Parables of Rama
by Swami Rama Tirtha | 102,836 words
Stories in English used by Swami Rama to illustrate the highest teaching of Vedanta. The most difficult and intricate problems of philosophy and abstract truths, which may very well tax the brains of the most intellectual, are thus made not only simple and easy to understand but also brought home to us in a concrete form in such an interesting and ...
Two boys came to a master and wanted him to instruct them in religion. He said that he would not teach them unless he had examined them. Well, he gave them two pigeons, one to each, and asked them to go out and kill the pigeon at some retired place where nobody might see them. One of them went straight into the crowded thoroughfare. Turning his back to the people who were passing through the streets and putting a piece of cloth over his head, he took up the pigeon, wrenched its neck and came back straightway to the teacher and said, "Master, master (Swami, Swami) here is your order carried out." The Swami enquired, "Did you strangle the pigeon when no one was seeing you?" He said, "Yes." "All right; lot us see now what your companion has done."
The other boy went out into a deep, dense forest, and was about to twist the neck of the pigeon, and lo! There were the gentle, soft and glittering eyes of the pigeon looking him straight in the face. He met those eyes and in this attempt to break the neck of the pigeon, he was frightened, the idea struck him that the condition laid upon him by the master was a very trying, hard one. Here the Witness, the Observer, is present even in this pigeon. "Oh, I am not alone! I am not in the place where no one will see me I am being observed. Well, what shall I do? Where shall I go?" He went on and on, and retired into some other forest. There also when he was about to commit the act, he met the eyes of the pigeon, and pigeon saw him, the Observer was in the pigeon itself.
Again and again he tried to kill the pigeon: over and over again he tried, but did not succeed in fulfilling the conditions imposed upon him by the master. Broken hearted, he came back reluctantly to the master and laid the pigeon alive at the feet of the Swami and wept and wept and cried: "Master, master (Swami, Swami), I cannot fulfill this condition. Be kind enough to impart the knowledge of God to me. This examination is too trying for me. I cannot bear this examination. Please be merciful, have mercy on me and impart to me divine knowledge. I want that, I surely need it." The master (Swami) took up the child, raised him in his arms, caressed and patted him, and lovingly spoke to him; "O, dear one, even as you have seen the Observer in the eyes of the bird that you were going to slay, even so, wherever you may happen to go, and where you are moved by temptation to perpetrate a crime, realize the presence of God, realize the Observer, the Witness in the flesh and in the eyes of the woman for whom you crave. Believe or realize that your Master sees you even in her eyes. My Master sees me.
Act as if you were always in the presence of the Great Master, ever face to face with the Divinity, all the time in the sight of the Beloved.
MORAL: Sin is committed only when God's presence is not realized; hence to cease from perpetrating crime, one should realize the Divine presence everywhere and at all times.