Search Of Truth
A man who is in search of truth does not think in terms of happiness. His happiness, or unhappiness, that is not the point. “I must know the truth. Even if it is painful, even if it leads to hell, I am ready to pass through it. Wheresoever it leads, I am ready to go to it.”
There are only two types of people. One is in search of happiness; he is the worldly type. He may go into a monastery, but the type doesn’t change: there also he is asking for happiness, pleasure, gratification. Now in a different way – through meditation, prayer, God – he is trying to become happy, more and more happy. Then there is the other type of person – and only two types exist – who is in search of truth. And this is the paradox: the one who seeks happiness will never find it, because happiness is not possible unless you attain the truth. Happiness is just a shadow of truth; it is nothing in itself – it is just a harmony.
When you feel one with the truth, everything fits together, falls together. You feel a rhythm – that rhythm is happiness. You cannot seek it directly.
Truth has to be sought. Happiness is found when truth is found, but happiness is not the goal. And if you seek happiness directly you will be more and more unhappy. And, at the most, your happiness will be just an intoxicant so that you can forget unhappiness; that’s all that is going to happen. Happiness is just like a drug – it is LSD, it is marijuana, it is mescaline.
Why has the West come to drugs? It is a very, very rational process. It has to come to it because searching for happiness one has to reach LSD sooner or later. The same has happened in India before. In the Vedas they reached soma, LSD, because they were seeking happiness; they were not really seekers of truth. They were seeking more and more gratification – they came to soma. Soma is the ultimate drug. And Aldous Huxley has named the ultimate drug, when it is to be found somewhere in the twenty-first century, he has called it soma again. Whenever a society, a man, a civilization, seeks happiness, it has to come somewhere to drugs – because happiness is a search for drugs. The search for happiness is a search to forget oneself; that’s what a drug helps you to do. You forget yourself, then there is no misery. You are not there, how can there be misery? You are fast asleep.
The search for truth is just the opposite dimension: not gratification, not pleasure, not happiness, but “What is the nature of existence? What is true?” A man who seeks happiness will never find it – at the most he will find forgetfulness. A man who seeks truth will find it, because to seek truth he will have to become true himself.
TRUTH IS. Truth simply is. It is neither old nor new. It is eternal, it has no reference to time at all; it is beyond time. That is the meaning of the eternal. Eternal does not mean forever, because forever has a reference to time; eternal does not mean permanent, because permanency has a reference to time. Eternal simply means timeless. It is.
Truth is never past and never future. It knows only one tense, the present. Truth knows only one time, now – which is not time at all; but it is timelessness. And truth knows only one space, here – which is not space at all; it is transcendence of space. Truth is always now-here. Truth has no history. History belongs to the world of lies. Politics has history, religion has no history.
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