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more he moved, the more the shadow would move ahead. The child started crying. He was a failure. He tried in every way to catch it, but it was impossible. To catch a shadow is impossible -- not because a shadow is such a difficult thing to catch, it is impossible because the child was moving to catch it. When he was moving, the shadow moved ahead. You cannot catch a shadow because a shadow has no substance, and only a substance can be caught.
Ramteerth was sitting there. He was laughing and the child was crying, and the mother was at a loss about what to do. How to console the child? So she said to Ramteerth, "Swamiji, can you help me?" Ramteerth went to the child, caught the child's hand and put it on his head -- the shadow was caught. Now that the child had put his hand on his head, the shadow was caught. The child started laughing. Now he could see that his hand had caught the shadow.
You cannot catch a shadow, but you can catch yourself. And the moment you catch yourself, the shadow is caught.
Suffering is just a shadow of the ego. We are all like that child, fighting with suffering, anxiety, anguish, and trying to disperse them. We can never be victorious. It is not a question of strength -- the whole effort is absurd, impossible. You must catch the self, the ego, and once you catch it, suffering suddenly disappears. It was just a shadow.
There are persons who start fighting with the self. It has been taught, "Disperse the self, be egoless, and you will be in bliss," so they start fighting the self, the ego. But if you fight you are still believing that the self exists. Your fight will give food to it, it will become an energy-giving thing to it, you will be feeding it. This technique says don't think of the ego, just move from the head to the heart and the ego will disappear. The ego is a projection of the head. Don't fight with it. You can go on fighting for lives together, but if you remain in the head you cannot win.
Just change the standpoint, just move from the head to a different standpoint, to a deeper standpoint of the being, and the whole thing changes because now you can look from a different perspective. From the
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