My 4-year-old daughter asked me as we watched Bhagawan Ramana's video clips on YouTube why we needed to pray to God. I told her that we were all God in the past but had forgotten this fact. So we are searching for God outside in temples and statues. Later when we come to know that God whom we saw externally was in fact within us, we begin to worship the Self or Atma (Jeeva). Soon we realize that we were God all these while.
This is beautifully narrated by Alan Cohen too in the documentary " Finding Joe (You)".
"Many years ago in Thailand there was a temple that was called the Temple of the Golden Buddha... and there was a huge statue of Golden Buddha... and word came to this village where the monastery was... that an army from the neighboring country was about to invade... and they got the brilliant scheme to cover the Golden Buddha which is quite large with mud and concrete so that it looked basic like a stone Buddha... so the army would perceive no value in it. And sure enough, this army rolled in with weapons and as they passed by the monastery they saw nothing but a big stone Buddha and they had no reason to plunder it. While years went by because the army continued to occupy... until there was a time when the monastery in the village where no one remembered that the Buddha was golden... until one day a young monk was sitting by the Buddha meditating on his knee and as he got up a little piece of concrete happened to crack off and he saw something shiny... He realized it was gold under there so... he ran to his fellow monks and said "The Buddha's golden.. the Buddha's golden!" They all came out and they realized he was telling the truth they took their picks and hammers and eventually unearthed the Golden Buddha. Now what's the metaphor here? The metaphor here is that each of us is golden by nature. We were born golden. We're born high. We were born knowing. We were born connected to our bliss. We were born knowing the truth. We were born knowing everything every great spiritual master has ever said. We were one with Christ, the Buddha, everyone. But then we went to school and they said you had to dress like this... and this is what boys and girls do... this is what black people do... this is what white people do... on and on and on... and so we developed a casing of stone over the Buddha to a point where at a young age maybe four or five... six or seven we believed that we were the stone Buddha... not the golden one and then something comes along that cracks our casing maybe it's an injury, a divorce, the financial setbacks, our government... will change something that really scares us and knocks off a piece of our armor and only in that moment of the armor being knocked off do you get to look inside and see the goal then. Let me tell you friend at the moment you see that gold the armor and the concrete will never satisfy you again. At that point, you truly answer the true hero's adventure and all you want to do for the rest of your life is pick away the stone because the gold is so much more fun."
It is said that Pondi Mahan of Tiruvannamalai was unearthed too from a river after the floods subsided. He was brought to a house where he sat on its verandah for the rest of his life.
We are told in this documentary that myths and legends are not history but metaphors to bring out the hero in each of us.
Just as Robert L Miller says "It is better to have a story to look through life than an explanation. The reason for that is that the story is richer", Tavayogi took me on an exploration rather than have me sit before him and dishing out stories about Agathiyar and the Siddhas from the books. As I had these wonderful stories to tell, this blog has come about and these stories are shared with readers. I am grateful to him.