Once you realise that you are not an individual but a whole universe.

_Aham Brahmasmi is an egoistic phrase.

Tat Tvam Asi(Thou Art That )makes it complete phrase.

That is the notion that is found in the Upaniṣads. In India, when the famale power of the goddess serevived during their period, there female on that the ultimate mystery is found in the mystery of one’s own being but that mystery is deeper than any individual’s thinking can go.

This spiritual experience has been termed Gnosticism, from the Greek gnosis, or knowledge, and it describes this intuitive realization mystery that transcends speech. For that reason, for that reason,the language we use in speaking of religious mystery is that of the metaphor.

Metaphor is the language of myth that remains, as we have observed, a still widely misunderstood term. Even many so-called well-educated people think that “myth” means something that is false that is, a lie or distortion about some person or event.

But that misunderstanding arises, as we know, only when we misread metaphorical language. All of our religious ideas are metaphorical of a mystery. It is vital to recall that if you mistake the denotation of the metaphor for its connotation, you completely lose the message that is contained in the symbol.

God is a symbol. The connotation of the symbol lies beyond all naming, beyond all numeration, beyond all categories of thought. One often asks, “Is God one, or is God many?” These, however, are categories of thought and do not serve well in talking about what is beyond all speech. You are probably familiar with one of my favorite quotations from Heinrich Zimmer, who used to say, “The best things can’t be told. The sec- ond best are misunderstood.” Why are the second best misunderstood? Because they are metaphors that, as we only seem to repeat too often, are misread for their denotation rather than their connotation.

Jesus dies, is resurrected, and goes to Heaven. This metaphor expresses something religiously mysterious. Jesus could not literally have gone Heaven because there is no geographical place to go. Elijah went up into the heavens in a chariot, we are told, but we are not to take this statement as a description of a literal journey. to

These are only spiritual events described in kinds of two metaphor. There seem to be people: Those who think that metaphors are facts and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know the facts and are what we call “atheists,” and those who think they are facts are “religious.” Which group really gets the message?

There is a doctrine that comes out of the Vedantic tradition that has helped me to understand the nature of the energy that flows through myths. The Taittiriya Upaniṣad speaks of five sheaths that enclose the atman, which is the spiritual ground or germ of the individual.

The first sheath is called annamaya-koša, the food sheath. That is your body, which is made out of food and which will become food when you die. The worms, the vultures, the hyenas, or the flame will consume it. This is the sheath of our physical body: the food sheath.

The second sheath is called the sheath of breath, prānamaya-koša. The breath oxidizes the food; the breath turns it into life. That’s this thing, this body: food on fire. The next sheath is called the mental sheath, manomaya-kośa. This is the consciousness of the body, and it coordinates the senses with the you that thinks it is you.

Then there is a big gap.

And the next sheath is called the wisdom sheath, vijñānamaya-koša

This is the sheath of the wisdom of the transcendent pouring in. This is the wisdom that brought you to form in the mother womb, that digests your dinners, that knows how to do it. This is the wisdom that, when you cut yourself, knows how to heal the wound. The cut bleeds, and then a scab comes along; finally a scar forms, and this is the wisdom sheath going to work.

You go for a walk in the woods. Somebody has built a barbed-wire fence.

It leans right into the tree. The tree incorporates that barbed wire. The tree has it, the wisdom sheath. This is the level of your nature wisdom that you share with the hills, with the trees, with the fish, with the animals. The power of myth is to put the mental sheth in touch with this wisdom sheath, which is the one that speaks of the transcendent. And the sheath inward of the wisdom sheath is the sheath of bliss,

ānandamaya-kośa, which is a kernel of that transcendence in and of itself. Life is a manifestation of bliss. But manomaya-kośa, the mental sheath, is attached to the sufferings and pleasures of the food sheath. And so it thinks, Is life worth living? Or, as Joyce asks in Finnegans Wake, “Was liffe worth leaving?”

Just think: the grass grows. Out of the bliss sheath comes the wisdom sheath and the grass grows. Then, every two weeks, someone comes along with a lawn mower and cuts the grass down. Suppose the grass were just to think, Ah, shucks, what’s all this fuss about? I quit? That’s mental sheath stuff. You know that impulse: life is painful; how could a good god create a world with all of this in it? That is thinking in terms of good and evil, light and dark-pairs of opposites. The wisdom sheath doesn’t know about pairs of opposites. The bliss sheath contains all opposites. The wisdom sheath is just coming right up out of it, and it turns into pairs of opposites later on.

When I was in Egypt, I went to the miserable little tomb of Tutankhamen. Compared with the tomb of Seti I right beside it, it was just somebody’s outhouse. There are two little rooms the size of a studio apart- ment. Seti’s tomb is as big as a small gymnasium. That’s why nobody both- ered to rifle Tutankhamen’s tomb, and that’s why we got all that wonderful stuff from it.

Think about the coffin Tutankhamen in terms of the Indian image of the sheaths. I don’t know if that is what the Egyptian sculptors intended, but this is what I saw. You have three quadrangular boxes, one inside the other: food sheath, breath sheath, and mental sheath. That’s the outside. Then you have a great stone coffin that separates the inner two sheaths from the ones on the outside. And what do you have inside? You have a sarcophagus made of wood, inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli. This is shaped in the form of the young king, with his signs of kingship crossed over his chest. That, I would say, is the wisdom sheath, the level of the living or- ganic form. And within that is the sheath of bliss: a solid gold coffin in the form of Tutankhamen, with several tons of gold. When you realize how gold was mined in those days, that sarcophagus cost many a life and lots of suffering to get that much gold. And this was the sheath of bliss. And within this, of course, was the atman, the body itself. Unfortunately, the Egyptians made the enormous error of mistaking eternal life for the eternal concretized life of the body. And so what do you find when you go to the Egyptian Museum? You pay an extra dollar to go to the Mummy Room. And you come into a room with three rows of wooden coffins. And in each sleeps a pharaoh. And the names of the pharaohs are there like the names on a collection of butterflies: Amenhotep I, II, III, and so forth. All I could think of was the room in a maternity ward, the nursery where they have the little babies. The Egyptians based all of this-building the pyramids and these great tombs-on this basic mistake, that eternal life is the life of annamaya-kośa, the food sheath. It has nothing to do with any such thing. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Time is what shuts you out from eternity. Eternity is now. It is the transcendent dimension of the now to which myth refers.

All of these things enable you to understand what myth really is about. When people say, “Well, you know, this couldn’t have happened, and that couldn’t have happened, and so let’s get rid of the myths,” what they are doing is getting rid of the vocabulary of discourse between manomay kośa and vijñānamaya-kośa, between mental wisdom and organic, life-body wisdom.

Santa Claus gives many surprises gifts to the children on Christmas.What it means : Life is not giving us what we want but gives us a surprise gift.Suppose that your child’s favourite fruit is an apple,then Santa Claus will give him other things he doesn’t’want.Life is unexpected.It’s a ritual to introduce the clues to your child about life fact,what is going to happen in his life.And what he is going to confront.Life is always unexpected.you have to make it worthwhile. Life lives on killing and eating.you can not deny it..If you don’t do this ritual,and your child always gets what he wants from his parents. He will definitely confront a psychological crisis when life gives him challenges.Culture can also teach us to go past its concepts.
That is what is known as initiation. A true initiation is when the guru tells you, “There is no Santa Claus.” Santa Claus is metaphoric of a relationship between parents and children. The relationship does exist, and so it can be experienced, but there is no Santa Claus. Santa Claus was simply a way of clueing children into the appreciation of a relationship.

Life is, in its very essence and character, a terrible mystery- this whole business of living by killing and eating. But it is a childish attitude to say no to life with all its pain, to say that this is something that should not have been.