Tagore says:
‘When the string of the violin
was being tuned it felt the pain of being
stretched, but once it was tuned then it knew why it
was stretched’. So it is with the human soul. While the soul
goes through pain, torture and trouble it thinks that it would
have been much better if it had gone through life without
it. But once it reaches the culmination of it then,
when it looks back, it begins to realize why
all this was meant: it was only meant
to tune the soul to a
certain pitch.
Restrain your speech.
An active tongue betrays a restless
mind. Tranquility on every
level is advised.
5th changing line,
from The I Ching, or Book of Changes
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Once you
merge your tracks
into the stream of zen,
you spend your days silencing
your mind and studying with your
whole being. You realize that this Great Cause
is not obtained from anyone else but is just a matter
of taking up the task boldly and strongly, and making constant
progress. Day by day you shed your delusions, and day by day you
enhance your clarity of mind. Your potential for enlightened perception
is like fine gold that is to be refined hundreds and thousands of times.
What is essential for getting out of the dusts, what is basic for
helping living creatures, is that you must penetrate
through freely in all directions and arrive at
peace and security free from doubt and
attain the stage of great
potential and great
function.
This work
is located precisely in
your own inner actions. It is just
a matter of being in the midst of the interplay
of the myriad causal conditions every day, in the confusion
of the red dusts, amid favorable and adverse circumstances and
gain and loss, appearing and disappearing in their midst,
without being affected and turned around by
them, but on the contrary, being able
to transform them and turn
them around.
…When you
go on grinding and polishing
like this for a long time, you are liberated
right in the midst of birth and death, and you look upon
the world’s useless reputation and ruinous projects as mere dust
in the wind, as a dream, as a magical apparition, as an
optical illusion. Set free, you pass through the
world. Isn’t this what it means to be a
great saint who has emerged from
the dusts of sensory
attachments?
One learns to understand
that there is a world in one’s self,
that in one’s mind there is a source of
happiness and unhappiness, the source of
health and illness, the source of light and darkness,
and that it can be awakened, either mechanically or at will,
if only one knew how to do it. Then one does not blame his
ill fortune nor complain of his fellow man. He becomes
more tolerant, more joyful, and more loving toward
his neighbor, because he knows the cause of
every thought and action, and he sees
it all as the effect of a
certain cause.
…Therefore, the work
of the mystic is to be able to read
the language of the mind. As the clerk
in the telegraph office reads letters from the
ticks, so the Sufi gets behind every word spoken to
him and discovers what has prompted the word to come out.
He therefore reads the lines which are behind man’s thought,
speech, and action. He also understands that every kind of
longing and craving in life, good or bad, has its source
in deep impression. By knowing this root of the
disease he is easily able to find out its cure.
No impression is such that it
cannot be erased.
