Respect the form that takes you to the Formless || On Advait Vedanta (2019)

Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said: Speak to us of Eating and Drinking. And he said: Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light. But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship. And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man.

When you kill a beast say to him in your heart, “By the same power that slays you, I too am slain, and I too shall be consumed. For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand. Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.” And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart, “Your seeds shall live in my body, and the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart, and your fragrance shall be my breath, and together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”

And in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of your vineyard for the winepress, say in your heart, “I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress, and like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels.” And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup; and let there be in the song a remembrance of the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress.

~ Khalil Gibran

Questioner (Q): While reading the above lines from Khalil Gibran, I have a hard time agreeing with him. It seems to me that the poet is giving justifications for killing animals to have their flesh and milk, as if we as human beings do not have a choice there. In today’s time, when the whole world is suffering due to man’s aggravated sensory pleasure addictions and unimaginable consumerism, how can what is being said here be justified? Could you talk about this poem so that we can understand its real meaning in the right spirit?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Not all utterances by wise men are utterances of the absolute Truth. The aim is to help. In fact, very few statements even in the cardinal scriptures can be taken as absolutely pure. Even in Vedanta, from the eleven principal Upanishads and the hundreds of other Upanishads and the dozens of other texts, only four statements have been called as the mahāvākyas (great sentences). If only four have been called as the mahāvākyas , obviously some difference was seen between these four and the other thousands of statements contained in the Upanishads. Those thousands are not false. In fact, to call them true or false is to miss the point. The objective of the Rishis is to help, and many a times it is not helpful to bring the absolute Truth to the listener. Not that this is a shortcoming with the Truth, it’s just that the listener is often, rather usually not in a position to appreciate, gather, and benefit from the purest of statements.

So, most of what you find as wisdom literature is just statements made with respect to the position of the listener. They do not intend to take the listener to absolute heights. They just seek to shake up the listener from his deep sleep.

Now, if someone is to travel a long distance and instead he is busy sleeping, and if you go and shake him up, then prima facie you are not assisting or encouraging the person in running up to the destination, right? He will reach the destination when he leaves the bed and starts moving. Whereas, whether he is sleeping or whether he has just woken up, he is still on the bed. When you go and wake someone up, he probably still would remain on the bed for five minutes.

So, someone who considers only travel and movement as an indicator of progress towards the Truth would probably find himself justified in saying that the so-called helper is not helping at all. Before the help, the sleeping fellow was on the bed; even after the help, the fellow has woken up but is still on the bed. The distance between the fellow and his destination is still the same. When he was sleeping, the distance between him and the destination was a thousand kilometers; now that he has been woken up, still the distance between him and the destination is a thousand kilometers. So, of what point is the help? No, there is definite help taking place.

When such a thing is being done, when help is being rendered in this form, then the criteria should not be with respect to the Absolute. You cannot say, “Oh, he is still very far from the absolute Truth.” That would be an unfair way of assessing the help. A fairer way of assessing help would be with respect to his current condition, not with respect to his targeted condition. If you measure progress with respect to the targeted condition, you will be deluded into thinking that no progress has taken place at all, or that no help has been offered at all. But when you look at the effectiveness of help with respect to the current condition of the seeker, then you realize that help indeed has been effective. Please get this.

So, let’s look at the current condition of the practitioner, of the seeker. What was he doing five minutes back? He was deeply absorbed in sleep on the bed. What is he doing right now? After being helped, he is still on the bed but he has at least partly woken up. So, with respect to his condition five minutes back, is there improvement or not? There is improvement, right?

And that is what the wise man has sought to achieve—improvement with respect to your current condition; incremental improvement, not absolute improvement; improvement relative to where you are standing right now, improvement not relative to the Absolute, because the Absolute is so far away. Any movement towards the Absolute would appear so small that you would end up saying, “Oh, I am still as far from the Absolute as I was two years back!”

Would it be unjustified to say that the Absolute is infinitely far? Oh yes, we say many a things about the Absolute; we do say that the Absolute is infinitely close as well. But you won’t contest it if I say that the Absolute is infinitely far, right? Now, if the distance is infinite, and even if you cover a thousand miles towards the destination, have you made any progress? And that assessment with respect to the Absolute would totally dishearten and demotivate you. You will say, “The Absolute is like the horizon: it was infinitely far away before I began seeking, and it is still infinitely far away after five years of seeking. So, why seek at all? Stop all seeking, stop all effort.”

So, the right way is to look at the current condition of the listener or seeker or audience, and take it up from there. So, who is the person the author is addressing? He is saying, go to his words, “Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.” So, he says, “Well, that would have been the most preferable condition. In other words, that would have been absolutely great, could you live in a totally non-violent manner, could you live in a way where you simply didn’t have to have any relationship with other organisms in order to just physically survive.”

And then he says, mark the words, “But since you must kill to eat”. So, let’s speculate about the kind of person he is speaking to. He is saying, “But since you must kill to eat”—he is talking to someone who is adamant on killing. Who is the person being spoken to? Someone who is adamant on killing. Maybe centuries of conditioning, maybe deeply and widely prevalent cultural norms. He is speaking to such a person.

“But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst”—he is talking to people who take it as a given that the milk of the calf’s mother has to be necessarily had. It has become a staple food in the region; it has become unimaginable for people of that region that they can live without flesh or milk. Such are the people to whom Gibran is talking.

And he must have really tried very hard to first of all convince them to do that which is perfectly right. That he does not state in this text, but that you must take as a given. If the man is wise, why would he want anything short of the Absolute for himself and, therefore, why would he want anything short of the Absolute for the others?

So, the first preference would surely have been to bring the Ultimate to the audience as well. But the audience is stubborn. The audience has been possessed by Prakriti (physical nature) and eons of social, cultural conditioning. So, what he now says must be taken not as the speaker’s first preference but as a compromised statement. And there is no option but to offer this compromised statement because it is humanly impossible for the best thing to be executed.

The wise man is practical. He says, “I see that you are not in a condition to reach the Absolute in one go, in one jump, but that does not mean that I leave you to your state and to your fate. If you cannot have the best, I’ll ensure that you have at least the second-best. If you cannot progress absolutely, I’ll ensure that you progress at least relatively. I see that my efforts to prevent you from consuming flesh have all fallen flat. You will take time. Not that I will be defeated, it’s just that the victory will take some time coming. In the meanwhile, I will keep fighting, I will keep gaining ground. Before the final victory comes, I will keep winning a series of small battles.” So, he says, “Fine, if you have to eat flesh, eat it this way. If you have to drink milk, drink it this way.” But remember that such a thing is to be said only after absolute efforts have been made and seen to be inadequate.

Because it’s a compromised statement, so the philosophy being conveyed here is obviously compromised. Do not measure these words for wisdom; you will not find much wisdom here. Do not assess these words for perfection; you will not find much perfection there, because there is no perfection really here. Being perfect is probably not even the intention of the author. These words are coming from a practical need. So, you may not find wisdom, but you will find compassion. The author is deliberately compromising on himself. You could say he is ensuring that he lives to fight another day.

The fellow has been shaken up and woken up, and now there is a possibility that you can allure him about the destination, and after some time he will be found actually moving towards the destination. But before he moves towards the destination, you are doing something that is ensuring that more time is being wasted on the bed. What is that? First of all, you woke him up; that was time spent on the bed, not time spent in covering the distance. Then, after he woke up and sat on the bed, you started talking to him. In an absolute sense, there is wastage of time, because even as you are talking to him the clock is ticking away; he is not making any tangible progress. You are just talking to him, alluring him, motivating him, and that may take one hour, two hours; that may take one month, two months; that may take years. And an onlooker might say that the helper is actually assisting the fellow on the bed to waste away his time. That is not really happening. The ground is being laid; the foundation is being laid.

But I see what you are saying. These things can become great excuses, and it is only the purity of your intention, then, that can be the real judge. You can very well keep consuming flesh and milk and such things, and say, “You know, I am just preparing myself to leave all these things.” It’s a great self-deception; many will fall for it. They say, “If I leave everything all at once then there will be recoil. So, I am trying to gradually drop stuff, one by one. You know, this year maybe I will drop cheese, next year maybe I will drop paneer, and then I will drop butter and ghee and…” Only they know whether they really mean what they are saying.

Finally, you have to answer yourself. Delaying the assault can mean either of the two things: it could mean you are gathering strength so as to launch a vigorous assault, or it could mean that you are so frightened that you are just somehow whiling away time to find an opportunity to retreat and run away. What is your intention? Only you can tell.

The things that Gibran says here are all philosophically quite weak. They do not have much relation with the Truth. This poetry has any value only in terms of the relative assistance it can offer to an adamant flesh eater; beyond that, it has very little value. In fact, it can be dangerously misused by someone in order to remain what he already is.

In assisting someone towards freedom there are no rules. Sometimes you push him to cover the entire distance in one go; sometimes you say “let’s take it step by step”; sometimes you contradict what you previously told him. It has to be a situation and approach where the destination is clear, the strategy is flexible, and the tactics, they keep varying almost moment by moment—and even that is not certain. In certain cases, you will need to stick to one strategy followed by one tactic.

That’s the thing with freedom—no real rules work there. Only love works. You must know in your heart that you are honestly trying, you are doing your best. That is the only criteria. Any rule can become a tool for self-deception, so it is best if one’s inner honesty is the only rule. But then, that’s a great danger. If there are rules, they keep you straight. If there are no rules and your own honesty is the only judge, then that’s an incentive for you to just cheat and lie to yourself and to others.

A lot of what is contained in wisdom texts is just with reference to the time and the situations and the people and the contingencies. They are not at all absolute statements, and they must be read as such. Only very few statements correspond to the Truth and that too, let me add, conditionally; that too, only if you read them in the right spirit and you have someone who can bring the right spirit to you. Otherwise, everything that is there in the wisdom texts, in the holy scriptures, is actually just relative, relative to the prevailing conditions of the time. It demands a certain intelligence on behalf of the reader to draw the real essence out of those words.

After all, words are just words. It’s your light that shines upon them first of all, before the words can fill you up with light. It’s almost like searching for the switchboard with a little torch. Once you have reached the switchboard, then the entire house can be illuminated. Before there can be so much light, you must at least have a little light, a little torch, to reach the switchboard. If you do not have even a little light, then the great light will remain illusive.

And that’s a major tragedy that has befallen on religious people. They expect the scriptures to give them a lot of light, which is fair, but they do not go to the scriptures with any light of their own, which is very, very unfair. The scriptures will give you a lot of light, but first of all use whatever light you have to reach the scripture and read it properly. How will the scripture give you anything if you can’t even apply basic sense to the verses or the stories or the injunctions?

What does light mean to somebody who is blind or has stubbornly closed his eyes? Some light must be there within already before you can benefit from the wider light. Some work must be done in one’s isolation, in one’s solitude, before one is in a position to benefit from the teachings of others. Someone who does no homework gains very little even from the best of classrooms. Don’t we know that? And often it so happens that the more quality a classroom has, the more intensive is the homework that it requires of you. Is it not so? That’s the price that you have to pay for benefiting from a high text or teacher or institution: you have to come prepared. Without due preparation, the texts will not benefit and may even backfire.

So, you are right. It is quite possible that this particular text from Gibran is used by the flesh eaters to justify what they are doing. They will say, “We do slaughter the animal, and as we are slaughtering the animal, we just recite the poem that Gibran has advised us to recite. We tell the animal, you know, ‘By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed. For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand. Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.’” Oh, glorious poetry! Glorious poetry that would enable the mindless, senseless, merciless slaughter of billions of more animals. It is quite possible.

But I assure you that was not Gibran’s intention. So much nonsense is happening in the name of religion. I assure you that was not the intention of the founders of those religions. The catch is, they will give what they can, you take what you want to. So, there is always a great difference between what the great ones are giving and what the receivers are receiving. And, unfortunately, even the great ones are helpless in this matter. They have discretion and control only over what they give; they have really no power over what we selectively receive or what we selectively interpret.

Another issue that I must address here is the issue of eating an animal versus eating an apple, because Gibran seems to have put both these on the same plane. He says, when you slaughter an animal then say these things to the animal, and when you eat an apple then say these things to the apple. So, to the common reader it might appear that even Gibran is validating that eating an apple and eating an animal are both similar acts. Well, they are not, let me assure you. Not at all. This has to be understood.

Who are we? It all begins from there. We are not just bodies that need to be fed. You can feed the body of a madman very nicely. You can give him the best kind of foods that are available. And if those foods are guaranteed, would you want to have the life of the madman, of the psychotic, of the mentally deranged person? The best of foods have been assured—would you like to now shift to a mental asylum? You won’t, because it is not for food that man lives. It is very obvious to you, it is so common sensical that if the body is alright but the mind is in disarray, the mind is in chaos, then life is not at all worth living, right? Therefore, a well-fed madman is not at all someone you would want to be.

So, what is it, then, that we really value, all of us, universally? We all want peace of mind, don’t we? Even having good food is a way to keep the mind quiet, because if the body is hungry then the mind starts shouting. Even the food is not so much for the body but really for the mind.

So, as I am fond of saying, we are incomplete, hungry, thirsty, seeking consciousnesses. That’s what we really are. Our bodily identity is marginal. I am not denying it, I am just keeping it in its right place. It does exist, but it is not our primary identity. And I am not stating a principle, I am stating a fact. I am not describing a utopian destination, I am just describing the day-to-day fact of our lives. A well-fed body having all the bodily comforts is no good if the mind is yelling and shrieking, right? That is a day-to-day experience; I am talking about that.

So, we are minds. Man is a consciousness seeking completion, seeking dissolution. Whatsoever is there in consciousness is noise. That is why man enjoys deep sleep the most: there is no noise then. This-that, happiness-sadness, light-darkness, right-left, up-down, profit-loss—they are all burdens upon the consciousness, and they are the stuff, the content of consciousness. The content of consciousness is itself the pain of consciousness, and man does not want to live in pain. We seek, therefore, completion, which in other words is dissolution.

There is always something missing in life. We are always feeling incomplete, and this incompleteness is the content of consciousness. Man is seeking to somehow go beyond the pain of not being full. That’s why we all aim and target and desire and run around: because we want something that would give us fullness. That’s our condition. Now, from this condition, let’s proceed to see what our food must be.

Once one sees that one is consciousness, one also sees that elevation of consciousness is one’s only savior. What do I mean by elevation of consciousness? Consciousness that understands, consciousness that is free, consciousness that has love. That is what brings peace—heights of consciousness. One starts seeing that it is not the world that would be of much use to you, but consciousness itself. You want to then serve it, raise it, elevate it, fulfill it. No point running after this material or that thing, this food or that drink, if it does not elevate your consciousness, right?

So, one requires reverence towards consciousness. One requires to have a continuous remembrance that one’s savior is nothing but consciousness. One requires to repeat it to himself constantly: What will save me? Not money, not food, not drinks, not house, not anything in the world, but consciousness itself.

So, that is the only thing that is valuable. What is valuable, then? Consciousness. Not money, not food, not drinks, not this. What is valuable? Consciousness is valuable.

If consciousness is valuable, now, tell me, what do I eat? And given my physical composition, given who I am as a body, something has to be eaten. What do I eat? I will have to eat something that elevates consciousness, or at least brings minimum damage to consciousness itself.

And remember that the way to salvation is to be deeply, deeply respectful of consciousness as such. Not my own consciousness; consciousness as such. Because if I respect only my consciousness, then I am respecting my personal current state of consciousness. And if you respect that, you will never be able to go beyond that. To respect consciousness is to not respect your personal consciousness but to respect, I am saying, consciousness as such. And if you respect consciousness as such, how will you kill a conscious being? He is the same as you.

Then you will say, “Are not the plants that we kill to eat the same as us?” Yes, they too are. But what do you do? You are born with mouth, teeth, stomach, intestines; you are born with a body that requires energy. You will have to eat something. But if you have to eat something, then how do you decide what to eat? Eat that in which you are causing minimum damage to consciousness.

So, eating an apple and eating an animal are not the same thing. The apple is not crying for salvation, the apple is not crying for freedom—but the animal hates to be caged. Do you see the difference in consciousness between the two of them? If you cage an apple tree, probably it will give you more apples; it will love to be safe from the birds and such things, animals. But if you cage an animal, he does not like it.

You too do not like to be caged. There is something in the animal’s consciousness which is just the same as yours. And if you respect your consciousness, how can you then kill the animal who then, in this respect, becomes your conscious brother? He wants the same thing as you do. He too loves freedom, he too loves to be loved, just like you.

And that will tell you why man does not eat man: because among the sentient beings man is the most conscious. If to eat an apple is the same thing as eating an animal, then eating Baba Adam too should be the same thing, no? The apple, the animal, and Adam, they all must be put in the same plane. But why don’t we eat human beings? Because they are the most conscious. And even among human beings, to kill a highly conscious human being is a greater crime than killing someone who is asleep and lost and unconscious.

In general, human beings are not cannibals. We do not eat other men and women, do we? Why don’t we ask ourselves, why don’t we eat other men and women? If flesh is what we want to eat, then why kill only animals? There are many who say, “You know, eating flesh is alright.” If eating flesh is alright, why is it not alright to eat human flesh? It is not alright to eat human flesh; a line is drawn. A line is drawn between the human being and the animal. You say, “No, the human being cannot be eaten because he is highly conscious.” No, I want you to draw the line between apple and the animal. You are anyway drawing a line.

It is not that you eat flesh wherever it is available. A newborn has no defences at all; you can easily kill it and eat it, can’t you? I am talking of a newborn human baby. Why don’t you kill a human baby if flesh is all that you want? Why don’t even habitual flesh eaters eat human babies or human beings? It does not occur to them, right? I am asking them to introspect: Why don’t you eat human beings? You don’t eat human beings because human beings are conscious, because human beings are hungry of liberation. And consciousness is your only hope and consciousness is your only savior; therefore, you do not want to disrespect consciousness by killing a conscious being.

So, even the most ardent supporters of flesh eating do not become cannibals; they do not eat human beings. They do draw a line. I am asking: If you are drawing a line, why must only human beings be beyond the line? Why can’t you be more discreet in keeping somebody out of bounds? Right now, you are drawing the line in such a way that animals are within the edible territory and human beings are outside the line, they have been exempted. No, draw the line with more discretion, more compassion, more consciousness. Keep even animals outside the line, which means that you will still be killing someone to eat. And who would that be? You would probably be killing plants, you would probably be killing grass.

And now that you are killing creatures, beings, things that are less conscious, see whether you can still keep being more discreet. Is it really impossible to eat without killing a plant? It is possible, at least it must be tried. If you cannot altogether avoid killing plants, see whether you can minimize it. I understand that even the best of your efforts would not fully succeed. Some plants would probably always need to be killed for human consumption, and that would mean that something conscious is still being killed. But that is the maximum you can do. Now, in fact, it is not violence because it is the very constitution of your body that is acting.

Violence is only when you deliberately kill. If killing is happening because it is unavoidable, then it is not violence.

Your entire intestine is a home to countless fungi and bacteria, and even as they are taking birth, they must be getting killed as well. Some food that you are taking might be acidic or alkaline, and it is killing a lot of micro-organisms in your system. You are not responsible for those deaths because your very body is designed in such a way that those deaths are going to happen. So, you cannot call that as violence, you cannot feel guilty about those things. In the Bhagavad Gita , Shri Krishna calls all that as akarma . He says it is not even action, it is akarma ; it is something you didn’t do, it just happened. So, how are you to feel guilty over it? You breathe in and certain micro-organisms travel into your respiratory tract, get trapped, and get killed; you are not responsible. And that is non-violence.

So, let nobody say that because somebody eats an apple hence somebody else is entitled to eat an animal. No, eating an apple and eating an animal are not the same thing. And if eating an animal and eating an apple are the same thing, then eating an animal and eating a human being are the same thing by the same logic, extending the same logic.

So, if someone comes to you quoting this kind of a logic that “You know, if I am eating the goat or the chicken, then you too are eating the rice grain and the wheat grain, and the rice plant and the wheat plant have been slaughtered. So, if I am guilty of violence, then you too are guilty of violence because you have killed rice and wheat. And if you will continue to eat rice and wheat, then I will continue to eat goat and chicken.” Then ask the fellow to extend this logic: “If apple and animal are the same thing, then animal and human being are the same thing. Eat the human being as well! And if you do not eat the human being, then extend the same logic not to eat the animal as well.”

The best thing, the dream, the utopia would be a situation in which man can survive without even killing a single plant; fruits, vegetables and leaves suffice. But given the configuration of our planet now and given our population, that is what I just said it is—a utopia. But still, that is what you must teach your kids: that not only must you not kill animals, you must also try to avoid killing plants. That would be the best. And if you can somehow come up with a way in which even plants are not to be killed for human consumption, that would be heavenly. But if you cannot come up with that kind of a solution, if plants continue to be eaten by human beings, that does not justify the consumption of animal flesh. This should be made clear.

Q: While it is true that the teachers have to take the state of their listeners into account, still there is a great danger of these statements being misused. For example, we just said that we should avoid killing higher forms of consciousness for our sustenance. While there is a clear logic there, it can be read from the other side also: that it is alright to kill beings with a lower level of consciousness.

The Guru or the teacher is always looked up to, and for many he can become an idol of sorts. Sometimes we even try to copy his words and actions. Still, more often than not, the words of the teacher become distorted and misused by us. While the effort has been to help us transcend our lowly position, we use the help to just stay where we are and continue being what we have always been.

AP: The words of the Guru are always going to be imperfect. That’s his helplessness. You have to resonate with his intention. You have to resonate with the source he is coming from.

Anybody who is dealing in words is dealing in imperfection. Let that be clear. If you want the Guru to be perfect, then don’t insist him to speak; let him live in his own silent domain. The moment the Guru is to take a human form and open his mouth to speak, imperfection is bound to creep in. That is why it would not be entirely misplaced to say that no word ever spoken really represents the Absolute. It is relatively a high utterance but not an absolutely high utterance; it still has imperfection.

So, whatsoever any teacher says is bound to have limits. There are bound to be gaps, contradictions, and those gaps and contradictions, as you said, can always be played upon, picked up, and misutilized. That is possible.

So, it depends on you. If you want to benefit from the teacher, resonate with him. You have to have a certain connectivity so that you know where he’s coming from. If you just feast upon his words, then you will only be pleasing yourself. Now, the thing is, if you really were so fond of the source the Guru is coming from, you would not have wanted the Guru to be formally and physically present in front of you; you would have said the source is sufficient.

So, in your desire for a physical Guru anyway some kind of malice is hidden. I am asking you, you see, to resonate with the source the Guru is coming from and not to be too particular about his words. But then, had you really wanted to resonate with the Source—and the Source is formless—then why would you have desired a physical, formal, personal Guru in front of you? Asking for a personal Guru is almost like asking for a bit of imperfection, because the moment the Source takes a physical form, the Source has assumed imperfection. What else is form? Can any form be perfect? Can any body or any person be perfect?

So, the moment the teacher comes in front of you as a person, the teacher is already imperfect—and that is what you have asked for. If you really valued perfection, then you would have said, “I do not need any physical teacher.” But if you do not need any physical teacher, if you value perfection so much that you do not value physicality at all, then first of all you would have not valued your own physicality. But then, you do exist as a body happily, which means you value your own physicality. If you value your own physicality, you will want a physical teacher. In wanting a physical teacher, you have valued imperfection.

So, the student, being a physical student, cannot really ask for a perfect teacher. Physicality is imperfection and the student is physical. So, the student will deliberately ask for a physical teacher, and a physical teacher is bound to be a little helpless because to be physical is to be incomplete, to be physical is to be a little imperfect at least. You can be relatively far ahead of the world, but in the absolute sense even the best of teachers are going to carry some imperfection, and that would reflect in their words.

So, that’s the thing with words. They help you, they elevate you, but do not expect perfection in words. Use words carefully. Know very well that what the teacher is saying is not contained in the words. Be one with the teacher. If you like the teacher’s words too much, is that not a way to avoid the real teacher?

And that’s what so many people do, don’t they? They stick to the scriptures. They will say, “We don’t want the teacher, the scripture is sufficient.” They will stick to the videos. They will say, “The video is sufficient, we do not want the teacher.” If you stick to the video, you must know that the video is always going to be a little imperfect. If you stick to the words, you must know that the books are always going to be a little imperfect, and you will somewhere be deceived by the same glorious book. And I am saying that with respect to even the holiest books—even they are a little imperfect.

And that is not their intention, that is their helplessness, because they are dealing in black and white, they are dealing in paper and ink. Wherever there is paper and ink, there is bound to be a marginal imperfection despite the best attempts of the teacher, because the teacher is receiving something in silence. What the teacher has received has come to him in silence, but he has to translate it in your worldly language. Now, silence is not really translatable into words. So, words would always carry some noise and that noise, I repeat, is not the intention of the teacher, it is his helplessness. What does he do? And you are insisting that you will not read silence. You are insisting that, “No, we do not read formlessness, we do not read silence. We only read a physical body. We only read words, we only read books.”

So, you insist that you are fond of imperfection. What is the way? Even if the teacher is physically there in front of you, you will have to do a tightrope walk. On one hand, you will have to see that the body is there and you will have to pay due respect to the body; at the same time, you will have to consciously remember, deliberately remember, constantly remember that there is something beyond the body. Unless the student is able to do that tightrope walk, he will miss the teacher. He will maybe gather the words, but he will miss the teacher.

You want to hear a story? So, the teacher is dying. The teacher is sick and the teacher is dying, and his favorite student is by his bedside, and the teacher says, “So, I am going now. Show me what you have learnt from me.” The student keeps standing, does not do anything. The teacher says, “I am going!” He roars.

So, the cup containing the teacher’s medicine is there by the teacher’s side. The student pushes the cup a little towards the teacher. The teacher maybe has not taken his medicines, and the teacher is saying, “Show me what you have learnt from me.” The student pushes the cup towards the teacher. Now, the dying teacher roars even more loudly. He says, “Is that all? Is that all you have learnt from me?” The student withdraws the cup from the teacher. The teacher laughs, deeply laughs, and joyfully dies.

That must be your approach towards the teacher. In pushing the cup towards the teacher, the student demonstrated, “I care for your body”; but that is not sufficient. And withdrawing the cup from the teacher, the student said, “But I know that you really do not need any medicine.” In pushing the cup towards the teacher, the student said, “I care for your body. I do give weightage and regards to your body, because your body is very important. Without your body, you would have been no help to anybody. It is because you have taken a bodily self that you have been able to help so many people. So, your body must be taken care of. Here is the medicine, please take the medicine.”

The teacher says, “No, this is not sufficient. Just taking care of the teacher’s body or just taking the teacher as a body, it is not sufficient. What more have you learnt?” The student withdraws the cup; the student says, “On one hand, I am offering you medicine; on the other hand, sir, I continuously remember that you are someone who does not need any medicine. I remember that you are the great void, you are the true Self, and the true Self is nirāmaya (free from disease, untainted). It does not need any medicine.” The teacher says, “Now, now you know.”

And that must be the attitude of every student; that must be the attitude of every reader who picks up a scripture to read. On the one hand, you must be highly respectful towards the words; on the other hand, you must know that the real thing is a little beyond these words, and the real thing will not come through the medium of words. The real thing comes to you when there is no mediator. The real thing comes to you only in love.

So, you must have a love for the real thing. Words are like an introduction; words are like a common friend who introduces the two of you. The common friend is needed, but the common friend must also go away in due time; otherwise, there is no union really. The imperfection is needed so that the two are brought together. Who is the imperfection? The common friend, the mediator, the words. So, till a point imperfections are good, words are good. But after a point they must go away so that there is only the two of you, and hence there is union.

Q: Should one have an image of perfection in mind so that one does not get stuck with the mediator for too long?

AP: No, you need not have an image of perfection. You only need to humbly remember that this is not That. You need not say that “I know what That is”; you only need to say, “This is not That.”

Q: And yet be respectful towards it.

AP: And yet be respectful towards that, because this is the utmost that anything in the world can do to help me. These words are the highest thing that the world can offer me. But all said and done, they are the highest that the world can offer me.

These are the purest imperfections that can be there, so have deep regards for them. Do offer the medicine to the teacher. Do not say, “You are not the body, so why do you need the medicine?” But you must also remember that the Truth does not need any medicine.

show_less