WHY LAZARUS LAUGHED : 86

The Criminal...2

TWO: I am not satisfied about our chat yesterday: the criminal and all that.

ONE: Good. But we are unable to talk on two levels at the same time.
TWO: Padma Sambhava revealed to us that we could not find a performer of an action, and that the discovery of that opens the way to full comprehension.

ONE: If your intuition verifies that - it is so.
TWO: Therefore there is no criminal.

ONE: He is only a concept.
TWO: But you seemed to imply that the circumstances of the 'crime' were all that mattered.

ONE: Well?
TWO: We understood that it is not an action itself that is real, but the doing of it, not that which is realised or done, but the realising.

ONE: Undoubtedly.
TWO: So the 'crime' is not real either, but just the act of perpetration?

ONE: The doer is a concept, the deed is a concept, the doing is real.
TWO: Since there is no criminal and no crime, but only a doing - what is there to judge?

ONE: If there had been a recording of our conversation I think you would find that it was implicit that there was nothing to judge.
TWO: But why should the circumstances of an unreal action committed by nobody have any importance?

ONE: You are trying to talk on two levels simultaneously. Such an acrobatic manipulation of language is nearly impossible. The law is an artificial structure of imagination, gratuitously associated with the idea of 'justice', that attempts to suppress the results of acts that are only concepts, performed by individuals that are not such, in a context controlled by cause-and-effect.
TWO: But why, then, do the circumstances matter?

ONE: The circumstances you refer to are the cause-and-effect as a result of which the apparent action occurs.
TWO: So there is reality in that?

ONE: Cause-and-effect are what we have referred to as karma. Those who have fully understood, who are awake, who no longer mistake themselves for the object of a dream-subject, and who have realised that they are in the world of appearances dream-subject and its objects undivided, that is, who can know themselves as I-subject when they will, are no longer victims of karma. But the rest of us, and even the awakened as long as life lasts, being subject to our psycho-somatic apparatus while living our dream, remain apparently in this world of appearances, and have to play our part therein.
TWO: Like actors in a play?

ONE: The image is the Maharshi's, and good. That life is purely phenomenal but it appears to be real, as our own dream-life does. And we can, indeed we have to, regard it as such, and speak of it as such in daily conversation. Otherwise we should be cut off from our fellow-men.
TWO: So the action, the 'crime' when the action is so regarded, is just a result of cause-and-effect, of karma if you will, and the punishment inflicted by the law is that also, the circumstances being karma also, the result of cause-and-effect, and the punishment inflicted on the dream-subject/object part of the same process although imagined to be a vengeance or a deterrent applied to a perfectly free and independent individual?

ONE: I thoroughly agree with your interpretation. It may be difficult to express it more succinctly.
TWO: I wonder, is it worth discussing these matters at all!

ONE: The Maharshi, since we have just mentioned him, probably did not think so. He only spoke when people insisted. His kindness was ubiquitous and unlimited.
TWO: Then we should not blame man for his outrageous attitude towards that nature of which he is himself an integral part?

ONE: We should not blame anyone for anything. Who is there to blame?
TWO: But still ... but still ...

ONE: You want to blame man for not understanding what he is, that he is not what he thinks, that poor, poor thing, but something unimaginably superior. But blame is not the word.
TWO: Pity perhaps?

ONE: Provided no element of contempt lies therein.
TWO: What remains of 'pity' is then pure karuna-caritas?

ONE: Which is understanding itself.
TWO: But how can he be brought to understand?

ONE: He cannot. Only he, as I-subject, can do that.
TWO: And that?

ONE: By following his urge, the urge that every dream-subject/object has, for that is his link with Reality.

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