Love or Knowledge: Which is More Powerful for Liberation?

Acharya Prashant: Love is the fire that melts down the bondage that is you. Knowledge is merely the light in which you can see your bondages. Even if you are able to look at your chains in the light of knowledge, that does not rid you of the chains. In fact, if you have been wearing chains since your inception, then observation of chains hardly surprises you, or does it?

Knowledge is just the beginning. Knowledge is like a school curriculum for boys in school uniforms. Love is for real men. They are either dressed up in battle gear, not school uniforms, or they are not dressed up at all. You begin with the knowledge, it is okay; primary, secondary, higher secondary. But Liberation is not a boyish matter. Liberation is for men who can love. Boys and girls can giggle and wink. It is men and women who know love and Liberation.

Observation is a teeny-weeny beginning. It is a teenage thing, actually. You look at the teenagers, they are observing all the time. Practicing observation is the teenage of spirituality; you have yet not grown up. You are observing this or that, somebody is observing his breath all his life. This is childish stuff. Not bad, not wrong. Merely childish.

Detached, passive observation will carry you only so far. Even when you are practicing detachment, isn’t there somebody who very solidly and stubbornly exists as a detached entity? You say, “I am detached from everything.” Who is detached from everything? “ I am.” This ‘I am’ remains. Childish fear. “I can drop everything except this ‘I’.”

“ I am detached.” It won’t help. The real thing that needed to be dropped is still there.

Love is when this ‘I’ simply melts, and goes away somewhere. Nobody knows where. You observe from your own center. You observe as the observer. Therefore, you fail.

The caged bird needs love for the sky. Merely ogling at the spikes of its cage is not going to help it.

Don’t you see how theoretical and academic the observation is? What do you think, people don’t know what their situation is. They know what their situation is but they have no discontent against their situation, and that discontent can come only from love.

Only when you have seen something bigger and better than yourself, only then you would not want to anymore remain who you are. Otherwise, you may know everything about yourself and yet coolly, comfortably continue to remain who you are. Is that not what most people do? Is it hidden from you how you are and who you are, how you live, how you behave, and how you spend your time? Is it a very intricate, sophisticated matter? Is it? It is common sense, it is a common observation. We all know that. You don’t need to be an expert observer to know these things.

Everybody knows the rut he is in, but we have accepted that rut because we know of nothing else. You must not only know of something else, but you must also fall in love with that something else.

Now you know why Kabir Sahab repeatedly and incessantly emphasizes the virtue of the right company, Satsaṃgati . He says, “Nothing changes you better and faster than the right company.” At one point he says, “The company of the sādhu (saint) is so sweet that even if Rama calls me, I don’t want to go.” Obviously, it is an emphatic and ebullient overstatement, but you see what he is pointing at. He is highlighting the importance of sitting with the sādhu . Just sit with him, and if you have spent a few hours with him, then you will be no more able to tolerate your usual domestic nonsense. Just knowing that your house is noisy is not enough. You must also have had an introduction to silence.

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