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Main Index
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you bring with yourself. The self is created by the society as a substitute so that you need not feel without identity... because the search for the soul may take long years of pilgrimage, of seeking and searching, and it will be impossible to bear a namelessness, an emptiness, a nobodiness.
The intention to create the self was out of love, so that from the very beginning you start feeling who you are; otherwise how will you live? How will you be addressed? The people who created the idea of the self were full of good intentions, but because they themselves had no idea of their own soul, they remained a man-created self and they died as a man-created self. They never came to know what existence has made them, and for what.
Your soul is part of existence.
Your self is a social institution.
So the first thing to remember is that the distinction is unbridgeable. If you want to seek and know who you really are, you will have to go through a radical change of destroying your own self, because if you don't destroy the self, and by some accident you come to discover the soul, you will not be one. That's what is called "schizophrenia" by psychologists.
You will be split. Sometimes you will behave like the self, and sometimes like a soul. You will be in a constant tension. Your life will become simply a deep anguish and anxiety -- and it is impossible to live such a life. Hence the society, the educational system, the parents, the priest -- everybody around you, tries in every way to create such a strong self that you never become aware of the hidden soul. The journey is not long, but certainly very arduous.
The self is not a simple thing -- it is very complex. You are a brahmin, you are a doctor, you are a vice-chancellor, you are a president; you are beautiful, you are very knowledgeable, you are rich, superrich -- all these dimensions are of the self. And the self goes on accumulating more money, more power, more prestige, more respectability -- its ambition is unfulfillable.
You go on and on creating more and more layers of self.
This is the misery of man, the basic misery.
Man does not know who he is, yet
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