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only then have you become the Upanishad.
Understand it this way: a poet sings a song about some flower. There can be a great sweetness, rhythm and music in this song -- songs have their own beauty -- but howsoever much the song may sing of the flower, yet the song is just a song, it is not the flower, it is not the fragrance of the flower. And if you are satisfied only with that song, then you have gone astray.
This Upanishad is a song of a flower that you have not yet seen. The song is wonderful: the singer has seen the flower. But do not be satisfied by the song, the song is not the flower.
It also happens that sometimes you too come close to the flower -- only sometimes. Sometimes you too get a glimpse of the flower -- accidentally, suddenly -- because the flower is not foreign to you, it is your very nature. It is very close to you, just by your side. Sometimes it touches you -- in spite of you. Sometimes the flower gives you a glimpse, a glimpse like a flash of lightning. In some moment it abruptly enters your experience: you feel that there is something more in this world, that this world that you know is not all that is. In this rocky world there is something else which is not a stone but is a flower -- alive and blossoming. And if you have seen it in some dream, or a lightning flash in the dark of night.... You see something and it disappears again -- thus it happens sometimes in your life. It often happens in the lives of the poets. It often happens in the lives of the painters that a glimpse of the flower comes close by.
Yet, however close to the flower, however great a glimpse you may have had, this closeness is still a distance. No matter how close the flower may come to you, still the distance remains. And even if I can actually touch the flower with my hands, still it is not certain that the experience I am having is that of the flower, because the message is coming through my hand. The hand may give a wrong message. There is no certainty of my hand giving the right message: there is no reason to trust my hand implicitly. Again, the message that the hand will give will be less about the flower and more about itself.
If
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