Two truths

Without knowing yourself, everything remains incomplete.

Human beings have labored greatly to know the world. But the very person who was sent to know the world has not tried to know himself.

The materialist truth

The world as it is currently run.

What this age calls real is what can be measured, built, bought, and shown to someone else. The body is chemistry. Work is output. Money keeps the score. A family is a set of duties that actually have to be done. The stars have been measured. The sea has been sounded. Machines work.

This picture is not a lie. Hospitals, harvests, bridges, and paychecks depend on it. It is ordinary life in the clothes the present wears. Do the work. Pay the bill. Cook the meal. Do not call any of that nothing.

The world you are already in

The one who knows

A very small distance is still left.

You have come to know the stars. You have measured the depths of the sea. You have conquered mountains, built machines, and carried science so far that you have reached the moon. Yet a very small distance still remains between you and your own self.

That distance needs no instrument. Only a little awareness. Your achievements are not vain. They can be useful in the world. They cannot complete you.

Read the whole of it

The question

Have you ever sat within and asked who you are?

You know thousands of things about the outer world. But have you ever sat within and asked: who am I?

You will say: I am such-and-such a person. My name is this. My family is this. My work is this. My identity is this. I am this educated. I have this much wealth. I have these relationships. But I ask you: set these aside, one by one. If the name is taken away, the position taken away, the wealth taken away — forget, for a little while, even the identity of the family. Look at the body too as merely an object. Then, what remains — do you recognize it?

This is not an exit from the measured world. It is the missing half of it. The person who knows the stars has not yet looked at the knower.

The reading, in full

Give this time

From today, sit.

So from today, make a small experiment. Every day, sit alone for some time. Do not try to attain anything. Do not try to prove anything. Close your eyes and only see. What is happening in the body? How is the breath moving? Which thought is coming in the mind? Change nothing. Only see. And if the thought runs a thousand times, return a thousand times to seeing.

Do this today. Reading will not do this for you. Pick a length you will actually keep, and keep it. The same time, every day. Ten minutes if that is honest. Twenty if you can protect it. Forty if the day will truly give it. If you miss, sit when you remember. Nothing is counted. The sitting itself is what was missing.

How to begin, if you have never sat