Daily Quote, Monday June 1, 2009.

Good morning on what does actually feel like June1!!

Here are my reflections on (or perhaps generated by is a better way to put it) today's quote.

Sometimes you hear people say that K's famous coment that truth is a pathless land means that there are many paths to truth, many ways of reaching truth. You might recall the brief exchange i had with Ravi the other week over Being vs. Becoming. The traditional idea in Yoga and the West is that everything is Becoming. In the West it is evolution; in India and Yoga it is realising our own true nature, the Atman is the Brahman as is often quoted. This school of thought would allow that there are many paths to truth, hence the different types of yoga outlined by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita for instance. K, however, is taking the route of Being, whereby there is a complete difference between Being and Non-Being. This is how truth gets to be a pathless land. There is no way of Becoming truth for K. As Ravi puts it so well, there is no bridge from here (Non-Being) to there (Being), the bridge being the technique through which we become ourselves. But perhaps we can build a bridge from there to here (Being to Non-Being).

For K we can realise everything in ourselves that is Non-Being, become receptive to Being, so that Being might become us. That is why K talks about transformation happening instantly; in observing your Non-Being (your conditioning, fears, habits and the rest of it) you are Being. When you Become the transformation happens gradually, you take a journey, you struggle, there is effort and trying. But for K there is no journey, no struggle. Instead, through your self-study, self-understanding, through seeing the danger of Non-Being, the violence and fear created by Non-Being.

This is what people mean when you hear tem talk about Dualistic and Non-Dualistic philosophy. K is dualistic whereas Yoga cliams to be non-dualistic. Can Being and Becoming ever be reconciled? In my Ph.D. dissertation, I showed how I think they can be. Some day if any of you reading this are interested, we can you a study group session on this and I'll do my best to explain how I thought through the problem. It's interesting to look at how the Non-Dualists deal with the gap between Being and Non-Being, and also at how empowering the gap can be and why it is important.


Truth is not of the past or of the present; it is timeless.

There is no path to truth and there are not two truths. Truth is not of the past or of the present - it is timeless - and the man who quotes the truth of the Buddha, of Shankara, of the Christ, or who merely repeats what I am saying, will not find truth because repetition is not truth: repetition is a lie. Truth is a state of being which arises when the mind - which seeks to divide, to be exclusive, which can only think in terms of results, of achievement - has come to an end. Only then will there be truth. The mind that is making effort, disciplining itself in order to achieve an end, cannot know truth because the end is its own projection and the pursuit of the projection, however noble, is a form of self-worship....He alone shall know truth who is not seeking, who is not striving, who is not trying to achieve a result.

Collected Works, Vol. VI - 134