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So many people are so busy trying to figure out what is good and what is bad. Someone once said that every being already knows what is good and bad. A fly knows what's good for it. It feels that flyswatter coming, and it lifts off. It doesn't sit there and say, "I wonder what this guy is really going to do? I bet you he's going to miss." It takes flight. If a bird feels threatened, it doesn't read a book to find out, "What are my chances statistically of getting hurt by this person?" Or think, "Let me figure out what the stars are like today." It takes flight.
There has always been the idea that the human being is superior. I don't know about that. You see the state of mankind: so much war, so much quibbling, so many opinions. So many more people are more educated now than ever, and we have more wars now than we ever had. More food is produced now, and there are more hungry people. There is more communication; the word "peace" is thrown around much more now, and there is less peace on this earth. It seems like somehow we forget our truest nature.
What is your specialty? What distinguishes you? The way I see it is we have become a very strange kind of problem-solver in our lives. The analogy is: Imagine a house, and outside that house is a tree. The tree touches the house, and the ants go up the tree, and from there, they go into the house. All of a sudden, there are ants everywhere, with plenty of food scattered everywhere for them to be able to eat.
Logically, one would say, "Just trim back the branches so that the ants don't have access to the house." But the way a human being would go about it in reality is not that. They will go out and buy little poison boxes. They will say, "Let's have electronic ant detectors and ultrasonic ant repellant. Let's discover which spectrum of light ants don't like, and let's invent a flying ant-killer robot. And let's come up with a kind of food that you can eat so when your skin exfoliates and the ants go to get it, they'll die." This may sound funny, but this is how the world approaches the problem.
All of a sudden, you've got hundreds of thousands of people going in their own direction trying to figure out how to get rid of the ants. Then somebody says, "Why don't you just trim back those branches?" And what will that person be told? "You're crazy. You're being too simplistic. You're impeding the progress of mankind! Here is an opportunity to really be on the forefront of the industry of ant destruction!" It sounds funny, but it's sad.
Trim back the branches in your life so that what you really want can happen. If you are looking for peace, that is a possibility.
It is for a limited time that we are here. Coming and going has to happen for every single human being. If you have found peace in your life, you can be in a place where you enjoy every day, every moment. This is what can distinguish you from being just caught up in the chores of every day. You can experience what it is really like to be alive.
Maharaji
