As one more hammer slam happens on our wrong thinking in Moha Mudgara by Sri Yogananda, the disciple of Sri Adi Shankaracharya, even the first line of the whole verse calls for a life-long contemplation to realise something which can never be told to someone else or described too. Such is the nature of the self.
So the Master asks us first to question who everyone else is and then come to a more direct and personal question, “Who am I?” These two alone we saw last week.
Now the remaining three lines of the verse are intriguing indeed. From where have I come? This seems to be an easy question to answer. From New Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Konark, Thiruvananthapuram or Mysore! The answer can be any place in the world. However, it is not a complete answer for this question. The many places we saw may be the birth place of the body in some hospital or home.
Where did that body come from? From parents of course! Yet the answer is not complete. The physical body has been given, nurtured by the parents with the seed that was tended and reared in the womb. Where did that seed come from? Where did that life in the seed come from?
It is a deep question that has no answer, but can be pondered about. In that process of pondering, the mind becomes quiet and slips into its most natural state of existence. That indeed is the end of our questioning—to experience that quietude within.
Some more questions the Master gives—Who is my mother? Who is my father? Well, even those answers are so easy you may say and mention the names of our parents. They are names. Who in reality are they?
Then you go through the same process of analysis reaching to their parents, grand parents and so on... The research can go ad infinitum, when out of sheer frustration you ask—well who are the first father and first mother in my lineage. No answer. Yet, the effort is not in vain. In that process, the mind becomes quiet.
Ultimately, the effort of such questioning from all sides—not just of you, your parents, extending up to your family, friends, relatives, colleagues, society, country and all the peoples of the world—up to the last blade of grass—keep questioning. From where it came from? What is the source? Who creates? Who nurtures? Who changes the existing form? Where does it go after existence.
The quest for the truth in the world will take you to the source of who you are—that silence of the self deep within.
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