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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
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to find them. The way is to become calm and quiet. The way is to become so alone and so accepting of one's aloneness that there is no need for anybody's grace. Become so silent and alone that you are fulfilled within your own self, that you are enough unto yourself. Then you will be calm. Then a grace will start happening to you, but it is not a grace coming from god. It is a grace spreading from your own center towards your own periphery. You will become graceful.
Buddha sitting, standing, walking, is just grace personified. But this grace is not coming from somewhere else; it is surfacing from his own innermost depths, it is bubbling up from his own center. It is like a flower that has flowered on the tree -- it has come out of the tree. It is not a gift from somebody else, it is a growth.
This is the difference between the path of the brahmin and the path of the shramana. On the brahmin's path, truth is a gift, god's gift. On the shramana's path, truth is a growth that happens to you from your own being. It is yours. Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.
THOSE WHO LEAVE THEIR PARENTS, GO OUT OF THE HOME, UNDERSTAND THE MIND, REACH THE SOURCE, AND COMPREHEND THE IMMATERIAL, ARE CALLED SHRAMANA.
Now, the definition of the shramana. Who is called a shramana? Who is really a seeker of truth? Who is making real effort, authentic effort to discover what truth is? The first thing -- they leave their parents.
Now this is very symbolical, don't take it literally. It is very symbolical and very psychological. A child has to remain for nine months in the womb of his mother... totally protected, in such a beautiful warm atmosphere that never again will he be able to find such comfort. No worry, no responsibility -- even for breathing. He has no need to breathe himself, the mother breathes for him. He has no worry that he will be hungry or left hungry; the mother goes on feeding him. He is so protected, so secure.
Psychologists say that in religious search people are seeking the same womb again. All their concepts of paradise are nothing but magnified wombs... absolutely comfortable.
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