He is on the staff of a large hospital as a fulltime senior doctor, and saw patients at home before he went to the hospital in the morning – private practice. I made a social visit to a doctor sometime last year. But that does not reduce his smile or the cheerfulness in his voice. In winter, he would be shivering inside the old windcheater he wears. His clothes will be drenched in spite of the raincoat and inside the clothes, his body will be drenched. In the rainy season he wears a rain coat and goes from house to house to deliver the milk, stopping his bicycle in front of each house and getting down to walk to the front door.
It may be peak winter, as it is now, or it may be raining torrentially as it was a couple of months ago – but he invariably greets me with a cheery good morning as he comes to deliver milk packets every day without fail. In contrast, one of the happiest faces I have seen is that of my milkman Ketan. These are the two birds – dvā suparṇā.I know an executive whose income runs into several lakhs per month and yet rarely have I seen him smiling. Let the Universal be there what does it matter to us? So this bird that is eating the sweet fruit does not even know that another bird is sitting here, as it is so much engrossed in the indulgence of the bliss, joy, pleasure of eating the sweet fruit. Because we are eating the sweet fruit of life, we are very busy indeed.
Do we know that? Has anybody had time to think like this? No. Has anyone time to believe that there is a universal ocean at the back of our consciousness? We are floating on the sea of Absolute Being. So-and-so – this body, that body, this individual, that individual, performing this work and that work. But when we wake up, we are once again the jiva, the fruit-eating bird in this world tree of samsara, and not even conscious that there is another bird sitting there, always uncontaminated.Īre we aware that we have a universal background in us? No, never. So intense is the joy of sleep that we want to go to sleep again and again. In the deep sleep state, we land ourselves on it, as it were, and feel the bliss of it so intensely that we do not like to wake up in the morning. Because consciousness cannot be located only in one place, cannot be divided into parts, cannot have fractions, it is therefore Universal. The detached consciousness, unconnected with these, is Ishvara himself because the general consciousness we experience in the state of deep sleep unconnected with the senses, body, and mind is Universal in its nature. Consciousness connected with the sense organs, mind and body is the jiva, the individual, so-called. The very consciousness that is contaminated by the body, mind and sense organs becomes jiva. That is the Ishvara-tattva that is in us. It is not connected with body, mind and sense organs. That is the uncontaminated detached consciousness in us.
There is some minimal awareness, consciousness qua being, as it is called, which is our essence that existed in deep sleep, and that is responsible for our memory of the fact of our having existed yesterday also. So who told us that we existed yesterday? The body cannot know anything it is unconscious, and the mind and the senses were not functioning in sleep. This consciousness of our being the same person that we were yesterday is not the action of the mind, not of the sense organs, not the body. It stands uncontaminated even in the state of deep sleep and enables us to regain our consciousness of the identity of personality when we awake the next morning and feel that we are there. The detached consciousness in us is called Kutastha- Chaitanya. So there are two phases of experience going on in one’s own body: a consciousness that is totally detached, and a consciousness that is very much involved. The bird that is eating the sweet fruit of this tree is the individual soul, the mind-body complex. This unattached bird is God, Ishvara, seated in your own heart and everywhere in this world. It is merely looking on, unconcerned and unattached. The only difference is, one of these birds is busy enjoying the delicious fruit that is of the tree and the other bird is not interested in eating anything. And they enjoy their existence on the tree. These are compared to birds living on a single tree which is this vast creation. They are friends. They are inseparable siblings, one connected with the other perpetually. Ishvara (God) and Jiva (living beings) are present in the world of creation as well as in the human body. This tree of life may be either this body of the individual, or it may be the entire creation itself. There are two birds in this tree of life.