|
Main Index
|
| |
| |
|
| |
intelligence. They are BOUND to become idiots! Growth is NOT possible there.
They may live in a silence, but the silence is of the mountains -- it is not their achievement. Unless you can live silence in the market-place, it is not your achievement. Come back from the Himalayas and you will be suddenly shocked that you are the same person as you had gone -- maybe you are worse. You will not be able to tolerate the noise, the turmoil of the world. What kind of attainment is this? Rather than becoming more capable, more integrated, you have disintegrated, you have become weaker. You have not gained in strength.
Know thyself, but in your knowing, do not become a hybrid or an idiot! One is getting puffed up in the ego -- that "I am a soul," that "I am infinite," that "I am eternal," that "I am this and that.... " If the I persists, then you are nothing. When the I goes, yes, eternity is there -- but you cannot claim it as yours. Eternity is, God is, immortality is, but nothing that you can possess, nothing that you can keep in your safe-deposit. It has nothing to do with you! It belongs to existence at large. And you also belong to existence.
That is the first extreme to be avoided.
And the second extreme: don't become an idiot. Don't start escaping from people, because all growth is there with people, in relating with people, in accepting the challenge and responding to that challenge.
Self-knowledge is a very strange concept, and you have to understand it -- because that is the whole work of a Sufi: how to know oneself. The word itself is a contradiction in terms, because in knowledge at least two things are needed: the knower and the known. And in self-knowledge there are not two things but only one. How to call it self-knowledge? Who is the knower and who is the known? The word has to be used because we don't have any other better word for it. But it has to be used very very knowingly -- knowing that it doesn't mean exactly what it says.
Self-knowledge is a kind of knowing, but not knowledge. It is a kind of awareness, luminosity, but not knowledge. Knowledge it cannot be, because knowledge requires two.
This problem
|
|
|
|
| |