Evolution of Love 2

Final Talks

A man who was a little mad lived in a small village with his wife. His friends liked to tease him and make fun of him because they all thought he was stupid.
One day, one of them said, ‘We have some bad news for you. Your wife has become a widow.’
He believed them and started crying out in grief, ‘ My wife has become a widow! My wife has become a widow!’
Some of the people he passed on the street laughed at him and said, ‘Why are you mourning? You are very much alive. How can your wife be a widow if you yourself are alive to complain about it?’
‘ My closest friends have told me this,’ he replied, ‘ and I trust them. They are very reliable people. If they saying that my wife has become a widow, it must be true.’
We would think that a man who behaved like this was utterly stupid because he chose to believe the words of others instead of his own experience. But are we any better? We believe, on the basis of indirect information provided by the senses, that we are the body. The experience of ‘ I am ‘, of the Self, is present in all of us, but when the mischievous senses gang up on us and try to make us believe something that is patently untrue, we believe them and ignore our direct experience.
Then we grieve about our state, lamenting, ‘ I am the bound; I am in unenlightened ; I am not free.’