Week 23 - Sukh dukh, pleasure & pain in the world. The power of Maya/illusion & its mythical ways.

00:00 - 03:42 Sant Narayan Singh Ji starts to do katha after seeing the desire of the sangat. They explain that the world is false; just an illusion and so pain and pleasure are false too. Just like in a dream, things feel real and we feel certain emotions from it; just like this, we are in a state of ignorance and we believe the world to be true. This ignorance is what makes us feel pain and pleasure and commit sins. However, with divine wisdom, we are able to grasp the true essence of reality and this wisdom is gained by singing the praises of the Lord.
05:15 Different things that we believe to be real but are in fact mythical, it seems to be true, but it is in fact false. Everything you see is mythical, as is ruling, lust, anger, vehicles, ego etc - a few Gurbani lines from Sukhmani Sahib go through these points in detail in the video
07:02 Vashisht Jee tells Sri Ram Chandar this story which is in Yoga Vasistha. A midwife tells a story to a baby Prince to stop him from crying. The child believing the story to be true, stops crying and starts focusing his attention on the story. The teachings to gain from this are that even though it is a false story, the child’s thought process makes it a true story for him. In the same way, our thoughts and intellect make us believe the world really exists and just like the child, we are caught up in a false story.
14:30 Because of the llusion of Maya, we are always acting out of ego and in states of pleasure and pain but with God’s Grace, we can be saved. Even devte/angels are attached to maya but gurmukhs get attached to naam and then get liberated. People try many things like fasting, pilgrimages to gain liberation but liberation can only come from the sanctuary of the Guru.
17:54 A story in which a righteous King calls an entertainer and requests that the entertainer creates a show of Maya for him to make him feel like it’s really happening and to give him sightings of the Gods in Heaven. The King grants permission for the entertainer to battle with the Angels/devte in order to get him sightings of them. The entertainer creates a show in which he manages to make the King and the population believe he has gone to Heaven and sent down pieces/heads of the Angels and he himself died which prompted his wife to fall on his funeral pyre. This whole show creates great pleasure for the King when he sees the Angels but great anguish when he sees that the entertainer has died and his wife has committed suicide because of it. When the entertainer finally reveals that none of the show was actually real, he tells the King the essence of what he has just done. Just like he; a poor person created a whole show in front of the King and the population and made them believe it was true, that is how the maya of God works. The show made the King go through stages of sadness and happiness and in the same way, we go through these stages when we see the world as true. After this, the King stopped being affected by pain and pleasure and gained liberation. The story illustrates that this was just one person’s illusion and it’s power and so one can only imagine the power of God’s maya. Those who see the world as false and mythical are not affected by pain and pleasure.