Darshan with Swami Krishnananda during 1997

by Swami Krishnananda

30. God-Realisation and the World

(Darshan given on May 25th, 1997.)

A visitor: You said that in God-realisation the world is like a dream, so that the whole world is vanishing like the dream is vanishing after waking up. On the other hand, you said that the leaves cannot fall down from the tree without the sanction of the Supreme.

Swamiji: Right.

Visitor: But that means that in God-realisation, you are not aware of leaves and trees, so you exclude them.

Swamiji: The leaf becomes God Himself. There is no leaf at that time. The leaf enters into God's being. The leaf becomes conscious. There is no tree at that time. They will all melt into the consciousness of God. There is no tree at all; it doesn't exist at all. It is only an illusion that you are seeing, and they will all melt down afterwards and become one vast ocean of existence. Even yourself, you will vanish completely into it. There will be no person to put a question afterwards. Only God is. He is looking at it, looking at Himself in that tree, mountain; everybody is going inside.

Visitor: But is it completely vanishing inside?

Swamiji: It will vanish into it. It is not vanishing; it gets absorbed into it, just as the dream objects get absorbed in waking consciousness. They are not vanishing; they are still there, but they are now operating through the waking mind instead of the dreaming mind. They cannot vanish. Nothing can vanish, but they get transmuted, transformed into a higher level, just as all the objects in dream get transformed in the waking consciousness. That's why you are not having any attachment to objects of dream, because they are all inside the waking mind. And so also is the case of God-consciousness, Universal-consciousness. When you attain that state, nothing in the world will attract you afterwards because it will be like the dream world. Whatever you are feeling now about the dream world, that you will feel about the waking world in that condition.

There are three stages of ascent. One is the dream world, another is the waking world, and the third is a transcendent experience. The transcendent one absorbs the waking condition as the waking condition absorbs the dream condition. It is a stage-by-stage ascent until you reach that where everything is absorbed into itself, and you will not find anything outside afterwards. It is a total experience, holistic, where you won't be existing afterwards. You are inside That. So only one thing is thinking; Pure Being itself is conscious of itself. When God alone is, you will not think of trees and all that. The trees have gone inside it already. Pure Being is conscious of itself: I am what I am.

Visitor: Then in the world of fantasy of…

Swamiji: What is the world? Which world? This world will not be there at that time. Just as the dream world is not there in waking, this will not be there in the cosmic mind. What has happened to the dream world? Where it is now? It has gone inside your mind. The same thing will happen. The whole world will go into that cosmic mind. So nobody will be there to think of this world.

Visitor: But the Supreme is acting in this world.

Swamiji: Is the waking mind acting in the dream world or not? Is the waking mind acting in the dream world? If you say yes, then God is working through the waking mind. If you say no, then you can say it is not working. When you are dreaming of things, do you believe that the waking mind is working? Or it is not working? In one way yes, in one way no. There is no waking, dream at that time. It is transcendent consciousness.

Your mind cannot grasp it because you are not able to think without the externality impulse in your mind. You always think of something outside. That outside becomes inside there, and becomes universal. I gave the simple example: Whatever happens to the objects in dream when you are awake, that will happen to the world of waking when you reach God. Do you feel that you have lost something when you have woken up? Perhaps you were a king in dream. “Now I am a little poor man sitting here. I have lost my kingdom.” Do you feel like that? You feel it is a foolish thing. This you will feel there. It doesn't exist at all. The mind itself vanishes. It is Pure Being.

Visitor: But we speak about the Almighty also.

Swamiji: That is the same thing. What you call transcendent experience is called the Almighty. It is another name that you are giving.

Visitor: Almighty means Almighty in dream.

Swamiji: In dream also you are almighty only because you have got control over the things. You may be having a lot of land in dream, you may be a king, you may be having so many servants, you have a lot of money in dream, so you have got control. But when you wake up, you find it is not there because they are external projections of the waking mind. The same thing will happen in transcendental consciousness. All the values of life, including whatever thick walls, buildings, sun, moon, stars, they all get absorbed into that consciousness. They are not vanishing; they get absorbed into it, so that it is inclusive of whatever you are considering as valuable here. The mind is also not existing there because, as you say, it is not psychological because the mind is not existing. It is only Pure Being, consciousness of Pure Being as such. Unless your mind is purified, you will not be able to understand this. You must purify your mind first. Otherwise, headache will come. It can cause headache.

There was a person who tried to meditate like this, but he had an impure mind. The mind was not pure. So the mind, which was having submerged desires concerning this world but consciously the desires were not visible, started meditating on the absoluteness of Consciousness. That gave him such a kick, like a huge electromagnetic field giving a shock to a man who goes near it, that he lost his senses completely, and he came here. I saw him. He was doing like this [shaking his head from side to side].

I said, “Why are you doing like that?”

He said, “I tried to meditate that all is Consciousness. The moment I started doing that, this happened to me. I got a blow on the head. Now I am doing like this.” He asked me, “What am I to do now?”

I said, “You stop your meditation. Eat well, sleep well. Forget all this spirituality and God and everything. For one month you don't do anything. After one month you will be all right. But don't start this meditation because you are not prepared for it. Only an electrical engineer can climb the electric pole. Suppose a layman climbs, he will get a shock and die there. You cannot touch a live wire, but engineers can touch it. Likewise, this is a kind of live wire, high-voltage. You should not play jokes with it unless you are insulated properly with purity of mind and strength of will, and without any kind of turmoil in the emotions. You must be a perfectly integrated person, very happy and very strong, fully satisfied: 'I want nothing.' Then this trouble will not take place. So don't be in a hurry.”