Without seeing the Beloved, how will he live? || Acharya Prashant, on Guru Kabir (2019)

Oh my Love! Come to my house. My body is in intense pain. While all say I am your spouse, I still have very deep doubts. So long as your heart is not immersed in mine, what kind of love is that? I don’t relish food, neither do I sleep; I feel discontent in my own home. Passionate is my love, like the thirsty longs for water. Will someone do me a favor, and narrate my predicament to my Beloved? Kabir is now in total distress: without seeing the Beloved, he is going to die.

~ Kabir

Acharya Prashant: The mind is referring to its Lord. The seeker is addressing the sought. The devotee is talking to God. Kabir is singing to Rama, “Balam aavo hamare ghar re (O Beloved, come to my home). Come, please come.”

“In principle I have been told,” says the seeker, the waiting one, the one feeling the pangs of separation, “In principle I have been told that you are my Lord, and I am all yours; I am your woman, your wife. But what kind of servant am I, what kind of woman am I if you are so far away from me?” It’s poignant, it’s very touching.

And look at the difference between the saint and the common man. The common man is reconciled to the intellectual fact of separation. So, the common man would intellectually declare, “Well, you see, there is the mind and there is the source, and there are so many philosophies that declare that the mind is craving for the source.” And even when the intellectual talks all this bookish knowledge, he is himself feeling no discomfort; he is himself feeling no separation. He knows of separation as a principle, as a concept; he does not feel any separation.