7  Discrimination TC  "7  Discrimination" \l 1

The power of discrimination, (viveka, as they call it in Sanskrit), is for one purpose: to be able to discriminate between the changing and the unchanging, to discriminate between the relative and the Absolute. The Absolute is our real essence, it is changeless. All change is but a manifestation of the changeless. When you combine in your life the values of both changelessness and change, then you live a full life.

You do not live a full life now. But those of you who have started on the path of self-integration, employing conscious effort in daily living, will reach that point where all of life is joy. Then even if you feel pain, you will see that you are involved in a universe which is composed of pairs of opposites.

Pleasure, pain; heat, cold; sun, snow: we will always have these pairs. But once we realize the value of pain and pleasure, then neither of them will affect us.

True discrimination comes only when one can really be silent within oneself.

It is your free will, your choice, to decide what to accept and what to reject.

Acquire knowledge by all means, but sift it; throw away that which is not necessary. Take the essence.

The more sensitive you become in the perception of good things, the more will you be able to perceive the bad things.

There is no use trying to analyze the mind to find discrimination. Analysis is not the same as discrimination, because all forms of analysis are biased and patterned.

Knowledge is a word that has been so misunderstood! Knowledge is an accumulation of various facts which can be found in any good encyclopedia. We want to go beyond knowledge and into the realm of wisdom—that is something different from knowledge.

The purpose that the intellect must really serve is not to make various deductions, but to make a very simple discrimination between what is right and what is wrong. If you have awakened the superconscious part of yourself, you will find that all the decisions you make will automatically be right.

The human being must experience what life is all about, and what Divinity is all about. Philosophy and discrimination cannot touch this experience: It is like explaining color to a person who is born blind. You cannot explain it.

You can try to explain what the beauty and fragrance of a flower are like, but a person has to see and smell the flower to know. You can analyze in a laboratory all the chemical components of sugar, but what do we know of sugar if we do not taste its sweetness? Sugar is there for its sweetness, not for laboratory examination.

Discrimination plays its part in our life, but discrimination, too, must be discarded at the stage where love and devotion grow.

It is not necessary to take everything I say uncritically. By all means be critical!—but be critical with an open mind.

You have been brought up in a certain way of life, and some teachings might seem foreign. If something sounds foreign, then become critical about it. But criticism must never be destructive or deriding: that “something” must be accepted with an open mind, and evaluated with constructive criticism as it applies to your individual self.

This applies not only to the talks I give you, but to all the books you read. You might not necessarily agree with the author. Often when I read certain passages, for example, I say to myself, “This is not quite it,” or “This is not so.” But I do respect the understanding that the author has gained; any author will always find someone who disagrees with his thoughts.

That is why Christ, so beautifully, said, “There are many sheep, but not all are of my flock.”

There was a small village by a river; and on the other side of that river was a city. Every day people had to travel by ferry boats across the river to go to work.

On this one ferry there was a peasant and a pundit. Now, a pundit is a man who is learned in scriptures; this one was a vain man. He knew all the scriptures, and this produced vanity in him. He was proud of all the books he had read and all the studies he had made. So on this ferry the pundit asked the peasants, “Have you studied Vedanta?”

They answered, “No, reverend sir.”

“Have you studied Sankya Yoga?”

“No, sir.”

“The Upanishads?”

“No, reverend sir.”

And he used to boast, “I’m a learned man.” So everyone called him “sir.”

One day a storm came up and the boat was sinking. The peasants started diving off the boat. As one was diving off he asked the pundit, “Can you swim?”

Now, every day, these villages had to cross the river twice, going to and from the city. The peasant was a practical man, and considering the possibility of a storm brewing and the boat capsizing, he had thought, “Let me learn to swim,” and had learned to swim. The pundit, knowing all his scriptures and books, nevertheless drowned.

That is the value of practicality. So all the scriptures and all the learning and all the gurus can be parcelled up and thrown into the river.

In the progression of the soul we reach the human stage, and to unpattern all the patternings of the mind a human being has to use the power of discrimination. That is why he has been given the gift of reasoning.

Because of the patterning of past associations and past experiences our reasoning becomes warped. A person feels insecure and inadequate within himself. So the mind has to be repatterned.

Now we all try to unpattern, but what happens is that when we try to unpattern the mind by using the mind, we are repatterning it into a different mold. What we really must do is to get away from patterning altogether.

And that is what our spiritual practices do. They bypass the patterning of the soul and go deep within, to the basis of pure innocence. That is the purpose of meditation; that is the purpose of life.

Mental maturity is achieved when you have developed discrimination, where you can view something as a whole in its total value. The mentally mature person will find some appreciation of the total value of an object. But the self-realized person will not only see the total value of that object, he will become one with the object and experience its totality in that oneness.

The human being has the consciousness to appreciate that he is created in the image of God, because the human being has thinking ability. The previous stages of existence could not discriminate. We, as human beings, can discriminate; and therefore it is our folly that we do not discriminate between that which is forever changing and that which is changeless.