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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8 | Previous Next | |
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is someone inside who has to be known. There is nobody inside. When Socrates says: Know thyself, he is simply saying, "Go in and see what is there." He is not saying that there is someone that you will come to know; he is simply saying go in. But he does not make you so scared.
Buddha says clearly that there is no one: Go in and see. There is only seeing, but not a seer. There is understanding but nobody who understands, knowing but not a knower. This has to be understood. This is Buddha's very emphatic message: that there are processes, certainly, but there is no center to those processes. Yes, there is love but no lover, and there is meditation but no meditator, and there is liberation, but nobody is liberated. It looks very strange, but now modern science agrees with it.
As far as objective reality is concerned, modern science agrees with Buddha more than with anybody else. Hence Buddha has a great future, because science will come closer and closer every day to Buddha. Science is going to speak in the same language as Buddha. Science says there is energy but no matter. That's what Buddha is saying for the inner world: There is energy, movement, processes, but no entity, no ego.
"Know thyself" means: know that you are not. Great courage is needed to know this. People want to know that they are immortal souls. Then they are very happy: "We are immortal souls." And Buddha says, "Don't talk nonsense! You are simply not. Immortality is there, but you are not immortal. When YOU disappear completely, whatsoever is left behind... that cleanliness, that purity, that innocence, that nobodiness, that nothingness, that SHUNYA -- that is immortal. It has no beginning and no end, no birth and no death."
But rather than going in and finding the basic illusion of the ego, rather than going in and finding the root cause of all your misery, you go on throwing the responsibility on others.
Murphy's famous maxim: The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on.
Everybody is trying to blame his misery on somebody else. And that's how we remain in misery, because this blaming is not going to help. In the
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