5 The Path
When you travel from falsehood to falsehood truth must seem so very far away.
You are enslaved and there is a reason for that slavery, when you understand that as a preliminary fact, you are already well on the way to freedom.
Every time you uncover the true that is one more freedom.
Self-understanding is not a path but it does lead somewhere.
A path implies effort but all effort is self-directed, and understanding is the ending of both self and direction.
Once you start on a path you will begin to accumulate merit and prestige, but you will simply be encumbered it all.
When you recognise the false as false, the truth has already been born.
When there is a path there is measurement.
To measure is to be mind-bound.
A path creates the illusion of separation, and the confusion of conflict.
The mind and the environment arise together.
If your mind is complex so will your world be.
A natural environment, a natural mind.
There are three common sense notions we carry around with us: permanency, perfectibility, and controllability.
In reality, however, the world changes, is limited, and cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty.
These notions are necessary for action of course, but we shouldn’t let them blind us to the way things truly are.
In these three we can see the delusion of self: resisting change, desiring more and better, and looking for security.
Have you seen how you would like to escape from ambiguity, which is simply the demand of logic?
How you would like to escape from limitation, for what is limited must die.
How you would like to escape from imperfection, which is the dream of the idealist.
How you would like to escape from suffering, driven as you are by the fear of pain.
The only real security is in acknowledging insecurity for that will never change.
The search for security resists change, and therefore sets itself up against the nature of the world – but the world goes on being the world regardless.
When insecurity no longer causes you fear, you will no longer grasp after he impossible.
Insecurity, which is openness; vulnerability, which is compassion; and change, which is the nature of life – all these go together.
The search for security always gives rise to conformity.
Conformity to a group or to an idea gives a semblance of continuity.
Conformity is always to one thing to the exclusion of another – and is therefore no security at all.
Conformity is a form of self-protection that saves you from three things:
Materialism stimulates desire, self-understanding frees you from it.
Materialism – another word for which might be atomism – is a process of self-isolation.
It is through the stimulation of desire that the self is propagated – and thereby all your problems too.
The mark of a materialist is that he is always measuring.
To measure another person is always to devalue him.
To live and not to measure, either oneself or another, wouldn’t that be a sign of freedom?
Where there is freedom there is also joy.
Joy is light and buoyant and comes when you are no longer tied down to anything.
Joy is not dependent, that is why freedom is its condition.
Being able to discriminate between the necessary and the unnecessary is the first necessity in the spiritual life.
Is it necessary to have understood everything before taking the first step? in that case you will never begin.
When you take the first step towards understanding, you have already left so much behind.