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| | | Book Name: Sufis - The People of the Path, Vol 2 | Previous Next | |
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even a trace will be left of you.
The negative part is clinging to the self. That's why great teachers -- Buddha or Jalaludin Rumi -- insist -- 'Remember, no-self, anatta.' Sufis call it fana -- one disappears. And one should prepare for this disappearance, one should be ready -- not only ready but in a deep welcome. It is going to bring great joy, because all your misery is contained in your ego. The very idea that 'I am' is your ignorance. The very idea that 'I am' creates all kinds of anxieties and problems for you. The ego is the hell.
Jean-Paul Sartre has said: 'Hell is other people.' That is not right. The hell is YOU, the hell is the ego! If other people feel like the hell, they feel like the hell also because of the ego -- because they hurt it continuously. They go on pushing your buttons. Because you have this wound of the ego everybody seems to hurt you. It is just your idea that 'I am special' and when somebody does not recognise it, it gives pain. When you don't have any idea of being special -- what Zen people call 'to become ordinary' -- if you become ordinary, then this valley can be crossed. If you become nobody, then this valley can easily be crossed.
So the negative part is clinging to the self and the positive part is relaxing into no-self, into nothingness -- being ready to die, willingly, joyously, voluntarily.
Then comes the sixth valley -- the abysmal valley.
One disappears. In the fifth, one was disappearing; in the sixth, one is no more. One is a memory of the past, one disappears. In the fifth, one was entering into death; in the sixth, death has happened, one has died, one is no more. That's why it is called the 'abysmal valley'. It is the most painful, because it is the sixth -- the last but one. One passes into the greatest pain of not being, of nothingness. One cannot believe it -- because in a certain sense one is, and in a certain sense one is no more. The paradox has come to the ultimate peak. One is and one is not. One can see one's own corpse -- one is dead -- and still one knows that one is seeing, so one must be in some way, in some sense. All the past ideas of the self have become irrelevant.
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