Life teaches you to believe that it is real. You feel you must have your food and sleep every day, that you will die without them. Your habits compel you to eat all kinds of foods that are harmful to you, such as meat, and to smoke and drink, and to think you can’t do without these things. We are all crazily dreaming different limitations on our consciousness, and when we slip into the rut of a bad dream of wrong behaviour, we have a hard time to pull ourselves out of it. Think how much time and effort you spend catering to the body? And what does it get you? Do you know that the more solicitous you are of your body, the more suffering you will have? If you are too much identified with this dream form, you become hopelessly immersed in delusion.
As soon as you ascribe reality to the dream thoughts out of which God created all things, that dream reality begins to punish you with dream suffering. But when you realise that God is everything in this universe, nothing hurts you anymore. If you realise that both water and the body are dreams of God, you can walk on the water as did Jesus- one dream form can walk on another dream form. There is no longer a barrier of difference between solids and liquids, or any other form of matter. But you have to realise this; such power does not come to you by mere imagining.
There are cases in India where people have walked on fire without a single blister. Some of the foremost scientists of England observed one young boy as he walked through twenty-seven feet of fire. A newspaperman who was present thought the fire a fake; he tried the same experiment and was badly burned. The young boy, by certain processes of thought, had convinced his mind of the truth that the fire was nothing but consciousness, and therefore could not harm the body, which was also consciousness.
When you believe that cold weather won’t hurt you, you won’t be affected by it. But if you feel you are going to catch a cold from the chill, you will. The thing is this: you don’t practise mind control. By controlling your mind you can experience the truth that this universe is a delusion. That is why the saints require their disciples to discipline the body and not give it too much attention. The purpose is not to torture the body, but to save the disciple from all the troubles that will beset him if he believes that comfort comes from material things. Comfort comes from the mind. Change your mental attitude and you will not feel discomfort.
Whenever you are attached to something, that possessiveness deepens your delusion. You will be rudely awakened one day to find that nothing belongs to you. Isn’t it silly, therefore, to be attached to things that were never yours in the first place? Your attitude should be that you were looking after these things only for the time being, like a housekeeper who lives in her employer’s home and devotedly, loyally, faithfully looks after it, but knows that her own home is elsewhere.
Extract from the book “Divine Romance” by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda.
