Sahaja Yoga Answers

There was once an average, hard-working, middle-class, family man so sat down on a park bench one day after work and fell asleep.

He dreamed that things all of a sudden began going well for him, and he gained money, power, respect, friends, and began to do all the things he wanted to in life.
Then things suddenly started to go poorly for him, and he lost all the power, money, wealth, influence and stature. When he lost all these things, his family deserted him, and he was ultimately left homeless. He became despondent, and was about to rob a bank, when . . .

He woke up, and realized that in all this drama, give and take, and emotion, he had neither gained nor lost a single thing.

So he chuckled to himself briefly, and began to make his way home.

Hah! Thats the story of Narada & Vishnu!

Moral of the story: Illusion is a temporary arrangement to impart permanent knowledge.

Narada was a sage quite proud of his sainthood and thought he was beyond the clutches of illusion. Vishnu, the sustainer of the universe did him a favor by showing him how deficient he was in reality.

He told Narada, get me some drinking water please... and Narada tried to fetch it from a pond. As soon as he bent down he warped into a birth-cycle on earth. He was born a beautiful woman, who married a kind, bore his sons, ruled over the lands, lost her sons and husband in battle and ended up a destitute woman.

As she neared her death, she heard "Narada, I am thirsty, can you get me some water?" and 'woke up' to find that only a moment passed but a lifetime was lived.

The lesson was illusion is a great teacher, but still it is an illusion.

Source(s):

Shrimad Devi Bhagvatam trans. by Swami Vijayananda