HE WHO KNOWS ME — Not merely knowing in an emotional sweep, or even an intellectual comprehension, but it is a true and full spiritual apprehension, which comes to one during moments of one’s intimate identification with the Self. The Self is to be realised as UNBORN, BEGINNINGLESS, THE GREAT LORD OF ALL THE WORLDS.” These three terms, each pregnant with suggestions to those who know a little of the ancient traditions in the Hindu philosophical thought, are generally meaningless to the uninitiated. The world-of-matter is the realm of finitude, where, each being, or thing, or experience, has a beginning and an end, a birth and a death.
The Infinite cannot ever be born, inasmuch as It never expresses as Itself in any of the finite manifestations. The ghost is born, and therefore, it must also die; but it cannot be said either that the post has given birth to the ghost, or that thepost has come to be born out of the ghost. The post was, is, and shall ever be. The Self is Eternal, and therefore, It is birthless; everything else is born in the Self, exists in the Self, and when all things are totally destroyed, they end in the Self. The waves are born out of the ocean but the ocean is birthless. Every wave, every manifestation, has a beginning,an existence, and an end. But the essence cannot have a beginning, and therefore, in this stanza here, the Self is qualified as ‘BEGINNINGLESS.’
THE LORD OF ALL THE WORLDS (Sarva-loka-maheshwarah) — The term ‘loka’ is one of the Sanskrit words which has a vast range of implications which are ignored generally by the translators who render it as the ‘world.’ ‘Loka’ comes from a root meaning ‘to experience,’ and therefore, the world should, in its full import, mean ‘a field for experiencing.’ In this sense, we make use of the word ‘loka’ even in ordinary, everyday usage: ‘the WORLD of the rich,’ ‘the WORLD of the under-dog,’ ‘the WORLD of the poets,’ etc. In its ampler meaning, the Universe, indicated by the word ‘loka,’ is not only the physical world experienced by our physical equipments, but it also includes the world of feelings and the world of ideas recognised, reacted upon and experienced by all of us in our lives.
Thus, my ‘loka’ is the “field of experiences” that I revel in at all levels of my body, my mind and my intellect — and it is evident that these experiences can never be mine unless I am constantly aware of them. This Essential Factor, pure Awareness or Consciousness, without which I am dead to the world, with which I perceive the world and live in it actively, should necessarily be the Presiding Chieftain that rules with His Grace, my ‘loka.’
The Self being the same everywhere, the Atman that rules my world is the Atman that rules the worlds of all individuals. The entire universe is the sum total of the worlds of experience of each individual, and evidently, the ‘ruler’ that governs the entire Universe must necessarily be the Absolute Self Itself. The term ‘the Lord of the worlds’ is to be rightly understood thus. The Lord is not a “tyrant over life” or “a Sultan of the skies,” or an “Autocrat who rules over our world.” The Self is the Lord of our experiences, just as the Sun, in the same fashion, is the Lord of our daytime world.
HE WHO KNOWS ME AS BIRTHLESS, BEGINNINGLESS AND AS THE GREAT LORD OF THE WORLDS, ends his delusion. In and through the grinning ghost that frightened me, I gain a glimpse of the wayside lamp-post, and forthwith, I go beyond my delusion and find myself released from every fear. In Hinduism, the concept of sin is not a frightening picture of some horrid inevitability. Man is not punished FOR his sins but he is punished BY his sins. Sin is a self-insulting act arising out of a misunderstanding in the sinner as to his own identity.
When one wanders away from one’s own Real Nature as the Self, identifies oneself with the happenings of the world and behaves as a mass of repulsive flesh, or a bundle of throbbing emotions, or a pack of ideas, one is in a manner, dishonouring one’s Godly dignity and divine status, the One-without-a-second. Such acts and thoughts chain a person down to a pursuit of the low pleasures only, never allowing him to rise above and climb the higher peaks of real Perfection.
On re-discovering the nature of the Self and gaining thereby a perfect, and complete identification with the Self, he can no longer perpetrate any more of his past ‘sins.’ The ‘sins’ in us are the carbuncles from which we suffer the pains of our limitations and the sorrows of our bondage. The moment we understand and live in the realisation that the Self is unborn and beginningless, and that It is not concerned with decaying and perishable matter, we have gained all that has to be gained, and known all that has to be known. Such an individual of True Realisation becomes himself the “Lord-of-the-worlds.”
HOW IS THE SELF THE LORD OF THE WORLD?
