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Main Index
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look inside me? I was born out of you but you did not create me. I came via you as traveller comes via a certain route, but what do the traveller and the road have to do with each other? Suppose that tomorrow the road says 'I know you, your being has come from me' -- just as you are saying.
"I existed before you. I have been on this journey for many lives. I certainly passed through you, as I have passed through others. Others too have been my father, others too have been my mother. But my being is completely separate."
It is very difficult, extremely difficult: If you saw the seed you cannot believe the flower is in front of you.
One way of looking is that of the distrustful, the rational, the skeptical. They say, "We know the seed so this flower is not possible. We know the mud: how can a lotus come from it? It is all false -- a dream, an illusion. He must have fallen into a kind of hypnosis. Someone deceived him; some magic, some spell...."
This is one way. The other is the way of trust -- of the lover, the devotee, of the heart filled with empathy. He sees the flower and from the flower begins traveling backwards. He says, "When the flower has become so fragrant, when such radiance appears in the flower, when there is such beauty in the flower, when such fresh innocence is seen in the flower, then certainly it must also have been present in the seed -- because it is not possible that what is present in the flower was not already in the seed."
It is not that these stories actually happened. Those who saw flowers bloom in Ashtavakra concluded that what has happened today must have also been present yesterday -- it was hidden, screened, behind a veil. What is here in the end, must have been present at the beginning also. What is seen at the moment of death must also have been present at the moment of birth; otherwise how could it arise?
So one way is to look backwards from the flower, and the other is to look forward from the seed. If you look carefully their essence is the same, their foundation is the same, but what a difference: like between earth and sky! The one who knows the seed says, "How can what is not in the
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