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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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up to the waist?"
Dividing man is dangerous, because man is an organic unity. But this is how down the ages it has been done, and now it has become almost a routine thinking, a conditioning.
Daumal, you are still thinking in the old categories. I don't belong to any school -- the school of the materialists or the school of the so-called spiritualists. My approach is total, it is holistic. I believe that man is both together, spiritual and material. In fact, I have to use the words 'spiritual' and 'material' just because they have always been used. In fact man is psychosomatic, not material AND spiritual, because that 'and' creates duality. There is no 'and' between the material and the spiritual, not even a hyphen. Man is materialspiritual -- I use it as one word, materialspiritual. And both the sides....
Spiritual means the center of your being and the material means the circumference of your being. The circumference cannot be there if there is no center, and the center cannot be there if there is no circumference.
My work here is to help your center become a clarity, a purity. Then that purity will be reflected on the circumference too. If your center is beautiful your circumference is bound to become beautiful, and if your circumference is beautiful your center is bound to be affected by that beauty.
My sannyasin is a total man, he is a new man. The effort is that he will be beautiful from both the sides.
There were once two mystics talking. The first one said, "I had a disciple once, and in spite of all my efforts I was unable to illuminate him."
"What did you do?" asked the other.
"I made him repeat mantras, gaze at symbols, dress in special garb, jump up and down, inhale incense, read invocations, and stand up in long vigils."
"Didn't he say anything which might give you a clue as to why all this was not giving him higher consciousness?"
"Nothing. He just lay down and died. All he said was irrelevant: 'When am I going to get some FOOD?'"
Of course, to a spiritual person it is irrelevant, talking about food -- what has that to do with spirit?
I am not that kind of a spiritual
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