SAILING BOAT

Continues … from last week issues 22 / 01 / 11 

Yesterday evening I saw a boat going up the river at full sail, driven by the west wind. It was a large boat, heavily laden with firewood for the town. The sun was setting, and this boat against the sky was astonishingly beautiful. The boatman was just guiding it, there was no effort , for the wind was doing all the work. Similarly, if each one of us could understand the problem of struggle and conflict , then I think we would be able to live effortlessly, happily, with a smile on our face.

I think it is effort that destroys us, this struggling in which we spend almost every moment of our lives. If you watch the older people around you, you will see that for most of them life is series of battles with themselves, with their wives or husbands with their neighbors, with society, and this ceaseless strife dissipates energy. The man who is joyous , really happy, is not caught up in effort. To be without effort does not mean that you stagnate , that you are dull, stupid; on the contrary, it is only the wise the extraordinarily intelligent who are really free of effort, of struggle.

But , you see, when we hear of effortlessness we want to be like that, we want to achieve a state in which we will have no strife, no conflict; so we make that our goal, our ideal, and strive after it, and the moment we do this , we have lost the joy of living. We are again caught up in effort, struggle. The object of struggle varies,  but all struggles is essentially the same. One may struggle to bring about social reforms, or to find God, or to create a better relationship between oneself and one’s wife or husband, or with one’s neighbor ; one may sit on the bang Ganga, worship at the feet of some guru, and so on. All this is effort, struggle. So what is important is not the object of struggle, but to understand struggle itself.

Now is it possible for the mind to be not just casually aware that for the moment it is not struggling, but completely free of struggle all the time so that it discovers a state of joy in which there is no sense of the superior and the inferior?  

Continues…