Once Sri Ramakrishna said of an experience of his that suddenly a boy came out of his body, a sixteen-year-old boy with a shining form; he also became a sixteen-year-old boy, and the two began to run and play for a long time. He said there came a mist of joy; the whole world vanished away, and they played like this. You might think that was some kind of fantasy. Nothing of the kind. Divine nature has a tendency to see Itself magnified in infinite forms. That is what creation is. He is the One, He sees Himself reflected in an infinite number of forms; that is His joy. Just as a vain person will surround himself with mirrors, look at his reflections all around him, and admire his eyebrows or lips or eyes and curl his hair like this or like that that is what the Lord is doing. That’s the great fun.
You think that only the foolish enjoy such fun? Everybody is doing it; you understand another person to the extent that you see yourself reflected there. Do you see anything more than your own reflection in another person? You don’t. That is why Christ said, Judge not that ye be not judged.’ When you say, There is a bad man’, you are saying, The badness of my mind is comprehending the badness there’, and thereby you are being judged. You are not judging the other person, you are judging as much of yourself as you can catch in the other form. Everything is one’s own reflection, a judgement of oneself. Can you deny this? If you think deeply, you cannot deny it.
That is the mystery of the whole creation: we are the One. We are seeing the dead part of our being as matter, dead matter. The ferocious part we are seeing as tigers and lions and so on. There is a good part also; we are seeing it as saints. That is what is happening. If you go deep, deep down and investigate all the layers of your mind and see how consciousness functions in each of these levels, you will be astonished. Some part of this mind is creating this vast universe; another part is creating the gods. We are all seeing ourselves in so-called others. There are no others, there are just infinite forms projected, in which we have reflected ourselves; that is all we are doing. This is the idea.
So Vedantists say since everything is really an incarnation of divinity, if some incarnation smiles back at us and says, Yes, here I am; what do you want? Come on!’ then he becomes the Divine Incarnation. And why not? Why not? All the talk about prophets who laid down the law, all the struggles, and all the conceptions that we are steeped in ignorance all these ideas belong to a lower vision of ourselves a lower vision which we can at this moment discard, because everyone is capable of a higher vision now. Even the greatest sinner can say, Lord, I am a miserable sinner; I know You are my only hope.’ In that very statement the miserable sinner has access to the higher vision. He may not use this grand language, I am God’, but when he says, You are the only one I have’, he is making the same statement. So you see, anyone is capable of having a higher vision, only he may use different language. The moment he has that vision, the whole world changes for him.
