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Main Index
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poet is in search. His search is for the beautiful, but beauty is nothing but truth glimpsed. Truth, when you just glimpse it for a moment, appears as beauty. When truth is realised totally, then you come to know that beauty was only a function of truth. Wherever truth exists, there exists beauty -- it is a shadow of truth. When truth is seen through screens, it is beauty; when beauty is naked, it is truth.
So the difference between the poet and the mystic is not much. The poet is coming closer, the mystic has arrived. For the poet, there are only glimpses of truth; for the mystic, truth has become his very life. The poet is only sometimes transported to the world of truth and then falls back again. For the mystic, truth has become his abode: he lives there; he lives AS truth.
Poets come closest to religion. Thinkers, philosophers, logicians, theologians, scientists, are very far away. Their whole approach is verbal. The poetic approach is more existential, and the mystic's approach is existential par excellence; it is absolutely existential.
Tao means to exist on the Way, and to exist in such a way that the Way and you are not two. This existence is one -- we are not separate from it. The separation, the idea of separation, is very illusory. We are joined together, we are one whole. We are not islands, we are one continent. You are in me, I am in you. The trees are in you, you are in the trees. It is an interconnected whole.
Basho has said: It is as if it were a vast spider's web. Have you tried? Touch the spider's web anywhere and the whole web starts shaking, trembling; the whole vibrates. Touch a leaf on the tree and you have made all the stars vibrate with it. You may not be able to see it right now, but things are so deeply related that it is impossible not to touch the stars by touching a leaf, the mall leaf of a tree.
The whole is one -- separation is not possible. The very idea of separation is the barrier. The idea of separation is what we call the ego. If you are with the ego, you are not on the path, you are not in Tao. When the ego is dropped, you are in Tao. Tao means an egoless existence, living as part of this infinite
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