Why do people behave the way they do, even when they know what the truth is? Hasn’t this crossed our minds so often?
This question is at the heart of the capacity of one man to do injustice to another, despite what his humanity tell him. Let us explore.
The world is what we make of it. Not what it really is.
Every book, every event, every statement has several different interpretations. Why?
Because what we receive is not what that book or event really is. But how our mind meets it. Based on the identities it takes on. And conditioning it brings to bear upon it.
The idea is not to move from one conditioning to another. Yours to mine. Or from ‘Evil to Good”.
But to a point where you can meet every moment on its own terms — sans any conditioning. At that point, you are no more. Not as an idea, but as a real experience.
In one of the most profound moments with my Guru, we were taken to a point for very few minutes, which was the preserve of the enlightened beings. Of nothingness.
When that moment came, one couldn’t bear the immensity and the void of it.
I sobbed like a child for hours on end. Suddenly, I realized that everything I had heard, read, understood, written, spoken, and learned was ridiculously minuscule and completely bull shit.
For, the Truth was so humongous that it couldn’t be expressed. All of me that I was preserving as ideas, opinions, and mind suddenly left my side.
And, I lost me.
An experience very profound, yet devastating.
If you have to move from point A to B, you have to step on point B and lift your foot from point A. But what if you are that point A?!
Identities – Xs and Ys
In our insistence on being point A, we take on identities. And, use these identities to understand others. This framework of creating our identities and using them to box the others – in order to make sense of the world – is at the heart of divisions in the world.
Racism, oppression, imperialism, and all the rest of such crimes of humanity on humanity.
The snow-clad mountain gave way to a green valley. A place no one in his world had ever seen. Strange, new people welcomed him. Peaceful and loving.
“Who are you,” he asked. “People,” they replied.
“I am X, so you must be Y,” he said with a sense of knowing.
“But don’t worry, I love all the Y’s as long as they are good to me”.
A wedge created. People categorized. And hate covered with pretense.
In such a world, you want equality?
“You hate the pigs, but love people. One day you will call someone a pig and treat him the same way. You cannot have a selective heart.” – Sadhguru
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