Have you ever seen a car race (formula 1, stock car, anything)?
Every once in a while all the cars go in for a pit stop. In as short a time as possible the car must be refueled, cooled, the tires changed, etc. In short, a full "service" is performed, and the car runs away again, squealing tires, trail of smoke, zoom, gone round the bend.
I was just thinking that life is like that. There are vast stretches where the rules of normal traffic do not apply. In a certain sense there is absolute freedom. Freedom in the sense that you can break all limits. The driver who breaks the most limits eventually gets the checkered flag. In this sense, life is different because no one is racing for a prize. Life is too personal to be a competition. One basically races to leave all bondage behind and emerge at the finish line a perfectly clean, absolutely complete being, free of everything - and achieves the ultimate freedom.
It is not a matter of winning anything. It is more a matter of leaving everything (not in the material sense of "things") behind so that by the time you cross a certain point, you have become victory itself. If an example is required, Buddha (and many others) raced so fast he left his physical death behind. You could say he was a corpse that walked around, because he had transcended mortal death itself. The physical form remained only to propagate what he had learned. However, that is too esoteric a topic.
The pit stop. That is important. The race happens elsewhere. This life, on this planet, which we believe is the be all, end all of everything is merely a pit stop to tune the real engine responsible for this life in the first place.
The sad part is, very few are concerned with fine tuning the engine so that it can race at its maximum possible capacity and reach the end point as fast and as peacefully as possible.
A lot of people (me included) are too busy worrying about how the damn car looks. Is the paint okay? Does it have a music system? It is faster than the other cars? What kind of side-view mirrors does it have? Is it analog or digital? What is the fuel efficiency? How much power does the engine have?
The details of the body of the car consume so much time that entire lives, or pit stops, can be wasted in just worrying about the outside of the car instead of fine tuning it so that it works better and better on the racetrack.
That is how life is lived today. The external demands way too much attention. The car is just a tool given to us so we can travel from once place to the next. It is not given so that we get all obsessed with the car itself and forget what it is capable of, or worse, spend so much time decorating it that we never drive it.
I have a colleague (what ho! Pandey sa), who once told me something he had read in a book by a guru. The guru said, there is the tool and there is the purpose for which the tool was made. For some reason, we have become so obsessed with tools that we have lost sight of why the tools were made.
The simplest example is money. Money is not the purpose. The purpose is something else but money is the tool. If money truly brought happiness then the rich would be the most blissful people that could ever exist. But that is not the case. Even they are miserable. It is because they tend to forget that getting entangled with the tool is folly. The tool is meant to be used in a certain way.
If you want to cook one meal, you do not light up a million fires. One small fire will do. If you set up a lot of fires, the surroundings will burn down and even the meal will give no satisfaction.
But it is difficult to think in those terms. Difficult not as in true difficulty of man trying to fly without an airplane, but difficulty in the sense that man knows how to fly but he has become so obsessed with airplanes that he has forgotten that the power of flight lies within.
There is nothing out there. Everything is in here. Fixing the "out there" is of no consequence unless the "in here" is not being worked on as well.
This is not life. This is a pit stop. A tool. Those who learn to use the tool can reach a point where pit stops are not required anymore. They are able to function perpetually. The only reason the pit stop exists is to reach that point.
Focus on the engine that makes the car go and not on what you can do for the decoration of the chassis.
If you take the engine out of anything that works, the only thing left is an empty shell, and that is not really good for much. Life is important, the body that carries life also needs its comforts and it is foolish not to invest in that. The problem arises with the assumption that the comfort of the chassis is good for the engine. An awareness of balance is vital.
Race cars are stripped of everything. Essentially, a race car is a human being from which everything that impedes its performance has been removed, even comfort to a large extent. You cannot drive a race car with your family. It is meant to be driven alone. You can drive the car of life to the comfort of everyone but the important thing is what is driving the car. But we seldom focus on that.
If we do, that car can become so accommodating that the entire universe can ride it to eternal bliss.
The chassis is important, it needs its care, but it does not need decoration. The chassis is perfect as it is. What matters is the engine. Today, there is so much burden of the chassis that we cannot think of the engine.
Imagine this very planet where everyone just maintains the chassis optimally and where a single engine can take the burden of a million chassis.
That is what a guru is. It is just one engine with the capacity to carry countless chassis at top speed. The guru's responsibility is to teach everyone that you have your own engine, you do not require carrying, but that lesson is not easy to learn.
I am very glad that I found a guru who could teach me this, but like he himself says, this does not require teaching, it all there inside.
The engine never stops working. All that is needed is to be aware of it. Once that awareness comes, the whole pit stop conundrum will be as easy as breathing.
Every once in a while all the cars go in for a pit stop. In as short a time as possible the car must be refueled, cooled, the tires changed, etc. In short, a full "service" is performed, and the car runs away again, squealing tires, trail of smoke, zoom, gone round the bend.
I was just thinking that life is like that. There are vast stretches where the rules of normal traffic do not apply. In a certain sense there is absolute freedom. Freedom in the sense that you can break all limits. The driver who breaks the most limits eventually gets the checkered flag. In this sense, life is different because no one is racing for a prize. Life is too personal to be a competition. One basically races to leave all bondage behind and emerge at the finish line a perfectly clean, absolutely complete being, free of everything - and achieves the ultimate freedom.
It is not a matter of winning anything. It is more a matter of leaving everything (not in the material sense of "things") behind so that by the time you cross a certain point, you have become victory itself. If an example is required, Buddha (and many others) raced so fast he left his physical death behind. You could say he was a corpse that walked around, because he had transcended mortal death itself. The physical form remained only to propagate what he had learned. However, that is too esoteric a topic.
The pit stop. That is important. The race happens elsewhere. This life, on this planet, which we believe is the be all, end all of everything is merely a pit stop to tune the real engine responsible for this life in the first place.
The sad part is, very few are concerned with fine tuning the engine so that it can race at its maximum possible capacity and reach the end point as fast and as peacefully as possible.
A lot of people (me included) are too busy worrying about how the damn car looks. Is the paint okay? Does it have a music system? It is faster than the other cars? What kind of side-view mirrors does it have? Is it analog or digital? What is the fuel efficiency? How much power does the engine have?
The details of the body of the car consume so much time that entire lives, or pit stops, can be wasted in just worrying about the outside of the car instead of fine tuning it so that it works better and better on the racetrack.
That is how life is lived today. The external demands way too much attention. The car is just a tool given to us so we can travel from once place to the next. It is not given so that we get all obsessed with the car itself and forget what it is capable of, or worse, spend so much time decorating it that we never drive it.
I have a colleague (what ho! Pandey sa), who once told me something he had read in a book by a guru. The guru said, there is the tool and there is the purpose for which the tool was made. For some reason, we have become so obsessed with tools that we have lost sight of why the tools were made.
The simplest example is money. Money is not the purpose. The purpose is something else but money is the tool. If money truly brought happiness then the rich would be the most blissful people that could ever exist. But that is not the case. Even they are miserable. It is because they tend to forget that getting entangled with the tool is folly. The tool is meant to be used in a certain way.
If you want to cook one meal, you do not light up a million fires. One small fire will do. If you set up a lot of fires, the surroundings will burn down and even the meal will give no satisfaction.
But it is difficult to think in those terms. Difficult not as in true difficulty of man trying to fly without an airplane, but difficulty in the sense that man knows how to fly but he has become so obsessed with airplanes that he has forgotten that the power of flight lies within.
There is nothing out there. Everything is in here. Fixing the "out there" is of no consequence unless the "in here" is not being worked on as well.
This is not life. This is a pit stop. A tool. Those who learn to use the tool can reach a point where pit stops are not required anymore. They are able to function perpetually. The only reason the pit stop exists is to reach that point.
Focus on the engine that makes the car go and not on what you can do for the decoration of the chassis.
If you take the engine out of anything that works, the only thing left is an empty shell, and that is not really good for much. Life is important, the body that carries life also needs its comforts and it is foolish not to invest in that. The problem arises with the assumption that the comfort of the chassis is good for the engine. An awareness of balance is vital.
Race cars are stripped of everything. Essentially, a race car is a human being from which everything that impedes its performance has been removed, even comfort to a large extent. You cannot drive a race car with your family. It is meant to be driven alone. You can drive the car of life to the comfort of everyone but the important thing is what is driving the car. But we seldom focus on that.
If we do, that car can become so accommodating that the entire universe can ride it to eternal bliss.
The chassis is important, it needs its care, but it does not need decoration. The chassis is perfect as it is. What matters is the engine. Today, there is so much burden of the chassis that we cannot think of the engine.
Imagine this very planet where everyone just maintains the chassis optimally and where a single engine can take the burden of a million chassis.
That is what a guru is. It is just one engine with the capacity to carry countless chassis at top speed. The guru's responsibility is to teach everyone that you have your own engine, you do not require carrying, but that lesson is not easy to learn.
I am very glad that I found a guru who could teach me this, but like he himself says, this does not require teaching, it all there inside.
The engine never stops working. All that is needed is to be aware of it. Once that awareness comes, the whole pit stop conundrum will be as easy as breathing.
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