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.
