|
Main Index
|
| |
| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
|
|
|
| |
to be precious.
I started these Buddha lectures with a ten-day silence deliberately. It was a device to start with silence -- Buddha would have been very happy. He must have shrugged his shoulders a little bit because of the music, but what can I do? It can't be helped.
My religion has to be a religion of dance, love, laughter. It has to be life-oriented, it has to be life-affirmative. It has to be a love affair with life. It is not a renunciation but a rejoicing.
The second question:
Question 2
BELOVED MASTER,
IT IS ABOUT THIS FEELING THAT IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE, AND AS SOON AS I FEEL IT, IT SEEMS SO FAR AWAY -- BUT WHAT IS THIS "IT"?
Deva Prashantam, it is one of the perennial problems encountered by every seeker of truth. You cannot grasp truth -- if you try, it will be far far away. You cannot possess truth -- if you try, you will find your hands utterly empty. Truth cannot be possessed because it is not a thing. On the contrary, you have to be courageous enough to be possessed by truth -- because it is a love affair.
Allow yourself to be possessed by it and you will know what it is. But you have been doing just the contrary: you have been trying to have a grip on it. That's what mind always longs for, desires. That's what mind calls "understanding." Unless the mind is capable of catching hold of something, the mind is not satisfied.
But truth is mercurial: if you try to hold it in your hands, the firmer the grip, the more elusive it will become, and the farthest -- so far away that you will stop believing in it, trusting in it...so far away that you will not be able to see that it exists at all.
Truth comes; it cannot be brought. Truth happens; you cannot do anything about it -- because the doer is the problem, the hindrance, the obstacle. The doer is the ego. And if you somehow manage and don't allow the doer to interfere, it comes by the back door -- as the one who experiences, as an observer, as an experiencer. It is the same ego again, in new garments.
That's why when you feel it, it is lost -- the doer has come now as a feeler. The doer has to be dissolved totally; it has not
|
|
|
|
| |