Activity

Ghari jo bajae raaj dar,
sunta hain sab koye.
Aayu ghataye jowan khisai,
kushal kahan te hoye.

When the watch strikes in the king’s court, everybody hears it.
The age is decreasing, youth is slipping, how can there be well being.

Kabir is saying there is a great difference between maturity and ageing, a vast difference. Everybody is aging; everybody will become old, but not necessarily mature. Maturity is inner growth.

Aging is nothing that you do, aging is something that happens physically. Every child born, when time passes, becomes old. Maturity is something you bring to life-it comes out of awareness. When a person ages with full awareness, he becomes mature.

Aging plus awareness, experiencing plus awareness is maturity.

There are two ways to live; one to be unaware, not attentive, to live in a deep sleep-then you age, every moment you become old, repeating the same mistakes, every moment you go on dying- the whole life is a long slow death.

But if you bring awareness to your experience-whatsoever you do, whatsoever happens to you, you are alert, watchful, mindful, you are savoring the experience from all corners, you are trying to understand the meaning of it, you are trying to penetrate the very depth of it, what has happened to you, you are trying to live it intensely and totally-then it is not just a surface phenomenon. You are maturing in the process…

Deep down within you something is changing with it. You are becoming more alert. If this is a mistake, this experience, you will never commit it again. A mature person never commits the same mistake again. When a man goes deeper into himself the more mature he is. When he has reached the center of his being, he is perfectly mature.

But at that moment the person disappears, only the presence remains.

The self disappears, only silence remains. Knowledge disappears, only innocence remains.