In the last article of 2018, I like to share a beautiful story told by His Divine Holiness, Paramahamsa Nithyananda (fondly known as Swamiji). It is a story about a Paramahamsa and the fish.
Paramahamsa means ‘great swan’. A Paramahamsa swan is special because it never touches the ground! It only flies in the open sky, never touching the dust and dirt of the earth. Even when the Paramahamsa swan lays its eggs, the egg drops from the sky and hatches in the mid-air and the baby swan flies out before the egg touches the ground. As per the Hindu scriptures, the Paramahamsa swan is the symbol of the enlightened being who always flies in the enlightened space and can never be caught in anything worldly.
There was a Paramahamsa swan who was flying over a lake, and its reflection fell on the lake below. When the reflection fell on the water, the fish in the lake started jumping, “Oh, a new big fish has come, a new big fish has come!’, and they went around the reflection, admiring it. Some fish started jumping on the swan’s reflection, some fish started dancing around the swan’s reflection, and some fish started making a fence in the water, saying, “This is the ashram for the big fish!’ Some fish started finding ways to get close to the ‘big fish’. Some fish started crying, ‘Oh, this big fish is so loving, so caring, so graceful and so beautiful!’ Some other fish started jumping to the other side and saying, ‘No, this fish is not paying attention to me at all. It is not at all loving and caring!’ Some fish started saying good things about the reflection and some fish started saying bad things about the reflection. Some fish started creating a place for the ‘big fish’ to live; some fish even threw a few stones at it.
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