The Creation of Pleasure and Pain : 10.

This is what happens to us. The trouble has started within, but by a peculiar intelligent device, the mind has transferred this error to the objects outside. There is a peculiar defence mechanism of the mind by which it can transfer its properties to persons and things outside. What is within us, we see outside, like a cinematographic projection. We see the picture somewhere on the screen in front of us, while it has come from somewhere behind. The projector is behind. There is nothing there – only a blank screen. The film is behind us, and the shape of the picture, the colour, etc., of the photograph in the film, which is somewhere unseen in the rear, is projected to the screen in front of us, and we begin to see it there, while it is really behind.



Similarly, the structural defect of the mind, which is the photograph in the film inside our own cinematographic factory, gets projected outside on the screen of the world of space and time, and we begin to see ourselves there as other persons and things. So we love things and hate things. The cause of the love or the hatred is here, but it has been thrown on the screen of space and time outside so that, God forbid, it can be cast on the screen of somebody else, so that tomorrow we like them or do not like them. They are only screens on which the picture is cast, and then only the picture is seen there; the screen is completely forgotten. This is what happens in the cinema. We cannot see the screen. If we begin to see the screen, there is no point in going there. We see only the shape that is cast on the screen that is deliberately made invisible.



The mind is such a wonderful mechanism which has unending resources of material of umpteen shapes and contours, which can keep us active for ages and ages. For years and years we can go on seeing a cinema endlessly, not merely for hours, and the screen is perpetually hanging there outside – an eternal screen in front of us, as space and time. The space-time continuum is the screen upon which is projected this series of the pictures that have been photographed by the mind itself in the process of perception and cognition through ages of reincarnation.

Swami Kishnananda

To be continued   ....