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things exists. It has nothing to do with flesh, blood or bones; it is immortal. It has neither beginning nor end. Formless, it is at the core of each one of us. From the darkness of your ignorance, I urge you, yearn for that imperishable flame!
But the immortal flame is disguised by the smoke of mortality, and so we cannot see the light. We encounter the smoke and step back. Those who are a bit more courageous search a little, but only in the smoke, and so they cannot reach the flame, the source of illumination, either.
How can we make this voyage to the flame beyond the smoke -- to the self within the body? How can we realize the Overself, the Universal? How can we come to know that which is camouflaged by nature, that which is hidden in nature?
I shall talk about it in three stages.
In the first place, we have smothered ourselves with such prejudices, inflated ideas and phony philosophies that we have deprived ourselves of the ability to see the naked truth. Without knowing, without searching, without any curiosity, we have ready-made hypotheses about life. For thousands of years we have been taught that life is meaningless, that it is useless and miserable. We have been hypnotized into believing that our existence is useless, purposeless, full of sorrow; that life is to be despised, to be by-passed. This constant repetition keeps tightening the stranglehold that is smothering us, so now we feel that life is nothing more than a big noise, a big din, a hotbed of misery.
It is only because of this contempt for life that all joy and love have been lost to man. Man is now just a formless lump; he is a turbulent sea of sorrow. And it's not at all astonishing that, because of these misconceptions, man has stopped trying to reflect upon himself. Why try to search for beauty in an ugly lump? And when one firmly believes that life is simply meant to be thrown away, to be rejected, then what sense is there in trying to acknowledge it, in trying to cleanse it and to beautify it? The whole effort seems futile.
Our attitude to life is not unlike that of a man making use of a waiting room in a railway station. He knows he is only there
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