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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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to each other: husbands to wives and wives to husbands, and parents to children and children to parents, and friends to friends. In fact enemies are not so inimical as friends prove finally: torturing each other, unloading their miseries on each other, throwing their dirt on each other. They are stinking -- what can they do? When they come close to you, you have to suffer their stink. And you have to suffer if you want them to suffer YOUR stink. So it is a bargain.
You cannot live alone, they cannot live alone -- you have to be together. Even if it stinks, at least there is the consolation that "I am not alone."
A man who knows how to be alone knows how to be meditative. Aloneness means meditation -- just relishing your own being, celebrating your own being.
Walt Whitman says: I celebrate myself, I sing myself. That is aloneness. This man Whitman is really a mystic, not just a poet. He should be counted with the ancient RISHIS of the Upanishads. America has not given birth to many great mystics; Whitman is really one of the most precious gifts of America to the world. He says: I celebrate myself, I sing myself. That's what a mystic has always been supposed to do, that's what a mystic's function is: to celebrate himself. But how will you celebrate? You will have to invite others. You will have to ask others to come and participate.
Meditation gives you the insight of your own inner treasure, and in love you share it. That's what I mean when I say that a sannyasin has to be ready to be alone -- so that one day he can be ready to love. Only a man who knows the beauties of solitude can love. But just a slight difference and you can miss the whole point.
Now, the difference between aloneness and loneliness is not much; as far as language is concerned there is no difference at all, they are synonyms. In the dictionaries you will find aloneness described as loneliness, loneliness as aloneness -- but that is only in the dictionaries, not in life itself. In life itself it is totally different.
Don't live through language, don't become too much obsessed with language, because language is only utilitarian. It can mislead you -- it
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