Know Yourself – In Gita Verse 7.19 After many births and deaths, he who is actually in knowledge surrenders unto Me, knowing Me to be the cause of all causes and all that is. Such a great soul is very rare.
Krishna says that there is only one way by which you know me or surrender me is becoming me. Becoming Whole. Means Know Yourself.
Life means uncertainty, life means insecurity, life means to be in danger. Only a dead person is out of danger. Now he cannot become diseased, he cannot die, there is no death for him, he is at ease, everything has become certain. Now nothing else can happen, so there is no danger.
If you understand these two things – the certainty of the past and the uncertainty of the future – if you understand that life means uncertainty, life means insecurity, life means danger, life means uncharted and unknown possibilities; if you understand this, then by and by your minds will drop, they will cease to function, and you will become one, whole. By and by, your response will become total.
This total response is religiousness. It is a total response: every moment, in every situation. Be total within and be total without. The moment this happens, the totality within and the totality without become one. Then there is no barrier between you and the whole.
There can never be two perfections. The moment two perfections come close they become one. Wholeness is always one.
There is a saying in the Upanishads: “If you take the whole out of the whole, the whole remains behind.” Nothing is taken out, because you cannot take anything from the whole. Even if you take the whole, the whole remains behind. And you cannot add anything to the whole. If you add something to the whole, it will remain the same.
There is no method to become one with the whole. You are already that. All methods are to help you to understand. They are to create a situation in which you can understand yourself: your multiplicity, your polypsychic-ness. When you know yourself in your totality, only then can you know what is beyond this totality.
So the first thing to be seen is yourself. If you have not even seen yourself, then seeing the wholeness is not possible.
Life is there; you are alive. Why are you not aware who you are? What becomes the barrier? What prevents you from this basic self-knowledge? If you can understand the barrier, the barrier can be dissolved very easily.
So the real question is not how to know oneself. The real question is to know how you are not knowing yourself, how you are missing such an obvious reality, such a basic truth which is so near to you, how you go on not seeing. You must have created a device; otherwise it is difficult to escape from oneself. You must have created walls; you must, in some sense, be deceiving yourself.
So what is that trick of escaping from oneself, of not knowing oneself? If you don’t understand that trick, whatsoever you do will not be of any help – because the trick remains, and you go on asking how to know oneself, how to know the truth, how to know the reality, and consequently you go on helping the barrier. You go on creating it also, so whatsoever you do will be of no use.
Really, nothing positive is needed to know oneself, only something negative. In a way, you have only to destroy the barrier that you yourself have constructed, and the moment that barrier is not there you will know. Knowing happens when the barrier is not; you cannot make any positive effort for it. You have just to be aware of how you are missing it.
Krishna says by knowing oneself one comes to know that he was only a door to the vast and the infinite, to the eternal and the deathless. It is a very strange paradox that the moment you know yourself, you are not, the whole is. The dewdrop has disappeared, and all around is the ocean.
The only richness is to know oneself.
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