Reel Real Reality

by Sri P.C. Lahiri

This piece contains a few thoughts that came to me after reading about the death of Robin Williams with an indication that he had taken his own life. 

Perhaps this reel life master got into real life disaster. The super luminescence of mass adoration through reel life portrayals builds immense pressure on the real life to always live up to the way that the world wants it to be.  The impossibility of this proposition drives the reel life hero to zero in real life. Why?

Reel life is the foreground, real life is the background, and Reality is the substratum of both.  Reel life’s foundation is real life, and Reality is the immediate foundation of real life as also the indirect foundation of reel life.  In fact, Reality is the Ultimate Substratum of one and all.  This is the unquestionable Wisdom that we have received from the True Masters of the world who were established in Supreme Reality which has been termed in this incarnation by Prajnanpurush Sri Sri Babathakur (the Master) as ‘I-Reality’.

To rightly understand any happening in the foreground (reel life) and its impact on background swabhava, the innate nature (real life), the eternal presence of the Ultimate Reality as the Supreme Background, and the essence of both (reel & real life) have to always be kept in mind.  I say that it has to be kept in “mind” because we are not established in that Reality; we are not unified with That by becoming one with It.  So we have to follow such Masters who are verily that Reality Itself. 

A point must be noted here — Master has always said that you are, were and shall ever be that I-Reality; however since you do not accept and embrace it wholeheartedly, you are not able to realize and be one with It.  It is a fact that we are not able to accept our own self as the Supreme Reality.  We do not dare to spell and write our own self with capital ‘S’. This is an inhibition, a limitation we have been carrying with us life after life till we get an opportunity to meet a Perfect Master who reveals an all-encompassing, all-embracing  dimension of this universe and beyond within us as our innermost Being. The more we cultivate and become aware of that innermost Being, the more is the revelation of the I-Reality from within, till the culmination through the perfect establishment in that Being Itself, the I-Reality Itself.  Till the advent of such a life, we keep carrying feelings of incompleteness, weakness, restlessness and so on and so forth.  How do we overcome this challenge?  How will this feeling of incompleteness get merged with the Wholeness/I-ness (not mine-ness)?  Simply by following that Soul who is Wholeness/I-ness personified — the Master.

Coming back to the case of Robin Williams, I present some thoughts based only on my understanding developed through my association with the Master.   I mean no disrespect to anyone’s feelings and beliefs.  Please forgive me if I inadvertently offend anyone’s belief system or emotions. 

If in life the reel persona of the foreground acquires a such monstrous size that the real life persona of the background is not trained and refined enough to withstand (due to a lack of understanding of the Reality behind all), then the foreground & background both collapse. The Reality was, is and shall ever remain the Ultimate Substratum which reveals the appearance of the foreground (reel life) and the background (real life), and also reveals their collapse.  The super structure that appears as the tallest building in the world (a highly successful reel life) is sustained by the invisible foundation inside mother earth (the innate nature — mind, intellect and ego — the real life).  With the impact of an earthquake of right intensity (the blinding sparkle and humongous demands of reel life on real life), the tallest of buildings collapses as the foundation (the innate nature, i.e. swabhava) is not able to support and sustain it any longer.  Both of them, the foreground building and the background invisible foundation inside mother earth, collapse on mother earth.  Mother earth (the Reality) remains as it is.  If the foundation was very strongly embedded and entrenched very deep inside mother earth, then the super structure would not have collapsed.  The more the nearness of real life to its innermost Reality, the stronger is the foundation of such a life to withstand any earthquake in reel or real life.

By being established in I-Reality, the Masters have played the real and reel life games to absolute perfection. All perfect Masters were Awareness personified and identified.  It is for this reason that their world-game has been of such qualitative & quantitative excellence that for generations and ages, it is respected and followed by large cross sections of humanity. Every time they have appeared, benchmarks have been set which have withstood the all-consuming tsunami of time.  The adoration and adulation that they received during their lifetime was unparalleled and unprecedented - yet they weren't affected by such adoration and adulation at all.  Master often said that ‘this One’ (pointing towards himself) is only doing fochkami (a Bengali word, meaning gamefully indulging in the frills of life).  What has been revealed by Him shall perhaps take hundreds of years for the humanity to grasp and yet He like a playful child says that I only indulge in the frills of life.  Such is the majesty, beauty and ease of the Masters.  For them, the real and reel life is nothing but the shadow of their True Nature, the I-Reality. 

Common man plays the reel life game by not even being properly aware of real life, what to talk of the I-Reality. We merely use real life (inner nature) for benefits and gains in reel life (outer nature), therefore suffering incessant miseries. Humanity in general accepts the real life as the Reality.  The fact of the matter is that what is being perceived as real life is not even real— it is only a reflection of the Reality, an ephemeral appearance of the I-Reality to play the sameside game.  Hence the real life appearance comes and goes.  If it was truly real, then it would have been there always as it is.  This life is real only to the extent that through it (i.e. this ephemeral real life), we can get identified with the eternal I-Reality.  It is in this context the phrase ‘real life’ has been used in this piece.

A life that goes from Reality to reel via real is an exemplary one for the entire humanity.  A life which considers reel to be real without even recognizing Reality ends in disaster.