Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You’re not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you’re at peace with yourself. Learning life’s lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Search Of Truth
A man was going in search of truth. As he left his village, he saw an old man sitting under a tree. The old man asked, “My boy, where are you going?”
The young man explained, “I am in search of truth. I will go around the earth, but I have to find it.”
The old man said, “You will find it, and you will have to go around the earth. Some advice I would like to give you, that if you find such-and-such a man under such-and-such a tree” –he was describing the tree he was sitting under, and he was describing himself –”if you come across such a man sitting under such a tree, you have reached your master.”
The young man thanked the old man and rushed fast in search of the tree and the man, the master–and certainly he had to go around the earth. By the time he came back to the tree, he himself was old, and that old man was almost ancient.
He fell at the old man’s feet and said, “You are something. Why didn’t you say that you are the man? Now I recognize the tree and I recognize you!”
The old man said, “I was waiting for you; otherwise there was no reason for me to live. Because I had given the advice, I could not die! And it was not possible for you to recognize me at that time, you were not mature enough.”
One has to knock on one thousand doors, then one finds the door that leads to reality. Perhaps it is the first door, but at that time you are not mature, you are not centered. You don’t have the intelligence. You have to fall many times, you have to get caught by all kinds of religious traps, pretensions.
All this is a necessary training, nothing is wrong in it. That’s how one becomes mature, that’s how one starts knowing what is false. The day you know exactly what is false, the real is not far away.
To know the false as false, is to know the real as the real.
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
– Tom Stoppard
