Passage 10

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In plain words

The bond with the body is something we grow, not something natural

It is not in our power to cross karma. All is God's will! On account of these attachments that belong to the body, man experiences pleasure and pain, and joy. These sorrows and joys are of his own growing! They are not given by nature. A small example of this. A mother had a son of twenty-five years. For twenty-five years he enjoyed his mother's Prema and the pleasures of life, and at last he died. That grief took root in the mother's heart and stays with her all her life. Another son died just two hours after he was born. For that one too she wept for a day. The twenty-five-year-old was her son, and the baby who died in two hours was her son too! When the twenty-five-year-old son dies, she remembers him and weeps all her life. But when the baby who lived two hours died, she forgot him once that day was over. Why did this difference come about? Both were her children! For twenty-five years she had grown a bond with that body. With this baby the bond lasted only two hours. So the bond with the body is something grown, not something natural. So we are bound by this bond of the body, by kinship and relations, and by attachment. But, ‘each for himself on the bank of the Yamunā’. So my son's karma ran its course that way. My karma made me weep because of this son. His dying was his karma; my weeping is my karma. The snake had to kill, so that is the snake's karma. Each body has come according to its own karma. In this way that mother taught the hunter. So, O Dharmarāja! Have you listened well to this story? An ordinary housewife understood the fruit of karma. You are the embodiment of Dharma; you are the one who must be king. You are losing faith in the fruit of karma. Then how will faith in God arise?