HOW ENLIGHTENMENT BEGINS

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.