then certainly you are keeping closed the eyes that see light.
Give a fresh thought to yourself.
Look at yourself from a new angle.
If you put the blame on others, you will never be able to see
your own mistake.
If you put the blame on circumstances, you will not be able
to penetrate the roots of your own mental state.
Hence, whatever the situation, proceed to discover
its causes in yourself.
Causes are always in one’s own self.
But they always appear to be in others.
Avoid this mistake and it will be difficult
to preserve your unhappiness.
Others function only as mirrors.
The face seen is always our own.
Life can become a celebration.
But it is necessary to create oneself anew.
And that is not a difficult thing.
Because in the very seeing of the fault in one’s own vision the mistakes
start dying and the birth of a new person begins.
156. Love.
Do not fight with yourself.
Such a fight is futile.
Because victory never, ever comes through it.
To fight with oneself
is nothing other than a gradual suicide.
Accept yourself.
Happily. In gratitude.
What is, is good.
Sex too, anger too.
Because whatsoever is, is from the divine.
Accept it and understand it.
Search and uncover the hidden potential in it.
Then, even sex feels to be a seed towards the divine.
And anger becomes the door to forgiveness.
Evil is not an enemy of goodness.
Rather, evil is only imprisoned goodness.
157. Love.
Strive for meditation.
Then all problems of the mind will disappear.
In fact, mind is the problem.
All the rest of the problems are only echoes of the mind.
Nothing will come of fighting
each and every problem separately.
Fighting with echoes is futile,
there is no outcome of it other than defeat.
Do not prune the branches, because four other branches
will replace that one pruned branch.
By pruning branches, the tree only grows more.
And, the problems are the branches.
If you want to cut at all, cut the roots,
because by cutting the roots the branches disappear on their own.
And mind is the root.
Cut this root with meditation.
Mind is the problem.
Meditation is the solution.
Mind knows no solution.
Meditation knows no problem.
Because, there is no meditation in the mind.
Because, there is no mind in meditation.
Absence of meditation is mind.
Disappearance of mind is meditation.
This is why I say: strive for meditation.
158. Love.
Don’t be in haste.
Maintain patience.
Patience is a fertilizer for meditation.
Go on tending meditation,
the fruit is bound to come,
it always comes.
But, do not be anxious about the fruit.
Because such an anxiety itself becomes an obstacle for the fruit.
Because such a worry distracts the attention from meditation.
Meditation requires total attention.
To be divided won’t do.
Partiality won’t do.
Meditation is not possible without your totality.
Hence, stay with the act of meditation and leave the fruit of meditation
in the hands of the divine.
And the fruit comes.
Because drowning totally in meditation is the birth of the fruit.
159. Love.
Life is not divided, either in time or in space.
If life is anything, it is undividedness – it is an undivided flow.
Past, present, future – these are human lines drawn on the undivided
flow of time.
Indeed, they are nowhere except in the minds of men.
Mind is time.
Similarly, space is also undivided.
The body is not one’s limit – in fact, the limit or non-limit of the whole
is one’s limit.
But, the mind does not rest without dividing.
It is like a prism; to divide is its function.
Passing through it the ray of existence becomes divided into many rays
and many colors.
What is one at the root becomes many at the branches.
The root is eternal – beginningless, endless.
Branches are in time – they have their beginning, they have their end.
Branches are change.
The root is ever-lasting.
Neither the root changes nor can it be changed.
Yes – one can desire it to be changed, and then such a desire
inevitably takes one into failure and anguish.
Branches go on changing.
They cannot be stopped from changing.
But certainly it can be desired that they don’t change, and then
such a desire inevitably transforms itself into failure and anguish.
The West is in the first kind of failure and anguish.
The East is in the second kind of failure and anguish.
And so far man has not been able to give birth to such a culture
which not only succeeds but becomes fulfilled too.
The two realities I have talked about above – the reality of the root
and the reality of the branches; the law of the intransient
and the law of the transient – it is only in the harmonious balance
of these two that such a culture can be born
which will neither be polar nor lopsided,
which will use the tension of the opposite poles, the same
as architecture
uses