Where is your movie playing?

A family in India lives in a village. The village is remote and has no electricity. The father goes to town on work and sees a movie for the first time and it happens to be a movie based on Mahabaratha, he is blown away by the realism of it. He feels his young son would be blown away equally, so he takes him to the movie. When they arrive the movie has already started. The theater is dark and they settle down. As expected the son is indeed blown away. Shortly after the war scene starts, the boy feels everything is happening in front of him. He turns to his dad and asks how is this happening, how did the people get there and so on. Dad asks his son to pay attention to the movie so that he does not miss anything. The son does it for a few minutes but is unable to contain his excitement. He is persistent. He asks…

“Dad, when did these people get here?”

“Son, what do you see?”

“I see people fighting”

“What do you see behind them”

“I see horses”

“What do you see behind the horses”

“I see many people fighting”

“What do you see behind them”

“I see arrows flying”

“What do you see behind the arrows”

“I can see a huge army of soldiers fighting”

(Father is very agitated that he cannot get his son to “see”)

“No, no, see all the way in the back. What do you see?”

“I see blue sky”

“What do you behind blue sky”

“Just blue sky!”

Father gives up and says “just continue to watch, I will explain later”.

Shortly after the intermission comes and the lights in the theater are turned on.

Dad asks “what do you see now”. Son says “There is nothing, it is all white!”. He comes to realize that everything he thought was real is just a reflection on the white screen.

Our mind is like the movie screen. Until the movie is playing one cannot see the screen. When thoughts are flowing through the mind you can identify only with the thoughts, when all thoughts have ended you come to realize that the mind is a mere projection of what you see. Gurudev famously says “Your eyes don’t see. If that is so you will leave one at home and another in the office to keep watch on both”. It is the mind that “sees” (rather perceives) not the eyes. Eye is only one organ of perception, skin (touch), nose (smell), tongue (taste) and ears (hearing) are the other organs of perception, it is the mind that perceives it all and not the organ you perceive through.

Suppose someone walks up to the projector and places a colored glass in front of the projector will the boy know that? The movie that he sees will now be colored by the glass. He will never know what the movie looks like without the colored glass because he has never experienced one without it. He is lost in the image that is being projected and will have no idea that there is a ever a colored glass. Similarly the vasanas “color” what is projected on to your mind. What you perceive is altered by your past impressions (vasanas), the likes and dislikes, your wants and needs and the attachments created by those vasanas. You have never “seen” (or perceived to be precise) what it looks like without the vasanas, because you were born with it and you continue to accumulate it, and above all you are oblivious to it.

Taking this further, the three equipments of life, the body, the mind and the intellect are three lenses through which you perceive the world. Through the body you perceive the world of objects, through the mind you perceive the world of emotions, through the intellect you perceive the world of thoughts. The individualized ego takes the role of a perceiver, feeler and thinker respectively but we are none of those. Like the movie screen each one is a projection, at any moment we identify ourselves with either body, mind or intellect because that is the movie that is playing at that moment.

Once the boy sees the screen he realizes at once and for all times that what he was a watching is a reflection and it is unreal. When he sees the next movie he knows that it is a reflection, he does not have to (and will not) go through the process of understanding again because the realization that it is a projection is realized once for all. He can still experience the movie with the understanding that it is a projection, it will not diminish his experience of watching the movie. Hence is our delusion caused by the vasanas, once we know what we perceive is a reflection of the mind we come to realize at once and for all what we perceive is unreal. You can still experience what is being projected with the understanding that it is unreal, it does not diminish your experience. In fact your experience is far richer because you now know you are merely playing the part when the movie is playing in the mind and you are merely the actor in the movie; you are free to experience it fully. You can enjoy the beauty of the reflection that takes place in your mind, the wonder of it all! With this knowledge you can now shift from one who is experiencing to one that is observing the experience, isn’t that wonderful?!

Let us move to the big question. If mind is the screen through which we are perceiving then where (or what) is the projector? Similar to the source that is illuminating the white screen what is that which is illuminating the mind? Here is the big answer…it is the Consciousness or Awareness. When we perceive the world of objects through the body the consciousness illuminates it by which we become “aware” of the objects. When we feel the world of emotions through the mind the consciousness illuminates it by which we become aware of emotions. When we think the world of thoughts through the intellect the consciousness illuminates it by which we become aware of thoughts. When we go beyond the equipments of life and beyond the vasanas that color it, you come to realize that which illuminates it all, the “Omkar”, the consciousness, the awareness, the atman or the God in us.

Salutations to Gurdev without Him illuminating our intellects the writing and understanding of the Truth is not possible.
Hari Om.
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For further reading and reflection:

The example of the son and father watching the movie was adapted from talk by Swami Sarvapriyananda, “Who Am I? according to Mandukya Upanishad” at IIT Kanpur, a profound talk on the four states of the mind (part 1, part 2)

To understand organs of perception and equipments of life watch Gurdev’s Logic of Spirituality DVD.

To understand vasanas and to understand the illusion of the mind read Gurdev’s Self-Unfoldment book chapters 11 (Vasanas) and 16 (Maya). Also chapter 5 on BMI.

To understand the Nature of the Self, the observer that observes it all, see Gurudev’s commentary on Archarya Sankara’s Vivekachoodamani pages 167 to 180.