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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 5 | Previous Next | |
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moment. That will not allow you to be a victim of false desires and false hopes.
BEHOLD THESE WHITENED BONES,
THE HOLLOW SHELLS AND HUSKS OF A DYING SUMMER.
AND ARE YOU LAUGHING?
YOU ARE A HOUSE OF BONES,
FLESH AND BLOOD FOR PLASTER.
PRIDE LIVES IN YOU,
AND HYPOCRISY, DECAY AND DEATH.
That's why people don't want to watch their lives. They don't want to go deeper into their beings because what they find is not soul, God, freedom, light. What they find in the beginning is ego, hypocrisy, decay and death. Yes, if you enter inside, first you will find these things. They are the first layers. But if you go on moving in spite of death, ego, decay, hypocrisy -- you go on moving courageously, then soon things start changing. Instead of death you start entering into eternal life, into life that is timeless; and instead of ego you come across your real self, your supreme self; and instead of death you come across immortality. But one has to go deeper.
The first penetration will make you afraid, you will become scared -- darkness all around and death. And people escape from that first layer. They become so afraid that they never try again.
The great English philosopher, David Hume, has written, "Reading again and again in the scriptures, 'Know thyself,' one day I tried. I closed my eyes and tried to go in. What I found was darkness, many many crazy thoughts, imagination, memory, desires, so many things crowding around, much noise and turmoil, but I could not find any immortal self." Just one day he tried, and that was that -- as if one becomes a buddha in one day. And not even one day, it must have been one hour or half an hour -- not twenty-four hours. Even a man of such keen intelligence as David Hume could not see a small point: who is the watcher?
He said, "I found memories, ideas, and so on and so forth, many things, but I did not find any self." You see the absurdity of the statement? Who has found the ideas and the imagination and the memory? Who is this witness? That is the self! It is SO simple. You cannot be the idea; you are seeing the idea -- how can you be it? The seer can never be the
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