara also says it is unrealisation of the false truth of what we wrongly believe to be the truth . According to Shankara we wrongly identify us with our ‘self ego’ missing out the cosmic ego which is universal.

Once we unrealise that we are not merely our self ego but the universal ego as well , we will realsise that what we have thought till now is a mere illusion (maya) and once that happens our soul will be liberated.

For this he gives an analogy of ‘a snake and a rope’. In dark we see an object lying ahead and we feel it is a snake because of its shape and posture. We get shivers in our bones. We get terrified, but yet we have to go beyond to reach our place and so we try to throw light on it to get confirmed what it is.

But on investigation we find it is not a snake, but a rope. Then our mental confusion is gone. As long as we thought it is a snake our reaction was of fear and agony and once we realized it is a rope our reaction was of relief and joy.

Similarly when we identify ourselves with our false ego everything is a problem and once we realize that we are part of the universal ego all our problems are gone.

He says the mistaken knowledge ‘that it is a snake’ is ‘avidya’ ; the one causes that is ‘maya’ and once the mistake is rectified, the right knowledge that arises that ‘it is only a rope’ is ‘vidya’.

But the mistaken impression would not have arisen in the first place but for a rope being there and therefore the rope is real while the snake is not. So we can’t deny the rope.

So he says the actual world is real; but our wrong identification of it as ultimate and eternal, under the influence of our false ego, is unreal and so this is ‘mithya’-wrong comprehension.

We are understanding that the air we breathe is the same as breathed by the other beings; we understand that the blood of humans are similar . Similarly we need to just understand that the core of all the beings- the ‘ consciousness’- ‘prajnya’ is the same .

Once this understanding comes then we will develop awareness that every other being and us share the same moving spirit and so are very innately connected and related.

This will develop a universal love, universal mind and universal consciousness. Once this awareness arises we would have understood the core of ‘who I am’ and that is what Vedas claim as God realization.

This article is a snippet from the Book Vedic Wisdom, Authored by Pandit Sri Rama Sharma. Vedic Wisdom is available online at www.giri.in and across Giri Trading Agency Private Limited, A chain of Speciality Stores dealing in all kinds of products needed in Indian Culture and Tradition.