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Main Index
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open seas where you belong. Intellect is the burden on man.
The last thing before we go into this parable: Tao starts with death. Why? There is something significant in the beginning. Tao says that if you understand death you will understand everything, because in death your boundaries will be blurred. In death, you will disappear. In death, ego will be dropped. In death, mind will be no longer there. In death, all that is non-essential will be dropped and only the essential will remain.
If you can understand death you will be able to understand what Tao is, what the pathless path is -- because religion is also a way of dying, love is also a way of dying, prayer is also a way of dying. Meditation is voluntary death. Death is the greatest phenomenon. It is the culmination of life, the crescendo, the highest peak. You know only one peak, and that peak is of sex, and that is the lowest peak of the Himalayas. Yes, it is a peak, but the lowest peak; death is the highest peak.
Sex is birth: it is the beginning of the Himalayas, the lowest peak. Just at the beginning the highest is not possible. Slowly, slowly, the peaks rise higher and higher, finally they come to the peak. Death is the peak, sex is the beginning. Between sex and death is the whole story of life.
Western psychology starts by understanding sex. Eastern psychology, the psychology of the Buddhas, starts by understanding the psychology of death. To understand sex is very primary; to understand death is the ultimate.
And by understanding death you can die consciously. If you die consciously you will hot be born again -- there will be no need. You have learned the lesson, you will not be thrown back again and again into the wheel of life and death. You have known, you have learned -- there is no need for you to be sent again to the school; you have transcended. If you don't learn the meaning of death you will have to be thrown back. Life is a situation to learn what death is.
This parable:
WHEN LIEH TZU WAS EATING AL THE ROADSIDE ON A JOURNEY JO WEI, HE SAW A HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD SKULL. PICKING A STALK HE POINTED TO THE SKULL AND, TURNING TO HIS DISCIPLE PAI FENG,
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