seeker of truth has to be wary of words.
Words are not the truth,
truth cannot be words.
Truth is an experience,
truth is reality,
and the path to it is neti, neti –
neither this nor that.
Drop explanations,
drop definitions,
drop scriptures and doctrines,
remember neti, neti – not this, not that!
Then drop I and thou
and say neti, neti.
What is left manifest in the emptiness –
that is truth,
and that alone is.
All else is dream.
114. Love.
The decision to take sannyas is propitious –
and sadhana follows decision like a shadow.
Seeds have to be sown in the mind as well;
there too – as we sow we reap.
The way has to be carved out of the mind too.
The temple of God is close
but the mind is like a dense forest
we have to hack our way through to reach it.
The first steps have to be taken from where you are.
Even for a long journey
the first steps have to be taken just close by,
and in every journey,
not only that towards truth,
the beginning is not different from the end –
they are two ends of the same span,
two poles of the same entity.
Yet often you cannot guess from the first step
where you will end up;
those first steps may seem quite unrelated to the last!
Charles Catering recollects this interesting incident:
Once I bet a friend
that if I bought him a birdcage to hang in his sitting-room
he would have to buy a bird.
The friend laughed and said
he could keep a cage without a bird –
there was nothing to it!
He accepted the bet
and I bought him a beautiful cage from Switzerland
which he hung in his sitting-room.
Naturally, the inevitable happened –
life has its own logic.
Whosoever saw the cage
immediately sympathized with him,
asking:
When did your bird die?
He would answer: I never had a bird.
Then they would say: So why the empty cage?
Finally he got sick and tired of explaining
and went and bought a bird.
When I asked him about it he said:
It was easier to buy the bird and lose the bet
than to explain things to each and everyone
from morn till night.
And also,
seeing this empty cage hanging there
day in and day out, my mind kept repeating:
The bird! The bird! The bird!
So, if you hang commitment like a cage in the mind
it won’t be long before the bird of sadhana comes!
115. Love.
Man lives not in reality but in dreams.
Each mind creates a world of its own which exists nowhere.
During the day as well as the night
the mind is swamped in dreams.
When the dreams become too much, too intense,
insanity results.
To be clear and healthy is to be without dreams.
Once, the president of a country went
to inspect the nation’s largest lunatic asylum.
The director took him to a room and told him:
In this room, the inmates suffer from car-phobia.
The president, curious, looked through the window.
But there is nobody there, he said.
They are all there, sir – under the beds repairing cars,
the director replied.
Everyone is lying under their dreams in the same way.
If this president had looked within, what would he have found?
Is not every capital a great madhouse?
But one cannot see one’s own madness – this is a sure trait of madness.
When someone starts doubting himself, seeing his madness,
know well that the time has come for his insanity to go.
Awareness of madness marks the end of madness.
Awareness of ignorance heralds its end.
Awareness of dreaming brings dreams to an end.
What is left is truth.
116. Love.
I am very glad to have received your letter.
Anxieties exist in life but there is no need to worry about them.
Worrying stems not from the anxieties but from our attitude towards them.
To be anxious or not is always our open choice.
It is not that a non-anxious mind is free of anxieties – anxieties are there,
they are an unavoidable part of life –
but it does not burden itself with them.
Such a person always sees beyond them;
dark nights surround him too but his eyes look to the rising sun
and therefore his soul
is never drowned in darkness.
And this alone is enough —
that the soul not be drowned in darkness.
The body is bound to drown in it – in fact it already has.
Those who are condemned to die live their lives in darkness;
only the deathless have their lives rooted in the light.
Blessings to the children and regards to all.
117. Love.
There is no greater power than trusting oneself –
its fragrance is not of this world;
peace, bliss and truth flow from this fragrance.
He who trusts himself is in heaven
and he who mistrusts himself
holds the keys of hell in his hands.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume was an atheist,
but every Sunday he made it a point
to attend the sermon of John Brown,
a confirmed theist.
When