The Creation of Pleasure and Pain : 12.

If my watch is stolen, my reaction is one thing, but if somebody else's watch is stolen, it makes no difference to me, even if it is the same watch. The same factory has made that watch, and from the point of view of the object as such, there should be no difference in the reaction of the emotion; but we know the connectedness of the emotion with the object makes all the difference. If my child dies, it means something to me. If somebody else's child dies, it is different. After all, what is the difference between your child and somebody else's child in the pure, dispassionate judgment of a living human individual?


Such examples can be cited endlessly to give the distinction that we make in our personal relationship in regard to the persons and objects of God's creation, which are things by themselves. Some philosophers call them 'things in themselves'. The thing in itself is different from the thing as it means to me. I am not so much worried about the thing in itself. What troubles me is the thing that appears before me to my mental vision, and the reading of meaning by me in that particular thing. What is the thing in itself? Nobody knows up to this day. It is difficult to know it. Perhaps as long as we live in this world, we cannot know what a thing really is. As we go deeper and deeper in our analysis, we begin to see newer and newer meanings in the very same object of the world.


We have the famous physical observation of things, which has given us a startling meaning of things, quite different from the one that is seen by the senses. An object which is hard like granite or stone is supposed to be constituted of minute granules of force or waves of energy, continuous in their activity with the other inner structural patterns of other objects in the world. It looks, from modern discoveries, that objects do not differ structurally among themselves, at least in their fundamental being, because of the outer shape automatically fading away when we begin to observe a deeper vision of things through instruments – the inner structural substantiality of objects.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued   .....