The fundamentals of man's relationship with the world || Acharya Prashant, on Raman Maharishi (2019)

“Just as the spider emits the thread (of the web) out of itself and again withdraws it into himself, likewise the mind projects the world out of itself and again resolves it into itself. When the mind comes out of the Self, the world appears. Therefore, when the world appears (to be real), the self does not appear, and when the Self Shines, the world does not appear. When one persistently inquires into the nature of the mind, the mind will end leaving the Self as the residue.”

~Raman Maharishi

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, Pranam. I don't understand how this mind is the cause of the world. As I look at objects, form, people, memories, likes and dislikes arise automatically in the mind. Experiences get shadowed by my personality inevitably.

Am I living in imaginations? What is attentiveness while I relate to the world? How can I see the world clearly as it is instead of seeing through my ego?

Acharya Prashant: You would do well to not to try to develop a framework out of the words of an Upanishadic seer or a Raman Maharishi. What is being said here is subtle. One needs understanding, not a paradigm. One needs realization, not a conceptual framework about the self, the mind, the world.

But that's what we would rather have. If we do that, it’s quite adolescent. Then it becomes a standard 8 thing. Some immature model that says, “Here is the self, and from this self arises the mind, and the mind projects the world and when the world is projected by the mind, the mind looks only towards the world, the mind does not look towards the self, the self is behind the mind, so the mind becomes totally oblivious to the presence of the self, and the mind gets preoccupied with the world, and therefore the self remains invisible and forgotten.”