In some ways, we give names to consciousness as a unit of consciousness, like Ātmā means "a spark of consciousness." It's eternal, it's non-reducible, it's always there, it always exists, and it always will exist. And it's flame-like in that it illuminates. For instance, right now we're sitting here, and all our bodies are illuminated by that flame. You can feel your feet; you can feel your hands, and that's because you're conscious. Consciousness is like a flame, but we forget about it.

One of the ways we forget about it is we come into what's called the bodily concept of life, and I start thinking, "I am my body." So the forgotten flame is that we've forgotten who we are, which is part of that. And then, under the pull of nature's modes, lies your purest self waiting to be remembered. This is a simple explanation of what spiritual practice is: it's an awakening to what we already are. You don't have to become something else; you don't have to change who you are. You just have to remember who you actually are.

And it's in diverting our attention to a false sense of self we call ahaṅkāra, which means "a false ego." There is a real ego; that's the real thing, who we are. But the false ego means I misidentify myself with the body, and when I do that, I suffer. And what's that suffering feels like? It feels kind of like a forest fire, like being in the middle of a forest fire; things are burning. So that's the other forgotten flame: we forget we're in the middle of a forest fire. And if you are planning a picnic, let's say, in the middle of a forest fire, it's going to be interrupted one way or the other.

There's an ancient text written by a really powerful sage, scholar, a saintly commentator on the ancient Vedas named Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura. And he wrote this song in Sanskrit that starts:

'saṁsāra-dāvānala-līḍha-loka- trāṇāya kāruṇya-ghanāghanatvam prāptasya kalyāṇa-guṇārṇavasya,

vande guroḥ śrī-caraṇāravindam.'

In this first stanza of his poem, he says it's from Sanskrit that actually the world is burning. Our bodies are burning; they're 98.6 degrees—that's hot—and they eventually burn out. And the world is sort of like a forest fire. Whatever we are used to now, whatever paradigm we think is our paradigm, somehow or other, it will be burned. So he says we're in this forest fire. We can't soothe that burning sensation from the massive fire that we're in the middle of with a few buckets of water. You need a rainstorm; you need a heavy rainstorm, and that would quell the intense heat and the flames of destruction. So this is one of the ideas of spiritual practice also: that we invoke a rainstorm of what's called kāruṇya, a kind of soothing of this burning sensation from the material world. And it's altogether possible because we're not actually burning; we're burning because of our false identification with the world.

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