Man’s attachments prevent him from the physical world like the Lilliputians hunt Gulliver in the ancient story until he becomes hopelessly attached to material unreality. Of all the things that hinder his usefulness in this world, there are none that enslave him so much as his senses, for instead of enlightening him they bind him in endless entanglements until he learns to extract from them their essence rather than admitting their shortcomings.
People have been trying for ages to untangle this knot of human destiny Alexander the Great He loses all patience and cuts the tangle with one blow. This sharp steel discrimination and its bright blade separates truth from falsehood, for the horn from discrimination is the divine reason that proves to man the illusion of materiality.
Man must learn to divide, deep in his soul, the eternal quest from the fleeting fancy, and the ability to do this lies in his level of skill. The initiate learns to move consciously from mortal maya to immortal nirvana, who rests firmly in eternal reality and whose consciousness merges with the eternal meditator. As such one is free from all attachment and Attachment to details is the basis of limitation.
Let us go into the world and study the curse of attachment as it stalks like the spirit of death, whose essence, in our world, is those who receive it or those who fall victim to the mirror of the object that carries it, so the ancient Aztec said, in his stomach. In their legend, the demon floated over the universe as a great flame and those who looked into this cursed mirror lost their souls. So all those who stop to look at themselves in the mirror of illusion become entangled in illusion which gradually destroys all who are not free from their vanity.
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It is said that there are two worlds floating in space – the world of temporary things and the world of eternal things. The human soul lies in the material world, subject to oblivion in the bonds of matter. He lives for today alone, he serves fleeting fancy, he struggles to hold on to illusions and then crumbles as the hand of infinite law slowly dissolves visible things into unknown realities.
As for the material universe, its entire workings are resolved into the unknown, those souls still bound to its spinning wheel by crystallized thought, and animal desires dissolve with it when the sage, perfect in perception, though he is free from illusion, passes into his already realized Nirvana.
Many in this world, in fact almost all, are struggling to break free from being chained by thought, action and desire, and in their mindless efforts become more involved with the problem they seek to eliminate. Man cannot climb the path to liberation and still serve the bonds that restrain him on earth, so the ancients taught, as the first step to immortality, the realization of the unreality of death – not that the objective universe did not exist but that it existed only as a means to an end and as such should be accepted, considered and mastered but never.
Attachment is the root of misery, the guardian of guilt, the motivator of lust and the causeless cause of limitation. Man has to fight this by realizing one great truth – that attachment to matter is renunciation of the soul and attachment to the soul is renunciation of matter. It is written that man cannot serve God (spirit) and mammon (matter).
The sage is freed by the realization of immortal reality and the fool is imprisoned by accepting the immortality of objects.
The ancient prophet, wandering the earth, cried out in his agony,
“There is no rest among the children of the earth, no peace in the cities of the plain or in the castles among the mountains! O God, deliver me from this moral mire which grips me with its stony fingers and condemns me to death the day I was born. Alas, unhappy fate! Who can kill and kill again”!
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Take your staff here and walk with me among the children of the earth, like the tribes of Israel bowed long beneath the rod of Egypt’s blackness. Attachment is the rod and flail that binds man’s back with the red sheaf of mortal pain. It is the heartless slave driver who pursues souls and breaks the heart of every soul that falls victim to his tricks. Yet from this land of darkness comes new races, Sorrows are born, and light is lost and widowed; From matter emerges the soul victorious which spreads its wings and soars upward to the freedom of reality.
There is only one consciousness and it is not in matter; There is only one truth and that is the realization of immortal holiness; There is only one search, the search for reality; There is only one reward and that is the achievement of reality; There is only one devotion and that is the love of reality; There is only one sin, the loss of reality; There is only one death, that is the death of reality.
When the clouded soul of man loses sight of the shining star of truth under the veil of illusion, just as the old cloud hides the body of the deity, so the cloud of attachment covers the truth with the cloak of limitation.
Let us notice the people whom we daily enslave to attachment, crushed by ignorance of the will of the planner or the wisdom of the plan. They are little better than beasts who know not when or why, but, like little puppets in a shadow show, follow the string they set upon themselves.
Karta is far from these, strong in truth and steadfast in reality, and when he comes to earth he does not bring peace but a sword, its blade sharpened by the grinding of the eternal wheel, sharpened to cut the veil of illusion and divide falsehood from truth. Now look at the ghosts we call men and women who live in material death while still alive.
First, love comes with bowed head and tear-stained face, Today those who fly like moths round its holy flame Sink broken-hearted at its altar’s foot. The price of love in the world today is loneliness and sorrow because we have not learned to uncover the mystery that love is of the soul, not of the body.
Attachment to Form Today is the measure and form of affection, the boundary of immortality Below that line there is no rest, no peace.
Then comes pride, a deity worshiped by many. Man fights and dies to rise above and gather around himself things that others cannot attain, but when victory seems to come the hand of eternity sweeps everything away and crushes the soul with its broken dreams.
Then vanity, which seeks to beautify the unreal and leaves the living truth embellished. It adorns flowers and stones that already bow before the glittering array of filth and worthlessness.
After this, Lust appears in the role of a human but with the soul of an animal. It destroys the thing it loves, kills the soul it claims to worship, and seeks to answer the divine call of the soul with the call of the physical senses.
There is a cloud over man’s soul and he does not know where he must go and he does not understand the path that will lead him there. He seeks entrance where angels dare not tread but is unwilling to cut with the sharp blade of non-attachment the cord that binds him to the great illusion. He longs for heaven but is still chained to earth with every fear, every habit and every desire.
This is the story of Vedanta, the unreal philosophy. For thousands of years, it has been taught that the soul is a real thing – and that as it gathers around itself ever-changing bodies it changes in the eyes of mortal man, but its life is always the same. With a keen sense of discrimination, man finds peace in seeing not the fleshly failure of the body, but the noble effort of the soul. There is nothing in his soul to fill the emptiness of a heartless world until he finds it and accepts it.
Santa Claus’s gifts come down through the hearth, so man’s gifts to the soul come out of the flame of sorrow that tempers the steel of the soul’s sword. Experience contains infinite possibilities – man’s free will must choose to experience beyond comfort through this path to the unfoldment of the human soul.
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Source: “The All-Seeing Eye” magazine by Manley P. Hall
Featured image from Deposit Photo
