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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10 | Previous Next | |
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ceiling. As he came out from under the influence of the ether he began to weep bitterly.
Mrs. Bernstein, the attending nurse, bent over him.
"Mister, it is not necessary for you to feel worried," she said kindly. "The operation was a big success. Take my word, when you leave here you will feel twenty years younger. Maybe more, who knows?"
But the poor old man only continued to wail, the tears coursing down his cheeks and losing themselves in his long white whiskers.
"Please don't cry," pleaded Mrs. Bernstein. "The pain will soon go away."
"Who is crying from pain?" sobbed the patient. "I am afraid I will be late for school."
Just look deep down inside yourself and you will find the child intact; it has not grown up. The ordinary mental age of every human being is not more than twelve. Physiologically you may be eighty; psychologically you are hanging around twelve. Hence, once in a while, you start behaving like a child -- in spite of yourself. If you are pushed and pulled too much you forget that you are a grown-up person. The child is sitting there, covered by many experiences, but those experiences have not been digested; covered by much knowledge, but that knowledge has not become your wisdom because it has not been achieved through awareness. You have been collecting and accumulating it in your sleep, so you have accumulated much rubbish alongside. Yes, once in a while you may have picked up a diamond too, not knowing that it is a diamond -- just another colored stone.
PLAY IN YOUR IMAGINATION WITH THEM AND THEY WILL SWEEP YOU AWAY. If you allow desire and pleasure and lust and greed and anger and jealousy and possessiveness and violence and all these rushing streams towards you, they will sweep you away. Don't play with them in your imagination; that is strengthening them, that is getting under their sway.
And the miracle is that everybody can understand everybody else's imagination, except his own. When somebody falls in love with somebody else you say, "How foolish!" Everybody thinks they have gone crazy. "Look at the face of that woman. She looks like a Picasso painting! And why is this man crazy about
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