born with some divine knowledge. These are the four situations which make a person
to seek for liberation. Buddha was a prince. Everything was available to him. He had
a wife and son. Still he felt pain in all that power, property, name, fame, etc. He
renounced everything and traveled from place to place in order to seek for eternal
peace.
The commentary mentioned the pain of the unborn child. I don't understand what
kind of suffering there is in the womb.
When the child is in the womb, it becomes aware of pleasure and pain after the fourth
month. The derangement of humors of mother's body can cause pain to the baby.
What about playing violent video games or games on the computer? Is that a form of
violence?
There are so many violent games. Why children throw rocks on a frog pond? The
frogs are not harming anyone. You see violence is in human nature. That's why first
comes nonviolence in the five rules of yames. If you think of opposites of these five
rules of yamas, you will find the opposite of yama and niyama support our egocentric
existence. We want to feel our existence and we feel it in violence, pain, miseries,
selfishness, etc. If in doing good things, we don't feel pride, name and fame, then
only that selfless action reduces egocentric desires. We do good things and also want
everybody should know about it. In such good work with self-interest, we are not
releasing ourselves from the trap of ignorance. Children will play violent games as
long as they don't understand what violence is and how it is harming our mind by
creating violent memories.
I am wondering about the goal of life and liberation.
What is life? Life is our feeling of I-amness. What does it do? It creates an illusory
world for its self-interest. That brings pain and miseries. That state of mind brings the
idea of getting liberation. That's our goal. So the purpose of human life is 1)
experience which is natural, 2) getting liberation from all experience which we have
to attain by purifying our mind by living a virtuous life.
In the unfolding of the divine plan, even though there is more attachment, is it creating
the ability for the knower to know itself? Is there a divine plan?
Prakriti exists for the Purusha to be known by itself. Prakriti is for experience and that
experience creates pleasure, pain, attachment. When the mind starts seeing the cause
of pain, then it starts withdrawing from all pain-causing things. Divine plan is
experience and get liberation from all the experienced memories. We are nothing but
our memories. We don't know the future and the present is only a moment, so we are
living in our past memories. It's hard. But real. Watch your mind and you will notice
the past is chasing you all the time and everywhere. The knower is the conscious
principle. It doesn't need to know itself because it is only conscious principle inside
out. The embodied self which is rooted in the mind acts like the mind. That self needs
to achieve liberation from the mental experiences.
On the road to dispassion, is the realization that we have to remove all the pain, and
that pleasure is pain, is that what is causing the pain? If you realize that you're trying
to get liberation through dispassion and know that you have to let go of all this, does
that cause the pain?
If all the memories are totally forgotten, then you are liberated right there. Nirvana is
a term for liberation. Nir = without; vana = arrow, or pain causing. Freedom from
pain is nirvana. Attachment is that shackle which binds a being into ignorance.
Dispassion is that force which breaks the shackle into pieces and liberates the soul.
© 1998 Sri Rama Publishing
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