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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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yesterday. I was reading a book by Silvano Arieti, M.D., and James Silvano Arieti, Ph.D. In their book, LOVE CAN BE FOUND, they quote this story. I was hoping, obviously, that they would laugh at the story and criticize the whole standpoint. But I was in for a surprise: they defended the story; they say the professor did the right thing. Rather than entering directly into the door of love and paradise, entering into the auditorium where a lecture was being delivered on love and paradise -- of course by some other professor -- they say the professor did the right thing. Why? Their reasoning is that unless you know about love, how can you know love? Unless you know about paradise first, how can you immediately enter into paradise?
On the surface it looks logical: first one has to become acquainted with what paradise is, only then can one enter paradise. First you have to have a map. Logical, still stupid; logical only in appearance, but deep down utterly unintelligent.
Love needs no information about it, because it is not something outside you, it is the very core of your being. You have already got it, you have only to allow it to flow. Paradise is not somewhere else so that you need a map to reach there. You ARE in paradise, only you have fallen asleep. All that is needed is an awakening.
An awakening can be immediate, awakening can be sudden -- in fact, awakening can ONLY be sudden. When you wake somebody up, it is not that slowly slowly, in parts, gradually, he wakes up. It is not that now he is ten percent awake, now twenty, now thirty, now forty, now ninety-nine, now ninety-nine point nine, and then a hundred percent -- no. When you shake a sleepy person, he awakes immediately. Either one is asleep or one is awake; there is no place in between. Hence Buddha says enlightenment is a sudden experience; it is not gradual, it is not that you arrive in steps. Enlightenment cannot be divided into parts; it is an indivisible, organic unity. Either you have it or you don't have it.
But man has remained clinging to words -- words which are hollow, words which carry no meaning, words which have no significance, words which have been uttered
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