Sri Ramakrishna sums up with a simple illustration the truth
of the unified ultimate Reality and the multiplicity of the manifest universe:
‘…he who has attained God knows that it is God who has become all this. Then he
sees that God, Maya, living beings and the universe form one whole. God
includes the universe and its living beings.’
Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa goes on to give the illustration of a bel fruit:
Suppose you have separated the shell, flesh, and a seed of a
bel-fruit and someone asks you the weight of the fruit. Will you leave aside
the shell and the seeds, and weigh only the flesh? Not at all. To know the real
weight of the fruit, you must weigh the whole of it—the shell, the flesh and the
seeds. Only then can you tell its real weight.
Sri Ramakrishna explains this metaphor: The shell may be
likened to the universe, and the seeds to living beings. While one is engaged in
discrimination one says to oneself that the universe and living beings are
non-Self and unsubstantial. At that time one thinks of the flesh alone as the
substance, and the shell and seeds as unsubstantial.
But after discrimination is over, one feels that
all the three parts of the fruit together form a unity. Then one further
realizes that the stuff that has produced the flesh of the fruit has also
produced the shell and seeds. To know the real nature of the bel fruit one must
know all three.