The Self is like Waking Up
Author: Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami
Description: The Realization of Parasiva is like waking up from a dream during which you were dreaming that you weren't the Self. But you were all along. Claim it. Tamil word for home, veedu, also means liberation. It's like coming home. This is monism. Lesson 315 from Living with Siva talks about worshiping God Siva as the God of love. This is theism. We need to become beings of love.
Transcription:
We are dreaming, we are dreaming, we are dreaming that we are not Parasiva, that we are going to realize Parasiva sometime in the future. But realizing Parasiva is like waking up. We say, "Oh, you know, I was already Parasiva! I was just dreaming that I was not." It is like that. We just have to claim it. We have to step beyond time and space, step out of the concept that we have to do something, then something else and then something else in order to realize it. It is like when we are traveling in a dream, we just have to wake up. Very simple and we find we are home.
There is an interesting Tamil word, 'vidu', which means both home and liberation for some reason. Same word, that is unusual for a word to mean liberation and also home. So you are going along and you are reading something and it says, "vidu" and you say, "What are they talking about a house for?" No, it doesn't mean house. It is liberation, in that sense.
It works perfectly with this analogy because in both cases we end up 'vidu'. We end up home or liberated, almost the same thing.
That is our monism as Gurudeva says sometimes. "We close our eyes and we are monists. Open our eyes and we are theists." So, in this case we are moving on to Lesson 315 from 'Living with Siva'. "I urge all Saivites, devotees of God Siva to worship Him as the God of Love and, in doing so, to become beings of love. The great saints of our religion were Siva bhaktars. They changed the world through their love of God Siva." Sounds like theism, we have switched to theism.
The phrase that struck me was, of course, the idea of loving God Siva. We say that all the time. But the phrase that struck me this morning as I read this was, 'become beings of love'. Step one, we worship God Siva. Step two, we develop a love of God Siva. And what happens in step three? We become beings of love. We are back in time and space, so things do work one step after another.
This is a very interesting idea, I never realized that phrase was used before, become beings of love. It relates to our next subject. "Holding the family together can be summed up in one word." Anybody care to guess? Love, right! Yes, love, there it is, love. "Love is understanding. Love is acceptance. Love is making somebody feel good about his experience. Love is giving the assurance that there is no need to keep secrets no matter what has happened. Love is wanting to be with members of the family."
Being a being of love, as we all are, as we are all trying to be, the family seems a natural place to perfect that. In our case, we have a monastic family. It too counts as a family. Holding the whole family unit together is summed up in the one word, love.
That is a wonderful topic, I think, to develop in the future. What does it mean to be a being of love? What is the yard stick? How can we measure how successfully we are being a being of love?
We had a very wonderful yard stick given by Gurudeva, on speech. It has to be true, kind, helpful and necessary. Very easy to tell if we are following that or not. Maybe if we look in Gurudeva's teachings, we can come up with the equivalent of that to see how well we are being a being of love. Because it is an important part of our Saiva Siddhanta, very important part.