| |
haste you will have the desire to fill up the emptiness. But if you are not in haste and if you accept the emptiness and you are ready to live with it, then you will find that gradually the emptiness gets filled up by itself. Nature does not tolerate emptiness. You create the emptiness, nature fills it up. God does not tolerate emptiness; if you create emptiness, God fills it up. Only emptiness is needed, fullness comes on its own. Just like when it rains, water from all sides rushes into the pit; in the same way, when you become empty, the divine rushes towards you from all sides. If you make a pit, existence will fill it up. Half of the work is done by you, half by existence. But your doing is not so important, the real work is done by existence. All that you have to do is to be ready, to be empty. That is why all the enlightened people go on insisting, "Do not accumulate. Do not have the desire to collect things"... because if you fill yourself, then you are not giving a chance to the divine to fill you.
I have heard a story. Once Krishna sat down for a meal. Rukmani was serving the food. Krishna had hardly taken the first morsel when all of a sudden he got up and ran out. But no sooner had he reached the door than he came back and sat down.
Rukmani couldn't understand this behavior. She asked him, "Why did you run? for what? Then why did you come back from the door? You ran as if some house was on fire and you had to extinguish it before having your meal. But then you came back as if nothing had happened."
Krishna replied, "Yes, certainly something was on fire, but by the time I reached the door it was extinguished, so I came back. One of my devotees was walking on a street of the capital. People were throwing stones at him, his forehead was bleeding and he was calling, "Govinda, Govinda!" He was neither reacting nor trying to save himself. He had trusted himself to me entirely. So to save him I had to run."
When one becomes helpless like that man, existence has to take care of him. When a person becomes so empty that in spite of being stoned he is doing nothing to save himself, he is not even running away and not even reacting, then
|
|
|