O intimate companions, this world is a vast fishing net. Souls are brightly colored fish. Divine reality whose dream power projects this entire drama is the sublime Fisherman. Certain powerful oceangoing fish when they become tangled in this inevitable net of maya try to tear its transparent strands. These are the souls striving after liberation. But the net is Mother’s reality which can never be torn. Only a few such fish who long to return to the open ocean actually escape, heroically leaping over the net and landing with a great splash. The divine Fisherman exclaims: “Ah, there goes a big one.” Only a few saints of love or gnostic sages attain such liberation in any generation within any culture. Other sincere seekers must rely upon various divine manifetations--saints, prophets, emanations, avataras--to open a gap in the net right before their eyes. This occurs only through Mother’s ineluctible permission.
Certain rare beings of pure conciousness live so deep in the ocean of reality that they imply never encounter the net which is cast in shallower waters. These are the ever-perfect souls such as the ancient Narada, the adept of pure love who first brought humankind the path of love. These ever-free beings never encounter the tangled meshes of the conventional egocentric world because from birth they clearly perceive that God alone exists.
The majority of fish are easily trapped in the shallow waters of family and society by the net of cosmic dream projection. They are not even conscious of the fact that they are bound. They grasp the net in their mouths and bury themselves comfortably in weeds and mud, feeling perfectly secure until the divine Fisherman, at the destined moment of their death, suddenly pulls them in, rudely awakening them from complacency and delusion. These secular persons who reject sacred teachings as well as superficially religious persons who accept such teachings but fail to act upon them profoundly always imagine themselves to be quite safe. They may even feel comfortable in their limited world--plunging deeper and deeper into the weed and mud of self-justification, ambition and auto-stimulation, mistaking states of passivity or degradation for states of enjoyment or even enlightenment.
Other fish not so easily domesticated are constantly swimming, searching for a gap in the net. They regard the habitual, egocentric network of the world as dangerous, as life-threatening. They cannot naively enjoy bondage even if this seems comfortable or justifiable but yearn instead for the bliss of authentic freedom. Some of these beings actually make the brilliant leap of liberation. Such rare persons who actually attain full realization during earthly life can give up their physical embodiment at any time.
Many men and women who consider themselves intellectually sophisticated or even religiously devout are not aware of being entangled in this magical net. Such persons are undergoing countless forms of obvious or subtle suffering during their daily lives and are threatened by even more severe spiritual dangers, yet they simply fail to open their eyes; they refuse to awaken from the meshes of self-orientation and self-obsession.
No comments:
Post a Comment