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.

He is shameless. If you see, he is saying, “The Lord is away from me,” and he is saying this with a straight face, with eyes that feel no shame. He will say, “You know, the mind is designed to be restless,” and he will say this as if he has just talked about a distant stone on some godforsaken mountain. He does not even realize that he has said something very horrible about himself. He has just said, “The mind is conditioned to be restless.”

Now, whose mind are you talking of? You are talking of yourself. There should have been a convulsion with him—simply put, you should have felt bad. But you don’t feel bad. You talk of it in objective terms, whereas it is purely subjective. You are talking of something that applies to you, something that is within you. It does not apply only to you, but it applies to you as well. Now, how can you, then, be so objective about it?

But the intellectual talks of everything as if he is so detached, whereas he is not. He is just insensitive most of the times. Why? Because he takes sensitivity as sentimentality; he takes an admission of sensitivity as a weakness. Why? Because he has been trained in the scientific method. In the scientific method there is nothing called subjectivity; there are only objects that you have to look at as if you are nobody. Whereas, in spirituality you begin with the admission that you are somebody.

When people enter literature or humanities with the same mindset as when they enter science or mathematics, then a lot of ugliness happens. You have people teaching Kabir in universities, as if Kabir is literature. If you are talking of Kabir and you are not melting within. If your eyes are not wet, what right do you have to utter even a word of Kabir? But a university professor does not simply realize that these things are not objective.

Look at Kabir Sahib. He says, “I have been told that I am your lover. That’s what Vedanta tells me; that’s what Sankhya Yoga tells me; that’s what the saints tell me; that’s what the Bhakti tradition tells me. All of them tell me the same thing. And when they tell me that ‘Oh Lord! I am your woman,’ then I feel so utterly ashamed, because the thing is not intellectual, the thing is not objective; it pertains to me, myself, my identity, my life.

“What kind of woman am I who cannot get to her Lord? What kind of woman am I who keeps displeasing her Lord? Sab koi kahat tumhari naari (the entire world tells me I am your woman), and the more I hear that I belong to you, the more I get buried in shame and disgust. If ours is really such an intimate relationship, then I must have done something horribly wrong to be thrown so far away from you; and that calls for serious guilt. It does not let me eat, let me breathe─ anna na bhaave, neend na bhaave, ghar baar dhare na dheer re (food doesn’t appeal to me, sleep doesn’t appeal to me; even the household is restless).

“I constantly keep asking myself, what crime did I commit? And I am pretty sure that I have made some heinous mistake. Otherwise, such an intimate relationship could not have gone so wrong. Today there is an ocean between us, a bhavasāgara that I cannot conquer; I cannot even see the other side of it. I must have been very, very distracted. I must have been very, very disloyal to you. I must have acted very, very unloving that I have come so far away from you.”

And so Kabir Sahib says, “I am very, very uncomfortable, remorseful, tearful.”

This is the question that the honest seeker asks. “The separation is surely not from the side of the Lord; I am the one who is causing the separation. And if I am responsible, must I not first of all realize and accept my guilt? Must I first of all not see how my patterns have resulted in my beloved Lord appearing so far away from me today? It was not his wish to be away; I did it. And therefore I am ashamed.”

“ Ab to behal Kabir bhayo hai, bin dekhe jiv jaye re (Kabir is now in total distress: without seeing the Beloved, he is going to die).”

The common man is never behal . Behal means distraught. The common man continues to be: “I am fine!” If you ever ask the common man, “How are you?” he will never say behal ; he will say, “I am good!” And Kabir Sahib says, “ Bin dekhe jiv jaye re (Without seeing the Beloved, he is going to die).” The common man has no such urge.

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