Participate With Yourself
If you have taken the first step of just accepting yourself and participate with yourself as you are, moment to moment…. For example, you are sad. This moment you are sad. Your whole conditioning says to you “You should not be sad. This is bad. You should not be sad. You have to be happy.” Now the division, now the problem.
You are sad: that is the truth of this moment.
And your conditioning, your mind says, “You should not be like this, you have to be happy. Smile! What will people think of you?”
Your woman may leave you if you are so sad, your friends may desert you if you are so sad, and your business will be destroyed if you remain so sad. You have to laugh, you have to smile, and you have to at least to pretend that you are happy.
This is the problem: you pretend, you act. You can manage to smile, but then you have become two. You have repressed the truth, you have become phony.
That’s why you are unable to know yourself. How can you know yourself if you don’t accept yourself? You are always repressing your being. What has to be done then? When you are sad, accept the sadness: this is you. Don’t say, “I am sad.” Don’t say that sadness is something separate from you. Simply say, “I am sadness. This moment, I am sadness.”
Live your sadness in total authenticity.
And you will be surprised that a miraculous door opens in your being. If you can live your sadness with no image of being happy, you become happy immediately, because the division disappears. There is no division any more. “I am sadness” and there is no question of any ideal to be anything else. So there is no effort, no conflict. “I am simply this” and there is relaxation. And in that relaxation is grace, and in that relaxation is joy.
Joy is not a goal, it is a by-product.
It is a natural consequence of oneness, of unity. Just be united with this sadness, for no motivation, for no particular purpose. There is no question of any purpose. This is how you are this moment, this is your truth this moment. And next moment you may be angry: accept that too. And next moment you may be something else: accept that too.
Live moment to moment, with tremendous acceptance, without creating any division, and you are on the way towards self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not a question of reading the Upanishads and sitting silently and reciting, “Aham Brahmasmi, I am God.” These are all foolish efforts. Either you know you are God, or you don’t know it. You can go on for your whole life repeating, “Aham Brahmasmi, I am God.” You can waste your whole life in repeating it, but you will not know it.
You are the way you are: accept it with joy, with gratitude.
Suddenly a harmony will be felt. The two selves in you, the ideal self and the real self, will not be there to fight any more. They will meet and merge into one.
When there is no interpretation, all is beautiful.
When all is beautiful, you are relaxed.
In that relaxation you have fallen into your own source, and that brings self-knowledge. Falling into one’s own source is what is meant by “Know thyself.” It is not a question of knowledge, it is a question of inner transformation.
You then have a magic key, which unlocks all the locks.
If you accept sadness, sadness will disappear. How long can you be sad if you accept sadness? If you are capable of accepting sadness you will be capable of absorbing it in your being; it will become your depth.
