| |
You may be a child or you may be very, very old. You may be young, you may be healthy, or you may be ill -- it makes no difference. Because the basic thing is to be empty within. It has nothing to do with your walls, young or old.
A child can attain Enlightenment. A man just on the verge of death can attain Enlightenment because Enlightenment is not concerned with your body -- it is concerned with something which is absolutely bodiless. It is concerned with the within which has no age. It is non-temporal. Time is not at all a problem. You may not have observed this, because you live such an unconscious life, and observation needs consciousness, alertness, awareness.
If you look within can you feel the age, how old you are? If you close your eyes and look within, the emptiness within seems to be ageless, without age. Are you a child? Are you young? Are you old? The inner space seems to be non-temporal -- it is. That's why you become old through others' eyes. You become old because of the mirror. If mirrors disappear and nobody talks about your age, and there is no calendar and no time measurement, you will remain young longer.
In the ancient days people stayed younger for a longer and longer time. It is said that they lived for hundreds of years; sometimes even three, four, five hundred years. Now these things look like stories, myths, fictions. They are not fictions. They must have lived, but they had no time measurement; no mirrors existed, nobody talked about age, nobody knew when he was born, nobody knew his birthday. They couldn't count beyond ten fingers. And nobody ever asked: How old are you? People lived, they simply lived not knowing how old they were. They lived very, very long. It has happened many times.
Just a few days ago, I was reading about a man, a Dutch man. A few years back he reached one hundred and sixty-five years. And he was working when he was one hundred and sixty-five, doing everything normally. He lived in a very, very distant village. Then some newspaper got the news; his name was published, his picture, and then people started coming to see him. Then doctors became concerned and they also came to study him.
|
|
|