A Secret Tone

After Bankei had passed away, a blind man who lived near the master’s temple told a friend: “Since I am blind, I cannot watch a person’s face, so I must judge his character by the sound of his voice. Ordinarily when I hear someone congratulate another upon his happiness or success, I also hear a secret tone of envy. When condolence is expressed for the misfortune of another, I hear pleasure and satisfaction, as if the one condoling was really glad there was something left to gain in his own world.

In all my experience, however, Bankei’s voice was always sincere. Whenever he expressed happiness, I heard nothing but happiness, and whenever he expressed sorrow, sorrow was all I heard.”

Accept Your Incompletion

We all are afraid of our incompletion. We all know blind men don’t have eyes. But we never realize that because they don’t have eyes their whole energy of seeing is directed towards hearing. Similarly we all are never complete. We may be physically complete but there are many things which we don’t have.

If you read this story with this thought you will find incompletion is blessing and giving us opportunity to grow.

If you accept everything, including your incompletion, suddenly love flowers…

When you accept life as it is, whatsoever it is, whatsoever the case, when you accept it in its totality, the devil disappears. It is absorbed by God, it is absorbed by the divine.

The devil is divine – in the very word also. Devil comes from the same root as divine –  they both come from the Sanskrit root dev. Devil is divine – that is the root meaning of the term. Things have gone a little astray, but the devil is divine. He has to be called back, and by fighting you cannot call him back. By fighting he goes away and away, and you will always miss a part. That missing part will not allow you peace. It has to be called home, it has to be absorbed into the whole.

If you accept everything suddenly, love flowers, hate disappears. So when I say accept hate, I am not saying be hateful; in fact, I am cutting the very root of being hateful. When I say accept, in that acceptance I am cutting the very root. You will never be hateful again if you accept; if you don’t accept you will remain hateful, and your love will lack something. This has to be understood deeply because it is not a metaphysical problem, it is existential. It is a problem that everybody has in him.

You hate somebody. When you hate, what happens inside? What is hate? What do you want to do to the other person? You want to kill him, destroy him. You want to throw him away, as far away as possible. You don’t want to see him, you don’t want him to be near you. You would like him to disappear, to exist no more – that’s why you want to kill and destroy. When you love a person what do you want to do to him? You want him to be always and always alive, never to die, to be near and close, to be available. You would like to protect him, care about him, and you cannot believe that your love is going to be destroyed by anything. You would like your lover or beloved to be immortal.

Look at both the phenomena. They are opposite. But can’t you feel? – They are two aspects of the same coin. Love is creative, hate is destructive. But have you observed? — no creation is possible without destruction; no destruction is meaningful unless it is for creation. So now: you can destroy if you are going to create, then there is no problem. You can demolish a house if you are going to create a better house – nobody will say that you are destructive.

Learning from the story A Secret Tone: Accept Your Incompletion

Experience Learning

Ask yourself what is wrong in being imperfect, incomplete?

To be incomplete is beautiful. In fact, to be incomplete is a basic requirement of being alive. The day you are perfect, you are dead. Perfection is death, imperfection is life. Imperfection should not be condemned, but taken as an openness. Imperfection means open – still growing, still moving, still living. Imperfection means you still have a future, imperfection means you still have hope, imperfection means tomorrow will be exciting. That’s what imperfection means.

‘Imperfection’ is not a derogatory word, it is almost synonymous with a living flow. Complete, where will you be going? What will you be doing? Complete means growth has stopped, you have come to your very end. All that was potential has become actual – that’s what completion means. Now there is nothing else but to die.

Imperfection means there is much still awaiting, much is going to happen. I am not saying strive for it to happen, I am saying it happens if you accept your imperfection, and you live it in totality. These are two different things. To believe that your imperfection is perfect is utterly wrong. But be total in each moment – when you are imperfect be TOTALLY imperfect. And then out of that totality you start growing.

And I am not saying that you will ever become perfect, because the day you become perfect you are no more needed – the perfect ones are discarded immediately. So life never becomes perfect; it goes on moving. From one totality to another totality, from one imperfection to another imperfection, it goes on, it goes on. Imperfection is simply life, aliveness, growth, evolution.

If you are sad, live it totally. Be really sad. And if you are really sad, you will come out of it sooner. If you are not really sad, half-heartedly you are in it, it will persist longer.

It happens, somebody has died. You loved the man or the woman; a lover is no more there. Then he is sad, then be REALLY sad. You owe this much to him. Cry and weep; go crazy. Don’t be lukewarm, don’t be just so-so. And don’t try to console yourself that now it is useless. If you try to console, the sadness will spread over a longer period – it can continue for years. That’s how millions of people have become sad. Because they have never lived their sadness, they have been postponing it. When you postpone it, it remains in your unconscious, waiting for the right moment to assert again. It becomes a heavy weight on your heart.

When it is there. pour it. It’s perfectly okay to be sad. There is nothing wrong in it, it’s how it should be. If you are really sad. Soon you will find the sadness has dissipated, evaporated. You have gone through it, it is finished. Whatsoever the sadness was going to give to you, it has given to you; now there is no need to remain around you. It will go away. And you will come out fresher, younger, more alive. And you will come happier out of it, more experienced, more mature.

Just like the pendulum of a clock – it goes to the right, to the very extreme right, and from there it starts moving to the left. While it is going to the right it is gathering momentum to go to the left. When it is going to the left it is gaining momentum to go to the right. Life moves between these two opposite banks; life is a river between these two shores.

If you have really gone deep into sadness, you are going to go into happiness as deep as your sadness was. People are miserable and people are not happy because they don’t allow their misery. When they don’t allow their misery they don’t allow their happiness either. The swing is going to be proportionate – if it moves one mile towards sadness, it will move one mile towards happiness. It will be always in proportion; life goes on balancing. If you can go ten miles into sadness, you will go ten miles into happiness – exactly like that.

So live whatsoever is there, live it in totality. I am not saying in perfection, because these are two different things. When you live in totality, you don’t have any ideal. When you start living perfectly, you have an ideal.