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There
is one final episode I must tell before I complete the story of my
association with my Master.
Many years later, sitting on the banks of the Ganga,
I had an extraordinary vision of myself, the self that had been H.W.L.
Poonja, in all its various incarnations through time. I watched the self
move from body to body, from form to form. It went through plants,
through animals, through birds, through human bodies, each in a
different place in a different time. The sequence was extraordinarily
long. Thousands and thousands of incarnations, spanning millions of
years, appeared before me. My own body finally appeared as the last
one of the sequence, followed shortly afterwards by the radiant form of
Sri Ramana Maharshi. The vision then ended. The appearance of the
Maharshi had ended that seemingly endless sequence of births and
rebirths. After his intervention in my life, the self that finally took
the form of Poonja could incarnate no more. The Maharshi destroyed it
by a single look.
As I watched the endless incarnations roll by, I also experienced time
progressing at its normal speed. That is to say, it really felt as if
millions of years were elapsing. Yet when my normal consciousness
returned, I realised that the whole vision had occupied but an instant
of time. One may dream a whole lifetime but when one wakes up one knows
that the time which elapsed in the dream was not real, that the person
in the dream was not real, and that the world which that person
inhabited was not real. All this is recognised instantly at the moment
of waking. Similarly, when one wakes up to the Self, one knows instantly
that time, the world, and the life one appeared to live in it are all
unreal.
That vision by the Ganga
brought home this truth to me very vividly. I knew that all my lifetimes
in samsara were unreal, that the Maharshi had woken me up from this
wholly imaginary nightmare by showing me the Self that I really am. Now,
freed from that ridiculous samsara,
and speaking from the standpoint of the Self, the only reality, I can
say, ‘Nothing has ever come into existence; nothing has ever
happened; the unchanging, formless Self alone exists’. That is my
experience, and that is the experience of everyone who has realised
the Self.
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