Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
India Herald
Houston, USA
4th April 2008
Who are the good and the righteous? Are they a special class of men? Could there be such men living in the world at all? If there are, God would have created them, for nobody else could create this special breed of men. Who could these men be and how would they appear to other, ordinary mortals, who are by the way created by the same God who has manifested the good and the righteous. Why would God not create each and every one good and righteous? Why on earth would He create the bad and the unrighteous, for who else could create them as God is the only creator? Would creating the bad and the unrighteous make Him God? If God could do wrong, and He would have if he had created the bad and the unrighteous, how could man be blamed for being bad and unrighteous, for it would be God who has made man as he is.
The good and the righteous are those men who are free of what is bad and unrighteous. This would mean such men should be free of duality. Are there men who are free of the duality of the mind? Could the mind be free of duality? The good and the righteous need the mind to relate with the bad and the unrighteous and to preach to them the fundamentals of goodness and righteousness. In order to do so they would need to know what is bad and unrighteous. So there could never be any man who is free of what is bad or unrighteous from the mind. If life is such, how could there be anyone who is really good and righteous?
Man needs to understand that the world is illusory, as the sages say it is, because life is a process of transformation of energy, which is light, and this process projects an optical and auditory illusion. The world is not infested with actions and situations which are bad and unrighteous, which man needs to avoid, or not do, and strive to be good and righteous. He needs to understand that life is timeless and thoughtless. He needs to understand that to do good or bad he would need time and mind in life, while both are absent from life. Life is a singular, spontaneous, uncontrollable and unpredictable transformation of intelligence or God.
It is thought the spiritual or religious people are good and righteous. It is strange to observe that it is they who preach continuously to do good and be righteous. If they were really good and righteous would they say that the other is bad and unrighteous? Would this proclamation not prove that they are equally bad and unrighteous as the accused? The accuser, the accusation and the accused are one and the same. Everything and every body is divine for all are forms and expressions of God.
He or she is wise who realises that man did not need a functioning mind for life to go on during the prehistoric period. The mind was manifested by God to project an illusion that man is the doer, speaker and thinker. The conviction ‘I think’, ‘I speak’ and ‘I do’ escapes no man, including the spiritual or religious. It is the spiritual and the religious who think that man is the doer. It is understandable if man believes that he is the doer, speaker and the thinker, but for the religious and the spiritual to say that man does, speaks and thinks is a contradiction that God is everywhere. It is God who appears as the good and the righteous and the bad and unrighteous as well to maintain the duality of the mind.
The good and the righteous have less of the bad and the unrighteous, and the bad and the unrighteous have less of the good and the righteous. The good and the bad, the righteous and the unrighteous are one and the same: they are just two extremes of energy united and in union, and not separate, as they are made out to be. Every generation has the good and the righteous and the bad and unrighteous as well, and every coming generation too will have its share of it. They will be present in every generation, and life makes it happen so that an understanding may happen to man that they are illusory and not anything physically real. The real is that which does not change and is eternal, and that is life, light or God and not actions, situations and speech or thought, which change and are temporary, for they are an optical and auditory illusion of light and sound and this is what makes life an illusion.
Those who blame, and there are plenty of them around, are those who have a superficial understanding of life. Man does not become good or righteous by branding others as bad or unrighteous. He has merely exposed his mind as being bad or unrighteous. Thinking in terms of bad and unrighteous amounts to being just as guilty as the accused. The accuser, the accusation and the accused are one and the same. Spiritualists, who speak of a new world, a new earth and universal peace, have not understood that the world is always new and fresh every moment, and that life is free of the mind and is, therefore, peaceful and harmonious every moment. Spiritualists have not understood that every technique, no matter how popular it may be, is nevertheless illusory and has to be in an illusory world. Life is intelligent because it appears as the spiritualists and their behaviour to maintain its illusory world. Every moment the real and the illusory are present, the real reflecting the illusory. Life is a manifestation of light and sound.
Life knows how to preserve its illusion because, if the illusion disappears, the world cannot be appreciated. It is only the illusory that can be appreciated and never the real. The real can never be admired for the admirer, the admiring and the admired are one and the same. Life’s intelligence cannot be comprehended by the limited mind. Life makes the mind think in terms of eliminating the bad and the unrighteous, and the very attempt to eradicate them maintains the bad and the unrighteous. The world man experiences is a world of thoughts, and so too are actions that are good or bad, spiritual or religious. This makes all experiences just thoughts in the mind and not a reality. Understand that you have blamed God by blaming man for being bad and unrighteous, for the bad man is an expression of God and this is why such thoughts happen to man, so that he may understand. God has many forms and they appear to the mind as sometimes good and sometimes bad. Life is timeless, thoughtless and actionless, without individuals and the mind. Life does not need the mind to go on – it sophisticates itself, and that is its intelligence.
Man blames, argues, hates, criticizes, doubts and is jealous of those who are his own. How could such a man think that he is good and righteous when he says he is and expects others to be? This is applicable even to the spiritualists and the religious, and no man is free of it as the mind is the same in everyone. God has made the mind the same (as far as its functionality goes) so that man may understand that no one is better than the other. So, the idea of goodness and righteousness is and always will remain an idea within the mind - just a mere thought.
The present moment where man is alive is timeless and thoughtless and this is why enlightenment is possible to happen to man. Enlightenment is timeless and thoughtless, which means that the mind is absent in the present, but it constantly and convincingly reports to man what is currently happening to him in the present, and what he should do to achieve enlightenment. How could this be possible? The mind just tells a story of a singular, timeless and thoughtless movement, which is life, and a very interesting and convincing story at that. The understanding that the mind is a storyteller is enlightenment, and not the efforts or the propaganda to be good or righteous, which is, after all, just a story narrated by life. Such is life’s intelligence!
© Copyright V.S. Shankar, 2008