Message #29460

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The Bhagavad Gita
Royal Science of God-Realization
commentary by Parmahansa Yogananda

II:16
"Of the unreal, there is no existence. Of the real, there is no nonexistence. The final truth of both of these is known by men of wisdom.

The senses say that the flower that was never born has shed no fragrance; things that were never real have ever been nonexistent. But the garden rose, by its fragrance, and the stars, by their twinkle in the sky, proclaim their reality. The seers of truth, however, known them all to be equally unreal; for the rose will fade away, and many a distant star whose glimmer dots the heavens has long since ceased to be. Could something become nothing? Possessors of wisdom perceive as real only That which changes not- the Essence that became the star and the idea of the flower in the poets mind. The wise alone know the mystery of the real and the unreal.

*'All objects... are fictions: chimeras of the mind. It is our left [brain] hemispheres... that trick us into seeing sheep, trees, human beings, and all the rest of our neatly compartmentalized world. We seek out stability with our reasoning consciousness, and ignore flux... Through this classifying and simplifying approach we make sections through the stream of change, and we call these sections 'things.' And yet a sheep is not a sheep. It is a temporary aggregation of subatomic particles in constant motion- particles which were once scattered across an interstellar cloud, and each of which remains within the process that is the sheep for only a brief period of time. That is the actual, irrefutable case...
'We slip so easily into the habit of assuming that what we see and feel in our minds is what is actually going on outside ourselves, beyond the portal of the senses. After all, we are only inches away from the borders of this seemingly familiar land. But there are no colors out there, no hot or cold, no pleasure or pain. Although we experience the world as a series of sensory objects, what actually comes to our senses is energy in the form of vibrations of different frequencies: very low frequencies for hearing and touch, higher frequencies for warmth, and higher still for vision... The radiations we pick up trigger neural codes that are made by the brain into a model of the external world. Then this model is given subjective value, and by a trick of the brain, projected outward to form the subjective world. That inner experience is what we habitually equate with external objectivity... But it is not objective... All of perceived reality is a fiction.' -Equations of Eternity: Speculations on Consciousness, Meaning, and the Mathematical Rules that Orchestrate the Cosmos, by David Darling, Ph.D. (New York: Hyperion, 1993).

The ordinary individual considers matter as real (because manifest); he ignores the Spirit as unreal (because hidden). This delusion enshrouds him in ignorance and suffering. The wise man tears aside the appearance of delusive creation and, perceiving the Everlasting Reality, is permanently happy.