Aptavani-2
259
become liable for your repetition. Instead people cry about
broken glass all day long!
If a mill owner happens to lose his shoe, he keeps saying
over and over, “My shoe is lost, my shoe is lost.” The foolish
man, he is a wealthy man, is it right for him to keep complaining
about his shoe in this manner? He should not tell anyone even
if he were to lose one shoe every day. Instead, he should think
that his shoes get stolen because his punya is ruined. On the
contrary, he should keep quiet. But alas, people even bicker
over a broken glass. Have you not seen such people?
For countless past lives, people have been ‘buying brass,
believing it to be gold’. They will realize what they have been
doing when they try to sell their gold. No one will give them
even a penny for it! Only if your misery and suffering comes to
an end, should you accept that you have found a Gnani.
Otherwise of what use is a Gnani if he cannot rid you of your
miseries? What is the point of sitting with him if your miseries are
not destroyed or you cannot find answers to your inner
entanglements? Elsewhere all you hear are intellectual discourses
and dialogues; however these people (who give discourses) are
not at fault. People at large have no understanding or awareness
of what is right and what is wrong. What can the light do if
moths come fluttering to it? Instead what people do is if they
hear something profound which they do not comprehend
themselves, they tell others, “Come let us go there, his talk is
very profound.” They go to the gurus where they don’t
understand anything. These are all merely intellectual crowds
where highly intellectual people become dumb!
Questioner : It is just like the mental hospital that you
have been mentioning, right?
Dadashri : Yes, it is a mental hospital but does it look
good to call it that? No. But when things reach extremes, we
have to say, “It is like the state of a patient in the mental