Once you enter the spiritual path, everything is in turmoil, everything is in question. You don’t know where you stand – you don’t know anything. Before knowing anything about spirituality, you were at least comfortable, self-satisfied. You ate breakfast in the morning, drank coffee, and you thought that was the ultimate. Now, nothing matters. You don’t feel like eating, like sleeping, like doing anything, because nothing is really worthwhile anymore. It never was worthwhile.
You just deceived yourself into believing that it was. If it was truly worthwhile, how could it go away? If you truly knew what’s what, how could you get confused? The very fact that you are confused means you didn’t know. You had made wrong conclusions just for the sake of comfort and security.
If comfort is all you are seeking, you must psych yourself up to believe you are perfect, that everything is okay with your life. “My house is good, my husband is wonderful, my life is great, my children are fantastic, even my dog is fabulous. This is it. This is life.” You must tell yourself this every day and go on with it. It will be quite good, nothing wrong with it. It’s just that it is limited, and this being will never settle for anything limited. It doesn’t matter in how many ways you try to fool yourself, somewhere there’s a longing.
Carefully look at all the happiness that you have known in your life. On the surface there’s happiness, but somewhere deep inside, there is a certian suffering in everything. The suffering is just because the suppressed being is always longing. To even become conscious of this suffering, people take lifetimes.
Entering the spiritual path means you have become conscious of your suffering. You were suffering unconsciously; now you have become conscious of it. Entering the spiritual path is a possibility, being with a Guru is a possibility. If the possibility has to become a reality, the first thing is that you are willing to see everything the way it is. You are at least willing to recognize your limitations. If you want to hide your limitations, where is the question of liberation? You have destroyed the possibility completely. If you are chained right now and if freedom has to come someday, the first and foremost thing to see is that you are chained. If you refuse to see that you are chained, the question of liberating yourself never arises.
True liberation is when nobody can take away anything from you, and that which can’t be taken away from you is your blissfulness, your inability to suffer. Gautama repeatedly said, “I don’t want to go to heaven. I want to go to hell.” People thought he was crazy, but that’s how a liberated man will be. “What’s my problem with hell? Anyway, they can’t make me suffer, so I will go to hell.” This man is free.
