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yourselves. Remove the layers of thought with the spade of meditation. And by right-mindfulness and constant awareness render thought lifeless. Wipe it out of existence. What you will know then will be knowledge. Where there are no thoughts, where consciousness is not hidden by the smoke of ideas you will find knowledge.
I am not asking you to go into solitude. I ask you to create solitude within yourselves. A mere change of location won't help; a change of attitude is necessary. It is not the environment but our mental attitude that is the central and most important point. A man may go into solitude but if there is no solitude within him he will even be surrounded by a crowd in his lonely retreat, for the crowd within him will be there as well.
My friends, the crowd is not outside, it is within you. You are surrounded by a crowd within so how will running away from the crowd outside help? The crowd that is with you now will go with you into your solitude. Running away from the crowd is useless. The crowd of desires within must be removed. Therefore don't seek solitude somewhere else. Just be solitary within. Don't go into seclusion but create desirelessness within. The moment you realize this, peace, bliss and ecstasy will permeate you. And at this moment of moments you will realize there never has been any crowd, nor has there ever been any outside world. Everything was within you! The creator and the creations are not separate from each other. They are, in truth, one and the same. It must have been at such a blissful moment that the mystic of the Upanishads exclaimed "Aham brahmasmi -- I am he, the creator, I am God."
The dust of the ages lies heaped on our minds. Old customs, old traditions and superstitions have enveloped us, just as a ruined or deserted house is full of spiders' webs and inhabited by the birds of darkness. In the same way we are stuffed with thoughts borrowed from others. And these borrowed thoughts about truth and about God are great obstacles. They keep us from knowing the truth. And so the search for the self, the search that can awaken our sleeping consciousness never starts in us.
Before one can know truth
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