The old Master instructed an unhappy young man to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and Then to drink it. “How does it taste?” the Master asked.
“Awful,” spat the apprentice.
The Master chuckled and then asked the young man to take another handful of salt and put it in the lake.
The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and when the apprentice swirled his handful of salt into the lake.
The old man said, “Now drink from the lake.”
As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the Master asked, “How does it taste” “Good!” remarked the apprentice. “Do you taste the salt?” asked the Master.
“No,” said the young man.
The Master sat beside this troubled young man, took his hands, and said, “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less.The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount we taste the ‘pain’ depends on the container we put it into.”
So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things.
Stop being a Glass~Become a LAKE.
Become Whole
After reading the story Amount Of Pain, how many of you felt that we are having wrong container for our pain. Replace the container. Become whole. Understand ego. No need to drop or sacrifice the ego.
How to drop the ego or identity?
It is impossible. The ego cannot be dropped because the ego exists not. The ego is just all idea: it has no substance in it. It is not something – it is just pure nothing. You give it reality by believing in it. You can withdraw belief and the reality disappears, evaporates.
The ego is a kind of absence. Because you don’t know yourself, hence the ego. The moment you know yourself, no ego is found. The ego is like darkness; darkness has no positive existence of its own; it is simply the absence of light. You cannot fight with darkness, or can you? You cannot throw darkness out of the room; you cannot take it out, you cannot take it in. You cannot do anything with darkness directly. If you want to do anything with darkness, you will have to do something with light. If you put the light on, there is no darkness; if you put the light off, there is darkness.
Darkness is only the absence of light, so is ego: absence of self-knowledge. You cannot drop it.
It has been told to you again and again: “Drop your ego” – and the statement is patently absurd, because something that does not exist cannot be dropped. And if you try to drop it, something which is not there in the first place at all, you will be creating a new ego – the ego of the humble, the ego of the egoless, the ego of the person who thinks he has sacrificed his ego. It will be a new kind of darkness again.
No, don’t you dropped the ego. On the contrary, try to see where the ego is. Look deep into it; try to locate it, where it exists, whether it exists at all or not. Before one can drop anything one must be certain about its existence.
But don’t be against it from the very beginning. If you are against it, you cannot look deep into it. There is no need to be against anything. The ego is your experience – maybe it is just apparent, but it is still your experience. Your whole life moves around the phenomenon of the ego. It may be a dream, but to you it is so true.
There is no need to be against it. Dive deep into it, go into it. Going into it means bringing awareness into your house, bringing light into darkness. Be alert, watchful. Watch the ways of the ego, how it functions, how it manages at all. And you will be surprised: the deeper you go into it, the less it is found. And when you have penetrated to the very core of your being, you will find something totally different which is not ego, which is egolessness. It is self, supreme self – it is godliness. You have disappeared as a separate entity; you are no more an island. Now you are part of the whole.
Learning from story Amount Of Pain: Become Whole
Experience Learning
Be authentic, integrated individuals with immense self-respect. The word self-respect may create doubts in your mind because self-respect seems to again mean the ego. It is not so. You have to understand both words, self and respect; both are significant.
Self is that which you are born with. Ego is that which you accumulate; ego is your achievement.
Self is a gift of existence to you. You have not done anything to earn it, you have not achieved it; hence nobody can take it away from you. That is impossible because it is your nature, your very being.
Ego is all that you go on accumulating through education, manners, civilization, culture, schools, colleges, universities… You go accumulating it. It is your effort, you have made it, and you have made it so big that you have completely forgotten your real self.
To know the real self is enough: the ego falls flat on the ground without any effort to surrender it. Unless the ego falls on its own, without your effort, it is not going to leave you. If you make effort to drop it, and that is what surrender is… All the religions teach surrender, they don’t understand even the very basics of psychology. Ego has not to be surrendered, it has to be seen. It has to be understood through and through.
That is the meaning of respect. It is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It does not mean what it has come to mean: honor. No – respect simply means re-spect, to look again. That’s the literal meaning of the word; there is no place for honor. Just look again, look back, look deep. Spect means to see, look; re means again. Once, you had known it.
Before you entered and became part of a society, a culture, a civilization, you knew it. It is not a coincidence that people go on thinking that their childhood was the most beautiful part of their life. It is a long-forgotten memory, because there have been days in your life, the earliest days, which you cannot remember exactly; only a vague feeling, a kind of fragrance, a kind of shadow is there.
If you re-spect, if you look again and go deep into your existence, you are going to find the place from where you started losing yourself and gaining the ego.
That moment is a moment of illumination because once you have seen what the ego is, the game is finished.
So don’t drop the ego, because that means accept the reality of your ego. And how are you going to drop it. Right now, you are it. The self you have lost far away back in the past. There is a great distance between you and your self. Right now you are existing at the periphery of yourself. That periphery is pretending to be yourself. That pretender is the ego. Now telling the ego, “Drop! Surrender! Be humble!” is simply idiotic.
