Where is the screen?

A father takes his son to the cinema for the first time. Everywhere the father points, the boy sees a picture.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 03 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

The traditional Vedanta examples for the relationship between the world and what underlies it are a clay pot, gold and the ornaments made from it, water and waves. None of them ever did much for me. The one that did came from a wandering monk called Ramananda Saraswati, who died a few years ago, and Swami Sarvapriyananda tells it like this.

A father takes his small son to see his first film. On the way he explains what a cinema is. There is a screen, pictures are projected onto it, there is sound, a story is told. They go in. The hall is dark and the film has already started. The boy is absorbed, completely, the way you are. Then after a while he starts asking questions, the way you do. Where is the screen. You told me there was a screen.

The father whispers, there, in front of you. The swami pictures it as the scene from the Mahabharata, Krishna and Arjuna on the chariot between the two armies. The boy says, you mean Krishna and Arjuna. No, behind them. The chariot. No, behind that. The battlefield, the sky. No. If you took all of that away. So the screen is nothing. No, it is all of it. The screen is the warriors and the elephants and the sky.

The monk's point was about the father's problem. Wherever he points, there is a picture, and the boy looks at the picture. If he says ignore the picture, the boy sees nothing, because pictures are all there is to see. And yet wherever the film is, the screen is there, it is what the film is happening on, and in a plain sense it is the real thing in the room while the battle is not.

That is the claim about Brahman, which the swami is careful to say is not the name of a Hindu god. The word just means the vast. Whatever you are experiencing, there is a foundation right here, and every attempt to point at it lands on an image.

The bit that got me was the small detail that the film had already started when they walked in. Nobody gets the opening credits. You arrive mid scene, with parents and a body and a language, and you are absorbed before you have a chance to ask what a cinema is.

Where the analogy fails is obvious. After a film you can walk up and touch the screen. Nothing like that is on offer here, and I am wary of any picture that makes the thing sound more findable than it is.