Acharya Prashant: If it’s a model, an idea, if it’s a thought then you can very easily say what is it that you have known; because then you have concluded something. When it comes to the Truth, when it comes to the Heart, you know that you can never say what is it that you have known.
Conclusions can be very easily expressed, realizations cannot be.
Conclusions can be, they have to be, very easily expressed. Realizations cannot be expressed because essentially all that you realize is a cutting down of the clutter.
All realization is just clarity, emptiness. So all realizations are one. In fact, realization can never be expressed as plural. Just as all empty spaces are one, similarly all realizations are one. Just as all zeroes are one, similarly all realizations are one.
Would you call a silence different from another silence? The infinite number of silences that you come across are just echoes of the same silence. In different situations, this and that but the same silence. Thousand times you can sit in front of the teacher, a thousand times you can realize. Again and again, you can realize but whenever you will realize, you will realize the same thing, which is nothing. That’s a joke.
The ordinary jokes become stale after the first use. Whenever you hear a joke for the second time, it has lost its value. The great thing about the joke that realization is that you hear it again and again, and you very well know what it is, and yet is equally appealing. In fact, its appeal keeps increasing with every subsequent encounter. That’s the thing with everything real. It cannot diminish.
If you want to put it simply, factually, you say it doesn’t diminish, it holds its place. If you want to put it poetically, joyfully you would say, “Though it keeps increasing, the real keeps increasing, it doesn’t even hold its place and magnitude”. In fact, its enormity just keeps increasing and increasing.
Real love cannot diminish. If it veins and waxes, comes and goes, it cannot be love. Real love only moves from depths to depths, heights to heights. Realization, respect, joy – if you find them crumbling, clouded, fractured you must know it’s a good sign because you are being told that something more real is waiting for you. Enlightenment is not one event, one thing, one experience. It is a series of Enlightenments that you are continuously going through. It is continuously beginning and never coming to an end. That is why it’s foolish to say that one is enlightened. One is in process of enlightening and every subsequent enlightenment is more fulfilling than the previous one. The previous one was perfect and this one is better than perfect. That’s the magic.
Not that the last one left something to be desired. It gave you more than you could ask for and yet now you have something better than that. Your desires are so little, when you are given it exceeds your desires and then it exceeds the excess. Then more and then more.
Ever seen the palm of a little one? Ever seen? He is standing in front of you. Give, and give, how much can he take? Just this much. If you really are a well-wisher, you give not only how much the palm can hold but you actually enable growth. You help the palm itself grow. You make the person capable of receiving more and when you receive more, you receive beyond what you have asked for. That’s the role of a teacher, to give you not only that which you have asked for, but also something little different. He may not like that. He may only ask for sugar candies and more, and more.
You are growing. You are growing so your capacity to get more is growing. That is growth, that is maturity - to be alive to something that you generally do not experience in your normal states of consciousness – depths of wonderment, great puzzles, sublime joys and shocking sorrows.
