“Being a pure channel for the Divine Power, He defies all traditional classifications such as saint, seer, and mystic. He was all this, yet something much more, too." ~ Sri V. Ganesan
ॐ
Forgetting Self, mistaking a body as Self, taking innumerable births and finally knowing Self and being Self, is just like waking up from a dream of wandering about the world. Know thus.
— Ekatma Vivekam - The Knowledge of the Oneness of Self, Verse 1
Note:
The ever-awakened state of Self is here compared to the waking state of a person. On going to sleep, a person forgets the waking state; this is similar to one forgetting one's true Self-consciousness. In sleep a person dreams, and in that dream, he mistakes the dream body to be himself; similarly, in the state of Self-forgetfulness, we mistake a body to be ourself. These two fundamental errors — forgetting Self and mistaking a body as Self — occur simultaneously.
Our undergoing innumerable births and deaths is similar to a person wandering about the world in a dream. Though in a dream a person may find himself to be wandering all over the world, does not his waking body, in fact, remain stationary on the bed? Similarly, despite our undergoing innumerable births and deaths, our true Self is in fact ever motionless, unchanged and unaffected.
On waking up from a dream, a person finds that all that he did and experienced in that dream is unreal, and hence he is in no way affected by any gain or loss that he may have experienced at that time. Similarly, on knowing Self one finds that all the karmas that one has done and all their fruits that one has accumulated and experienced throughout innumerable births are unreal, and hence one is in no way affected by them. In one's experience of Self, one realizes that truly nothing has ever happened to one. This experience is the ultimate truth and is known as ajata—the knowledge that nothing ever comes into existence or happens, and that Self, the sole reality, alone ever exists as it is.
In The Mountain Path Vol.19, Nº I, January 1982 (pdf)










