For some actor who has been crazily walking the streets thinking he is indeed the poor beggar that he acted in the film, how much grateful would he be to the psychiatrist who treats him to realise his true wealthy original personality? The same is the joy experienced by the student in Vivekachoodamani by Sri Adi Sankaracharya.
The seeker here has been believing that his life of sorrow in a giant dream filled with the scenery of a forest of illusion where there is birth, old age and death. He is roaming in the three-dimensional live film set, tortured and crushed by different maladies every day, bitten by the tiger called ego which forces the mind to identify itself with the limitations of the body. The teacher out of his limitless compassion wakes him up from the deep sleep in this dream forest called ignorance. The student pays his gratitude to such a teacher with repeated prostrations.
Repetition is the mark of exhilarated adulation. The seeker dips his words in the cool syrup of reality when he says, “Salutations to You, that is always One who has come in the form of my teacher, shining at the same time in all names and forms of this Universe.”
To that student who is talking from the grateful ecstasy of self-realisation, the king of all teachers whose heart encompasses all creation with love, addresses the student again. This whole universe is an uninterrupted thought form of the expansive Brahman. Look at it from any direction, it is the same reality.
Learn to see this truth with the eye of intuition and a calm mind in all states of existence—waking, dream and deep sleep. Is there anything else that the one endowed with the power of clear vision left to see all around other than the forms of the trees, plants, animals, humans and the landscape? In the same way for the one who has realised the Truth, there is no other experience in the understanding than that one Truth which has this universe as its field of play through the five sense objects of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching, and emotions and thoughts.
Is there any wise person who will give up a life of experiencing the taste of the supreme bliss for some little empty pleasures through paltry trinkets? Will someone go around hugging the picture of a painted moon when the real moon is out there shining in its brilliant glory?
There is not an iota of joy or destruction of sorrow for the one who is enjoying illusory objects of untruth. So my dear student, experience eternal contentment by tasting the bliss of non-duality by being ever established in your own Self, blesses the teacher.