When I was a student
at Harvard and staying in an apartment, I had a Japanese friend who lived in
the same house, Kobayashi by name. He was a man with quite a sense of humor. In
fact it was the first time that I discovered that the Japanese were not all that
serious but could be very funny at times.
There was a time when
I found him sitting in front of a blank TV set in the sitting room on an
armchair, his legs folded under him, and his eyes closed.
I asked him what he
was doing in front of the blank TV set and he said to me:
"I am waiting
for enlightenment to hit my Holy Blain!"
That was the way he
pronounced the word 'Brain".
But seriously though,
- when do we know that we are on the verge of being enlightened?
The first step is
when a feeling of detachment from the world sets in.
The feeling comes
into your heart that this world is not your home, but is like a temporary train
journey which must come to an end - and you dont know when.
When you look upon
all the sorrows and joys of the world as temporary then you begin see
everything being swept away into the past by the hand of time. If happiness did
not stay, sorrow too shall not stay.
You begin to think of
your present as the past, in which all the sorrows and joys appear to linger on
in sleep.
My grandfather, who
was a great enlightened soul, had composed this verse in Urdu which I am
translating into English below:
"I have a heart
in which there is no sorrow,
Nay! There is no
place in it, for even joy!"
He had risen above
the sorrows and joys of the world and was lost in a world where there was peace
and only peace.
