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consist of going to bed in the night and leaving it in the morning? Is it life that a child grows into youth and old age and then dies? Does life comprise only birth and death? Or is it just leaving a few children behind oneself?
No, even machines can do it. If not today, tomorrow the machines are going to do it. Children will be born in test tubes. Childhood, youth and old age are mechanical processes. When a machine is made, it passes through its youth and old age. Every machine has its childhood, youth and old age. Even when you buy a watch it comes with a guarantee that it will run for ten years or so. The watch will be young and old and then die. Every machine is born, it lives and it dies. So what we ordinarily call life is nothing more than a machine.
Life is a very different thing.
If this dead bulb does not know of the electric current, it would think that, as it is, is life. When a gust of wind pushes it about it will say, "I am alive because I am being pushed about." The bulb will take it to be its life. But what will the bulb say, if it can speak, when the electric current reaches it for the first time? It will say, "It is just indescribable! I don't know what it is that has happened to me. Until a moment ago I was filled with darkness, and now it is all light and the rays are flowing in all directions." What would a seed say the day it grows into a tree? It would say, "I don't know what has happened to me. It cannot be said. I was a tiny seedling, and now I don't know what has happened to me. And it is equally difficult to say that it has happened through me."
Therefore, those who realize God do not say that they themselves have realized, they only say that they don't find any connection between what they had been and what they have become. They say, "Now it is all light where it was all darkness before. We were all thorns; now we are all blooming flowers. Then we were frozen with death, now we are flowing with life. No, no," they will say, "we have not realized, we have not realized." Those who know will say, "It is all his grace; it has happened to us through his grace and not through our efforts."
But it does not
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