In a puppet show, the villain is a cruel-faced puppet with a harsh voice. Children are frightened. But the puppeteer is not frightened. Behind the curtain, he pulls the strings and inflects his voice to animate the villain. To the enlightened mind, hell is like this—a scene in a puppet show. The liberated one is a witness to the waking dream but no longer fears its appearances. Therefore, Jesus prays for his persecutors, and Bhagavan jokes through surgeries without general anaesthesia and faces impending physical demise with serenity.
Light and dark, pleasure and pain, self and other—these sustain the illusion of the waking dream. Their resolution is symbolized in Arunachala as Ardhanarishvara (Siva-Parvati)—the half-male, half-female united as God. The solution for the polarities is opting for the pole we reject, like homeopathy treating illness by aggravating its symptoms, or curing snakebite with snake venom. The marriage of opposites is a symbol of all our longed-for “reunions up and down the scale of being”:
Emotion and intellect, matter and spirit, body and soul, the one and the many, male and female, human and divine, freedom and necessity—all the contradictions of our fractured existence are most marvellously woven together in the wedding of soul and spirit, which preserves our [apparent] two-foldedness right into the heart of the One.
Surrender is under the sway of ego’s calculus by being weighed against what we believe we are entitled to. When things don’t go our way, we want Bhagavan to rescue us. But grace often shows up as loss—the Divine’s way of redirecting the heart. Painful as it is, loss becomes the ground for a deeper vision. In the crucible of adversity—when stripped of control—our hearts are transformed, and our prayers grow urgent like those of Gajendra, the Elephant King, who finds himself in the jaws of a mighty crocodile.[22] Only at such moments does real transformation take place. Bhagavan comments:
If you have surrendered, you must be able to abide by the will of God and not make a grievance of what may not please you. Things may turn out differently from what they appear. Distress often leads to faith in God.
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