When we in the morning brush our teeth and we look in the mirror and then you say “Good morning handsome!”…you are looking at that familiar well known face: “I know this face”
No, you don’t know this face, it’s a new face that we are looking at, it is a face that we have never seen before in what we see in the mirror in the morning, but the changes from yesterday are so subtle that it is hard to notice – sometimes we notice:
’I never had this wart before, I never had hair growing out of my ears, my nose’
‘a new bag has appeared’ and so on...
Changes are there…-just like two pictures, find the seventeen differences between the two pictures – this kind of experience.
(One of the the Greek philosophers) said:
“You can not step in the same river twice.”
So this is our understanding and Dhruva had this understanding that everything in this world is a temporary always changing manifestation, including one’s body and therefore has no real meaning or of any significance.
There is an interesting letter of Bhaktisiddhanata that I like. It is describing that:
‘Hiranyakasipu, where ever he looked he couldn’t see the Supreme Lord and Prahlada was just the oppsite, wherever he looked he would see the Supreme Lord …….and we are in between!’
He places us in between of Hiranyakasipu and Prahlada which basically indicates that we have an attachment to Krishna and an attachment to the material world. Both! Therefore this exercise to look at the illusory nature of all the material manifestations, illusory in the sense that it is temporary, that is important and that we practice this exercise as part of our sadhana – that is part of our application of the philosophy.
We need to have a philosophical outlook which includes this Brahaman vision when we see this material energy.
(Kadamba Kanana Swami, Mayapur, November 2010)
