The confused Prince, trying to solve the riddle, is helped here by the Kingly Teacher in Krishna who gives him a vivid example. To imagine a substance that exists everywhere, allowing everything to exist in it, but at the same time, it in itself not getting conditioned by the things that exist in it, is very difficult, and the ordinary intellect cannot easily soar to comprehend those heights of understanding and appreciation. As a prop for the ordinary intellect, to raise itself up so that it may peep over its own limitations and gain a vision of the unravelling expanse of the Infinite, here is a brilliant example.
The gross can never condition the subtle. As the poet sings, “Stone walls do not a prison make,” for, even though we may imprison the body of the prisoner, his thoughts are ever free to reach his kith and kin at their hearth. The gross stone walls cannot limit the flight of the subtle thoughts. If once this principle is well understood the example becomes very expressive exhibiting all its secret suggestions.
KNOW YOU ARJUNA, that the winds curl, swirl and whirl around everywhere in space; the space supports and envelopes them everywhere, and yet, they do not ever limit the space. This beautiful example, when meditated upon by any seeker, if he has at least an average amount of intellectual comprehension, will enable him to define, in his own mind, the right relationship that exists between the Self and the non-Self. The Real supports the unreal; the unreal seemingly lives… through its history of misery and sorrows, fleeting joys and passing pleasures… in the Real and yet, the unreal can never condition the Real. When the wind is moving, the space need never move. None of the qualities of the wind is the quality of the space (Akasha). Compared with the outstretching Infinite space, in which the universes keep on revolving, at a speed measured in light years, the atmospheric disturbances are only upto the height of a few miles off the surface of the globe. In the infinite vastness of the Real, the arena of disturbances caused by Its flirtations with Its own assumed self-ignorance, is only a negligible area… and even there, the relationship between the false and the Real is the relationship between the fickle breeze and the Infinite space.
These two are stanzas not merely to be explained away by words, however true the commentator may be; they are to be meditated upon by the students, individually.
THEN WHAT ABOUT YOUR WONDERFUL THEORY OF A SYSTEMATIC LAW OF REBIRTH — THE STORY OF A CREATOR CREATING THE WORLD DURING HIS DAY-TIME — AND DISSOLVING THE ENTIRE LOT DURING HIS NIGHT-TIME, ETC.
?… LISTEN:
