Day 4: Difference Between Direction And Destination
Awareness, is the key to being self-directed, centered, and free in every aspect of our lives.
Direction is very subtle, delicate, fragile. That’s why everybody has chosen destination. Society tries to fix a destination for you. Parents, teachers, culture, religion, government: they all try to give you a fixed pattern of life. They don’t want you to be free, left alone, moving into the unknown. But that’s how they have created boredom. If you know your future beforehand, it is already boring. If you know that you are going to be this, it is already boring.
Future should be a direction, not a destination. It should be more like nirvana. The word Buddha uses means all that you know will not be there. That’s his definition of nirvana: all that you know will not be there, all that you have experienced will not be there, all that you are will not be there – something totally new, something that you cannot understand because you don’t have the language to understand it, you don’t have the experience to understand it. Something absolutely new – it cannot be talked about. Nirvana is a direction. Firdaus and paradise – Mohammedan and Christian – are destinations, very clear-cut.
Destination belongs to the ego; direction belongs to life, to being. To move in the world of direction one needs tremendous trust, because one is moving in insecurity, one is moving in darkness. But the darkness has a thrill in it: without any map, without any guide you are moving into the unknown. Each step is a discovery, and it is not only a discovery of the outside world. Simultaneously, something is discovered in you also. A discoverer not only discovers things. As he goes on discovering more and more unknown worlds, he goes on discovering himself also, simultaneously. Each discovery is also an inner discovery. The more you know, the more you know about the knower. The more you love, the more you know about the lover.
You have a direction – awake, throbbing with life and unknown, always surprising, unpredictable, no map. If you only have a great passion to discover. Yes, a map is not needed; great passion, great desire to discover is needed. It is journey of alone. Then you go on your own. Move into the vast, into the infinite, and by and by learn to trust it. Leave yourself in the hands of life, because life is God. When Jesus says, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done,” he is saying this a great trust. Even if God brings death, there is nothing to be afraid of. It is he who is bringing death, so there must be a reason in it, there must be a hidden secret in it, there must be a teaching in it. He’s opening a door.
