The Lesson and the Reflecting Object

It is not sufficient if you study well, receive degrees, get good jobs and earn high salaries. Today people worship wealth. They earn a lot of money and as they amass it, they waste it by spending it on constructing tall buildings, buying cars and for other such selfish purposes. Wealth acquired through unfair means is also being spent off in similar unfair activities. Money comes today and goes tomorrow, moves from person to person. Your ancestors also earned a lot of money. But they used it for judicious, righteous and noble pursuits. They built shelters for passersby, dug wells to provide water and established educational institutions and health centers. You must spend hard earned money in righteous ways. Else, that money will cause a lot of tribulations in your family. 

   Baba (thought for the day) 

Until now I had no idea what is meant with it that people worship wealth and Baba has its own way to make us aware of it in the inner view, only I didn't expect that. Of course, we know that some people amass money and that it gets always more and it was Maharishi who said once, it is never enough and we should not think about money, just because of that reason, because it is never enough. So I never thought about it anymore, to get confronted with the opposite, I guess. That is always possible if we go in one extreme, what happens is that we attract the other side of it.

As my aim is to see those words in my own life, I just follow the thoughts coming up with it and first that needs the patience to do so to haven enough focus on it to be able to go deeper into it. If we don't do it, it is mostly because of lack of interest. The mind is directed outwards to the world and has not time and inclination to go and think about it.

The first obstacle we have to get over with is our own disinterest in spiritual matters, because our mind is too busy, too occupied,  too distracted, not calm enough, too restless, that seems to be the basic state of the mind, restlessness. As a horse is by nature shy, the mind of people is usually restless or flickering, wavering, so with meditation we get the mind more stable and calm and after all if we reach that it should even be possible to get to a peaceful mind.

So Baba tells us that people worship wealth and I had not long ago someone in my inner view, he was in the dream as a gold statue. That is not funny to see a person in gold.

The reflection of the inner view he called Pratibimba, the bimba is the object and the Pratibimba is the reflection of that object, now everything is an object only the reflection of it is not. If we paint a picture, it is again an object and it became the expression of an insight, but in the reality in our own consciousness it is like reading a book and the reflection tells us something in that book. It is like a new chapter opened up and the title the 'golden statue'.

If we focus on the observer on a certain time it will be present as his own reflection, but the observer is not an object, therefore, it will be the reflection of it as the higher self.

So that golden statue was the reflection of an object or a person or what he describes here, the reflection of worshipped wealth. It was a person in shiny beautiful glistening gold. That is how we get the idea in the inner view of it, if we do not have that experience, we might think, what does he mean with worshipping wealth? Could it mean that our believe has lost its value, money matters more than anything else? Probably it could.

But it means another thing, that we amass wealth. It is not enough to be wealthy until we are not only rich, but super-rich. So there is the question how we earned it by what means and how we use it and it is mostly selfish means, not for the benefit of others, but only for our own self to make it more shiny even and bright.

That is how it looked that statue of gold, amazing shiny, but nevertheless it was a statue of gold and not a person. In the inner view when Baba left the body, we went in the dream some days before he left the body down well and there was only little water left, what said that he would leave the body, but at that time I didn't understand it yet. Up we went that same well and on the mind level he dropped the body and it fell into dust and on the top was Krishna and his brother. It looked very beautiful, they walked together happily and Krishna's skin had a blue color and he was wearing yellow silk and his brother was normal color and he was wearing blue silk.   

God we think, God we are. Dust we think, dust we are. (Baba)  

If we worship wealth in the Bible we find it with the word Mammon and that a gold statue could be the personification of it feels also kind of awful, we have even a name for it, but for me it was just a picture or a statue or gold or color getting it all together, it is a Partibimba, the reflection of an existing object. It is a way of seeing it, no matter how we interpret it.  

When I went to Baba and I had an inner interview, he opened in the dream the door to the interview room and there was a beautiful light and it was golden, but it was the light and he was normal, he was just Baba and dressed in white. So he reflected the same way he looked in the Darshan, only the light was very different.

He also tells us to not put God in stone, if we project it into wealth, it is for sure in stone and why, because it is a relative value.

And Yogananda said that attachment to physical objects and that is a physical object, results in tragedy and as Baba calls it here, it will cause a lot of tribulation to our family. I guess my family is part of that as well.  

Money comes today and goes tomorrow, moves from person to person. Your ancestors also earned a lot of money. But they used it for judicious, righteous and noble pursuits. They built shelters for passersby, dug wells to provide water and established educational institutions and health centers. You must spend hard earned money in righteous ways. Else, that money will cause a lot of tribulations in your family. 

That is how we learn the lesson in thinking it over and by that we can absorb it and we begin to understand it. It is good to meditate, as I am meditating since a long time and I write, there is a means to look at it and by thinking it over it begins to make sense and when it does make sense, we have not anymore to fight the mind who doesn't want to go into spiritual matters, because it is directed towards the world.

The problem is not only to think it over, but to get our mind calm and settled and peaceful enough that it is able to think it over, even if we think maybe in our mind we do not have the time for it.

Meditation calms the mind down and it is easier to think it over and to get into spiritual matters.