Rajan Sachdev
It is monsoon again and on a Sunday morning as I looked at plants growing in our garden, I could see the labour intensive job of cleaning the garden of weeds that were growing alongside plants. In this weather, plants (as well as weeds) grow rapidly and with it comes the task to clean weeds off the garden area. And as it happened it reminded me of a story I had heard about weeds.
A man bought a new bungalow. He laid out a garden and planted some flower seeds. When they began to sprout he found that weeds had come up mixed with the flowers. He was worried, so he went to his neighbour for advice. “How am I to know which plants are flowers and which are weeds?” The neighbour answered,”That is simple, pull them all out! Those which come up again are the weeds.”
This is the quality of all that is worthless in our lives: pull it out and it is not destroyed. The meaningful, the purposeful, is destroyed if you pull it out. This is true of all those who begun search for the meaningful in life. To attain to the meaningful is an uphill journey. Attaining the worthless is like rolling down the mountain; you don’t have to do anything, the force of gravity will do everything.
The useless and meaningless have one outstanding quality: they demand no effort. You may laze around, they will take root and flourish on their own, and they will keep a tight grip on you until your last breath. The speciality of the useless is that you uproot it, and it grows by itself. The useless and the ineffectual grow on its own. Uproot them a thousand times, and they will still persist. The meaningless grows effortlessly, but the meaningful requires great effort.
That is why most of us have chosen the meaningless; it grows on its own. You don’t have to do anything to become corrupt. The habit of stealing grows like weeds. Do you have to work hard to become one? You don’t have to go through any prayer, any sadhana, any yoga. These things happen on their own.
Do you have to go somewhere to learn how to be greedy, to some university? No it grows like weeds. But when it comes to yoga or meditation the difficulty starts. If you want to learn how to be truly loving there are many difficulties in the way, while attachments grow and flourish like weeds. You learn peace only with great difficulty. Every moment you have to uproot all the weeds before you can plant the seedling of peace. If you want peace to grow, the weeds must constantly be kept in check or the young plant will be suffocated, as if covered by a heap of rubbish.
A true seeker is one who has realized that that which grows on its own is useless, and that he has to plant something and take care of it day in and day out. We have never forgotten to be angry and we have never forgotten to be greedy, but we have to remind ourselves to be peaceful and loving. It slips away again and again. It is a seed that has to be sown and taken care of. Rubbish grows by itself; weeds come up by themselves. We have to know that whatever happens by itself is worthless. This way we will attain nothing in our life time. At the time of death you will find yourself leaving empty-handed, just as you came in empty-handed. And it is this blindness, this lack of discrimination that is maya, illusion. This is the state where you cannot discriminate between what is useful and what is useless. Indiscrimination is maya.
Knowledge has been defined as the discrimination between the meaningful and the meaningless. In life both exist – the flowering shrubs as well as the weeds. You will have to distinguish one from the other by your own experience. If your attention gets fixed not on the meaningful but on the worthless, you wander in illusion.
Indiscrimination means the inability to distinguish the diamond from the pebble. We have to become the jeweler of life because that alone will lead us to discrimination. We possess life. Now look inside it. The test of our ability is to know all that happens by itself is worthless, and that which refuses to happen in spite of your efforts, is worth attaining. This is the test.
The day we find that which was so difficult to bring about has begun to happen, then know the flowers are about to bloom. And the day all that used to grow by itself stops growing, know that maya has ended.
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