![]() ![]() Remember, there are three layers of your being: the body, the mind, and the self. Again you are decorated, again you become very, very strong. You will be clairvoyant.” This and that – all the siddhis of the yogis – all the miraculous powers of Yoga. You will be able to manipulate existence more deeply. You will have siddhis – you will have spiritual powers, occult forces. You will be extraordinary.” On the one hand they say, “Drop the ego,” on the other hand they go on strengthening the same ego under different names. If you drop the ego, great is going to be the payoff in the other world – heaven, paradise, moksha.” On the one hand they say, “Drop the ego,” on the other hand they persuade you, they bribe you, they buttress your greed. If you drop the ego, you will be the chosen one. If you drop the ego, you will be the first in the Kingdom of God. They say, “If you drop the ego, you will become spiritual. Be egoless,” but in a subtle way, somehow, they go on protecting it too. Only two persons have touched the very substratum of the ego and those two are Lao Tzu and Gautam Buddha. All religions say that the ego has to be dropped, but if you listen, if you read, if you look into those religious people, you will find that their insight is not very deep and the ego comes up in different forms again and again. All other religions say the same, but Tao goes deepest in its approach its insight is the greatest. Tao says that the ego is the only barrier. ![]() Sometimes the ocean waves and you are, and sometimes the ocean remains silent and you disappear. The moment you understand that “I am a wave,” it means you have understood that you are not – only the ocean is. All waves are nothing but the ocean waving.Īll human beings are nothing but the universal consciousness waving. If a wave in the ocean thinks, “I am separate: I am,” then the wave has gone mad. It is the tree’s energy that has become the leaf. Even to conceive of the leaf as separate is impossible. The tree is and the leaf exists only as a part, an organic part, of the tree. If a leaf in the tree starts thinking, “I am,” then the leaf has gone mad. The ego is neurosis, and anybody who suffers from the ego suffers from neurosis because he thinks as if the part were the whole. The ego is the only insane thing in the world. ![]() The moment you start thinking about yourself as a separate individual, the part is claiming to be the whole the part has gone mad. Empty, a deep nothingness, nobody inside – then you really are. So the basic, the very basic, teaching of Tao is to be in a state of nonbeing, what Buddhists call anatta, a state of no-self. Just as darkness and light cannot exist together: if one is, the other is not. When you are, godliness is not, and both have never been seen together they cannot be together by their very nature. To be is to be separate, therefore not to be is the door. What use is it to you to have this effect on people which is incompatible with your own basic peace? If you insist on making an effect, it will unsteady your basic self, and to no purpose.” It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so you are incapable of preventing them. “Enough! I told you confidently that others would lay responsibilities on you, and it turns out that they have. “Now that you have come, Master,” he said, “aren’t you even going to give me my medicine?” Lieh Tzu ran out barefoot holding his shoes in his hands and caught up with him at the gate. After standing there for a while, he left without speaking. Po-hun Wu-jen stood facing north he leaned on his upright staff and wrinkled his cheek against it. Not long afterward, when Po-hun Wu-jen went to call on him, Lieh Tzu’s porch was full of the shoes of visitors. “An excellent way to look at it! But even if you stay, other men will lay responsibilities on you,” said the old man. If men with so little to gain from me value me so highly as a customer, will it not be even worse with the lord of ten thousand chariots who has worn out his body and drained his knowledge in state affairs? The Prince of Ch’i will appoint me to some office and insist that I fill it efficiently. His profits are meager, and the considerations which sway him have little weight. “The only motive of an innkeeper is to sell his rice and soup, and increase his earnings. “When a man’s inner integrity is not firm, sometimes, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which, outside him, presses on the hearts of others it makes other men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties. “If that is all? Why should you be alarmed?” “I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first.” Lieh Tzu said, “I was alarmed by something.” On the road he met Po-hun Wu-jen who asked him why he had turned back. Lieh Tzu was going to Ch’i but turned back half way. ![]()
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