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Thought: Eight Hundred and Twenty-Seven
………………………………………………………One. Sometimes I slip into sadness for no reason at all. This grey celebration of melancholy stretches on for a long time. Passionless, restless, unbroken. I say nothing to anyone, and even surrounded by people, I remain alone. Everyone senses something has happened. But no one cares to ask what. We carry no obligation to track each other's sorrows, and so we lack the will. People offer me countless remedies for my low spirits. I listen and think: *If only one of them could listen to my heart the way I listen to theirs in silence—with time and patience.* I already know everything they tell me. I need no advice at this moment. I need only one person who will listen to me quietly, without judgment. This is what no one understands. Everyone has learned only to counsel; no one has learned to listen. The world is full of people who speak, but where is the person who truly hears? There is no shortage of teachers on earth—it is friends we lack.
Though I resist believing it, my heart now understands the truth: the person I love, who sends me a dozen *I love yous* every day for so long, has never truly loved me at all. This person stays with me only for their own gain. This remaining here is a name, nothing more—a performance without substance. Perhaps it is better not to see that someone is merely playing at loving me. If you once see it, it becomes an enormous problem. After that, you cannot accept them from within. It causes terrible pain in the heart—not the pain of losing them, but the pain of not being able to convince your own mind. The mind understands, yes, that they were never truly mine, yet it refuses to accept this. Rejection you can bear, but deception cuts far deeper. My old love does not return; only the memory of it returns, again and again.
These days my heart grows heavy without warning. Why? I cannot say. The person I tell I love every day—I fear I no longer love them with my whole self as I once did. This inability to love spreads like cancer, only growing. As love diminishes, indifference multiplies far beyond measure. Not to love one who loves you—perhaps that is misfortune. But to cease loving one you have loved is death. It is far harder to cast someone from your heart than to make room for them there. Where I brought my body for my heart's sake, they brought their body for their body's sake. When the body comes at the body's true call, it is called compromise; when the body comes at the heart's false call, it is called sin. In the agony of this sin I writhe, while my beloved basks in its pleasure.
I am often seized by a desolation I cannot name. Why? I cannot rightly say. All those I think of as close—they are merely my blood relations, my kin. In truth, none of them are truly my own. One who has no one of their own can accept this, perhaps make peace with it. But how can one whose own people surround them accept that none of them are truly theirs? I have no answer to this. And having no answer, my head fills with unbearable pain. When that pain finally subsides, I gaze out the window with hollow eyes.
They see my gaze turned toward the sky; I see my gaze fixed upon this futile life of mine.
I am seized by sudden, inexplicable weeping. I do not know why. Those I have always considered friends were never truly friends at all—merely acquaintances. It wounds me deeply to have placed acquaintances in the seat of friendship, only to cast them out again. I have foolishly cherished as a friend someone who abandoned me in my darkest hour, day after day. Now I understand: amidst countless friendships, I possess not a single soul to whom I might turn in crisis without condition or self-interest. Whoever fails to stand beside you in need is no friend, by any measure. And nothing is more absurd than mistaking acquaintances for friends.
Sometimes a terrible solitude descends upon me. I cannot fathom why. I realize that among seven and a half billion souls, I have not one of my own. My heart does something peculiar then. Why does it feel this way? When did this unease begin? What compels my mind to abandon its dwelling? I understand nothing. I cannot seem to understand anything at all. I am no one's now. No one is anything to me. I move through this world estranged from every living person. Every relation before my eyes is merely a discharge of obligation—nothing more.
So much happens to me, yet I know the cause of none of it. Everything that befalls me comes without reason. Yet I have learned this: behind every reasonlessness there lies at least one reason.
II. With a steady hand or one trembling, written on a scrap of paper: *No one is responsible for my death.* Behind every suicide lies the guilt of that one person closest to them. Sometimes that number rises from one to many.
Inquire carefully enough and you will discover that those accountable for such a death are precisely those whom, despite all visible culpability, no one can hold responsible. What society dismisses as mere voluntary death has been brought about through the direct participation of certain people—yet they cannot, under any circumstance, be called guilty.
Life becomes unbearably complicated sometimes. We love certain people in such a way that to despise them while they live becomes impossible for us. We dream of building lives around people who eventually become the sole reason for our death. Death hovers perpetually at our neck, breathing down upon us—and yet we dream of filling it with all the consolations of life.
When is life's most difficult equation formed? When you discover that the very person you love has become the sole source of all your hatred. You can neither love them nor hate them; and you certainly cannot forget them. That superfluous, unwanted person becomes worth more than your entire lifespan. There is no greater helplessness than this.
When hatred and love—these two forces—converge at a single point, that is when life's every calamity and crisis begins. When such a contradiction of feeling is born within you for one person, life is overtaken by a profound meaninglessness. When a person is forced day after day to hate the one they have loved more than their own existence, then that terrible note passes into their hands, the one written in the ink of defeat: *No one is responsible for my death.*
In truth, every suicide is a perfectly deliberate, meticulously planned murder.
Thought: Eight Hundred Twenty-Eight
………………………………………………………One. The woman who once perceives her father's shadow in a man will wish to keep that man in her life at any cost. Young women enjoy contemplating which aspects of their chosen boy resemble their father. Some men do the same—they catch a mother's shadow in a woman and want to claim her as their own. We love to remain bound in the trusted affection of childhood.
When we seek someone for a moment, we seek one willing to indulge the cravings of our body and mind. But when we seek someone for a lifetime, we search for one willing to shelter all our weariness and sorrow. Then we don't merely seek a partner—we seek a mother's unconditional tenderness and a father's cool shade. If we find someone who can penetrate the body's surface and merge with the soul in the heart's deepest sanctum, we desperately wish to keep them close for all our remaining days. In the end, we want to see ourselves surrounded by absolute trust and compassion. To live well, we need the safety of comfort more than the abundance of happiness.
When a person questions themselves in deep meditation about what they truly want, the mind doesn't walk much with form, nor with virtue, nor with wealth—it walks chiefly with the pull of affection. We love to remain caught in affection. In the spell of that affection, a person rises above all logic and ultimately surrenders themselves toward its source. When someone plain-faced wins the love of a beautiful person, inquiry will reveal that affection—*maya*—lies at the mystery's heart. Once a person is bound in another's affection, they become desperate to possess them. In that person's eyes, the one who awakened their affection becomes the most attractive, most beautiful being in the world.
How beautiful a person looks matters less than how beautiful they appear to someone. Let me put it simply: if you see someone and think, "How is it possible that so-and-so loves *them*?"—that person appears extraordinarily beautiful to so-and-so's eyes. We forget that whoever loves someone surely finds them beautiful! To speak of it only shows foolishness. More importantly, we are no one to decide who should live with whom for them to feel good. Does our opinion of which two people match in our eyes run their lives? Who are you to judge the choice of one whose happiness you cannot ensure? Happiness, peace, comfort—these have no universal grammar.
Inner beauty always outshines outer beauty. With our outer eyes we see the person of the body; with our inner eyes we see the person of the heart. What one perceives with the inner eye is the greatest truth in that person's life—there is no greater truth. We have neither the right nor the responsibility to determine another's truth. Only the foolish try to impose their inner truth upon others. A truth that people peddle by imposing it is as genuine as cheap salve hawked on street corners. Let us remember: the person's own understanding is far more important than our judgment of them. That understanding is the secret mystery behind all the world's beauty. We see the world through the truth of the heart. When a person changes, that inner truth changes too. As many people, as many truths.
Man lives with all his vision fixed upon the truth of his own heart. Where the sight of our eyes ends, there begins the sight of the inner eye.
This is why the ungainly, protruding belly of the beloved person seems as beautiful as the peak of Kanchenjunga; eyes sunken and darkened within their sockets bloom forth with the luminous whiteness of lotus petals; when you touch skin dark as coal, a strange and innocent celestial feeling stirs within the mind. The beloved's discordant, rasping voice spreads the magical enchantment of Ravi Shankar's sitar. Those who have never known love will never grasp such things. We see the beloved as beautiful, think them beautiful, hear them beautiful. When strangers pass judgment or offer their opinions on this, we are naturally irritated. We are so incompetent and foolish that we live judgmentally even about those we have no need to live with! The world's sorrows flow from this very idleness and poverty of our hearts.
Love is nearly an undiscovered enchantment. Those caught in its spell cannot themselves fathom what it is they are living within! Today or tomorrow, sooner or later, almost all of us are trapped wholly and completely in love's enchantment. About a love you have never experienced, you can easily render a thousand judgments, understanding half or nothing at all. Only when you yourself have plunged into something like that will you understand—all that you once said was mere speculation and outright falsehood.
Two. Before calling another a donkey, you must first become human yourself. When the sight of someone makes them seem useless, unbearable, spoils your mood—what is the point of looking their way afterward? Does he care for your liking or disliking? Is he causing you any harm? Does he gain money when you look at him? If you don't like him, don't look his way, don't go near him. That's all!
*Don't like him, yet follows him about—*
*What kind of fool burns in such strange love?*I see certain people who harbor endless hatred toward some particular country. If we loved our own country even a fraction as much as we hate another, our nation could have advanced far further. A country progresses through the sincerity of its own citizens; what mentality the citizens of another country harbor toward that country matters nothing to it. The fierce hatred of citizens from a country behind ours will not reduce our GDP one bit, will not impede our progress in the slightest. Rather, their love for and sense of responsibility toward their own country would greatly increase the possibility of that country becoming our equal.
The donkey's fierce rage cannot even stir a single hair of the lion's mane!
Three. The most honest dedication I have ever read is in this book. It reads:
*To my wife Marganit and my children Ella Rose and Daniel Adam—without whom this book would have been completed two years earlier.*
Four. Listen, one day you will have everything, only I will be gone. Then you will understand. Around you will be scattered heaps upon heaps of happiness, yet on that day my absence will make you weep greatly. Though you cry much, you will never have me back again—only shattered fragments of memory will lie before you.
Thought: Eight Hundred Twenty-Nine
………………………………………………………One.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
I dream of very small things. I will have two fluffy kittens and a puppy. I'll hold them in my lap, sit on the open balcony with a cup of tea in hand each evening, and watch the birds return to their nests across the sky. The birds come home trailing magic through the whole expanse of heaven, in neat formations. Some don't come in line—they fly alone. What is this called? Solitude? Self-assurance? Fearlessness? Or is it merely stubbornness?
I weave very small dreams. I'll build a small house with my own money. Its walls will be spotlessly white. A grand piano will stand in the south-facing room. That room will be a trustworthy ocean of air. Returning from the office in complete leisure, I'll sit down with a soft thud before the piano. There I will draw out melodies, open my throat to song. Let it be off-key—it's still my own voice! What brings me joy is the most beautiful music this world has to offer. Some time will pass in quiet conversation with myself, washing away the weariness of days. In the rapture of melody, I'll listen—by my own measure—to the wordless sound of wind moving through the spell of notes. This very dwelling in the solitude of consciousness is what prayer is.
I have very small desires. I will write them down in a diary. On the day I have everything this life can give, I will finally understand: the time to fulfill my desires will perhaps never come again in this life. From that day forward, I will begin recording my unfulfilled longings, one by one, in that diary. The moment a person begins to become human in everyone's eyes, from that very moment begins her painful journey toward becoming less than human. Everything I will die without having, everything I will never possess—its perfect description will rest in that diary. After my death, that diary's ashen pages will bear silent witness to all my incomplete desires.
I have certain tender indulgences. On a day when I'm sulking in the monsoon, sitting shut in my room with the door locked, my beloved will come rushing and tap gently at the door: *I'm soaked through in the rain! Don't take me in if you won't—but at least take these kadan flowers from my hands? An ice-cream bag hangs on my arm; accept these blossoms and rescue me a little, please?*
I have dreams in fragments. Everything I will ever have, I'll sign away before death to the stray dogs and cats on the street and the homeless people. Every organ of my body I'll bequeath and donate. I have a great wish—that my beloved eyes might live on even after I'm gone. Let my kidneys save the life of someone walking toward death. Everyone will know I'm gone. But over there, the kohl in my two eyes will present my existence, day after day!
My lifelong wish is this: not a single penny be spent on me after my death. Let the news of my dying not even reach those close to me. Let them all know I'm alive. When tears fall for me, it feels as though the weight of sin has bent my entire consciousness! Even after death, I don't want to bear the burden of anyone's tears. A person who lives completely without expectation—even while alive, such a person cannot bring themselves to imagine, in their thoughts, the least particle of another's tears after death.
I want my death to take with it all my desires, my achievements, my dreams—they should die together with me. They are like my children. Children often live on in neglect and indifference after their mother's death. Better than such neglect and indifference is death itself.
Two. When Lata Mangeshkar was just thirteen years old, her father, Sri Dinanath Mangeshkar, died of a heart ailment.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
Meena, Asha, Usha, and Hridaynath—four younger siblings—and the care of their mother: all this responsibility falls upon her slender shoulders. At that tender age, she accepts it with utmost seriousness, and as the sole breadwinner of the family, she busies herself with singing and acting in various musicals and films, fulfilling her duty. Time flows on, and with it, her days grow fuller. As she grows older, there comes a moment when she decides she will not marry.
For every perfect act of self-sacrifice, some reward is ordained. The fire in the sacrificial pyre of one's own immolation never dies.
I cite from Sukoomar Roy's *Archimedes*:
"King Hiero had once commissioned a goldsmith to craft a golden crown. The goldsmith made it well enough, but the king grew suspicious—had the man stolen gold and hidden his theft by mixing base metal into the crown? To settle the matter without harming the craftsman, he summoned his friend Archimedes. After hearing the problem, Archimedes said, 'Let me think on it.' Days passed as he pondered. One day, as he stepped into the bath, water sloshed over the rim, and in that instant, a brilliant solution struck him. The bath forgotten, he cried 'Eureka! Eureka!'—'I have found it! I have found it!'—and ran naked into the street… The principle he discovered in that moment of rapture still bears his name in science: 'Archimedes' Principle.'"
The world has remembered Archimedes' madness that day as the magnificent tale of a lost scientist's great discovery. Not everyone is so fortunate; the rest remain merely mad. Everyone has their moments of madness, yet in history, only genius's frenzy finds a place. The world calls someone mad when their madness remains, in the end, nothing but madness. Such a person does not escape with merely being called mad—people add another word and call them a madman and nothing more.
Infinite pursuit and meticulous labor—holding hands with these two, success comes slowly, climbing the stairs of failure. There is but one shortcut to success: to work knowingly, with understanding. When one pursues a task with love, giving it endless hours, one eventually becomes a master of it. The work of skilled hands and unskilled hands are never the same. The results differ vastly. People say the fruit of waiting is sweet. In truth, it is not the fruit of mere waiting—it is the fruit of *work-filled* waiting that is sweet.
The more times one falls hard while trying to rise, the sharper one's mind grows, the keener one's edge becomes. Let the nature of labor be such that the dark shadows beneath the eyes, worn from constant toil, one day transform into the kohl of recognition—the mark of work acknowledged—and color both eyes with dignity. Let the journey of labor be silent and unbroken; let the flowering of its fruit be loud and glorious. The more one chatters during work, the more the world chatter about one when the work is done.
One must learn to wait in silence. One must know when to raise one's voice. Can the end of a game be foreseen from its beginning? Perhaps in some cases. Those are the legendary players. If you play among them, so much the better. But if not, refine yourself to such brilliance that no matter how you play, the spectators never lose faith in you. Let everyone watch and wait for the moment you will score that goal, eager to see it.
Become a Lionel Messi. Become a Cristiano Ronaldo.
As long as they are on the field, everyone watches their feet in anxious anticipation—waiting to see when their foot will send the ball into the goal post. In the final minute of the match, they can still overturn the result. No one can even imagine that today their feet might not score!
Build yourself into such a dependable magician. No one expects a tiger's roar from a donkey, nor does anyone imagine a donkey's bray from a tiger. That's where the joy of living like a tiger lies!
Thought: Eight Hundred Thirty
………………………………………………………One. Everyone who comes to my wall is a superior kind of human being than me—in knowledge, in character, in intelligence; in a word, superior in all dimensions of enrichment. I harbor no sorrow about this. I have accepted your excellence with a bowed head. In one lifetime, how much can a person truly gain? A brief little life—one can pass through it even without gaining much! Know this for certain: I am not as noble as you are, nor do I possess even the remotest desire to become so. I am flawed, so I shall go to hell. I have no objection to going to hell, but when some of you drag me around insistently toward heaven, it annoys me greatly.
I generally maintain a few hundred paces' distance from heaven's agents. Let us remember this: if I am not obliged to bear someone's burden of sins, then to thrust lessons of virtue upon them is merely to present myself as a tiresome person. They themselves may go to heaven or hell as they please—that's fine—but instead they're busy dragging another to heaven! What an absurd judge—dangling from the gallows rope themselves, yet passing sentence on another's hanging! If your lungs don't burn from hashish, why should your mind burn from someone else's cigarette? Give them a chance and every rascal wants to become God! In the end, they remain rascals, not God.
I am weary of all this. When someone sees this weariness, they dust off every dialogue they've laboriously learned in life—delivered with such perfect moral certainty. A common one is: pride is the root of ruin. Listen, brother, whether a person who cannot prevent their fall has pride or not, they will fall either way. Learn how to prevent the fall, and life will be happy. Humility is a great thing when shown in the right place. Humility shown to the unworthy brings sorrow. There is no need to be humble before a goat. The beast eats jackfruit leaves anyway—show it humility and it mistakes it for a leaf, crunches it between its teeth and swallows it whole. I see another dialogue: even if a wicked man is learned, he should be abandoned. So brother, if a good-hearted woman dances before you, will I get money from that? Or if you give me a certificate as a wicked man, can I wash it and drink the water? By the way, why do you come dancing before someone you've deemed unworthy? Brother, have you no shame?
Let me speak of a related matter. Once I used to promote the "Writings to Words" group in comments. Now I promote the "Rouypyrup" group. Many people are pained by this! What the pain is for remains unclear to me. Rouypyrup is my younger brother's and his wife's enterprise. They sell silver jewelry online. Considering quality, collection, and commitment, at this moment in Bangladesh there is no one near their standard. I only mentioned them before you the other day! Long before that, the name of Bangladesh's largest establishment in the silver ornament trade was Rouypyrup.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
The money that comes from selling jewelry keeps our household afloat. Should I not promote that institution on my own page's wall, then? Must I dance at the sight of your Fazliamar advertisements instead? If you came to my wall and sold mangoes, lychees, bananas, and pomelos, what would I gain? Didn't you once work to advance your brother's business success? Or is such work forbidden for Sushanta Pal? Who made this rule? You? Oh, really!? You are so sweet... so cute! Doesn't Sushanta eat and wear clothes like you? Yes, if my so-called 'shameless promotion' irritates you so much, you can unfollow or block me and keep yourself safe. (Google will show you, complete with pictures and videos, how to unfollow a page. It would be good if you took the trouble to look there.)
You don't earn money from following me. You're not a customer of Roupyarup. I don't expect even a cup of colored tea from you. There's not much for me to learn from you either. Despite all these 'no's, if I saw your haha reactions or hateful comments, I don't possess that oceanic well of pure love that would make me embrace you and shower you with kisses. I have no obligation to display even the minimum tolerance toward the rude and foolish. A page with hundreds of thousands of members on its banlist cannot permit such fidgeting on its wall, dear Chaudhuri Sahib! I may be poor, but I too have considerable (Facebook) dignity!
I keep in mind that you came here to taste the butter. Through my writings and words, you know me. Getting to know me hasn't cost you a single paisa. This knowing has put not a single paisa in my pocket. I haven't sent the police to your house to force you to know me. You know me because you needed to. When that need is satisfied, you'll forget me quickly enough, and that bothers me not one bit. You read my writings for free, you listen to my words for free, yet where does all this expectation come from, boss?
Lifespan is more urgent than immortality. Well-being matters more than love. Family matters more than Facebook.
(Did you notice how I strategically promoted Roupyarup through this very post? Has noticing this soured your mood? Is your anger burning through every hair on your head? Will you unfollow me right now and leave? Must I now dance and sing Syed Abdul Hadi's 'Jeyo na saathi...' in a tearful voice to win you back? Brother, oh brother, just tell me once—what must I do? Just once... please, I beg you! Even so, don't leave me! If you abandon me, I'll waste away—from hunger, from cold. Your love, your affection, your respect, your reverence, your likes, your comments, your shares... I survive on these, chewing and swallowing them. That's how my belly gets full, Sir!)
Two. A few more books from my collection...
I have a great wish that one day, if I can organize my books properly, I'll make a documentary about my small library. It would be useful to many.
Sometimes when I share pictures of books, when I write something about them, and some see it and think, 'Look at him, showing off!'—to them I humbly say, 'Please don't think that way. What may be showing off to you might be, for others, precisely the inspiration that makes a book buyer and book reader.' I am showing off a little, true—you display yourself with a selfie because your face is good-looking; I display myself with books because mine isn't. But the purpose is the same!
Buying and reading books—whatever else may or may not come of it—in certain people, at least, moves the mind forward a little. That much, life has taught me.
Reflection: Eight Hundred Thirty-One
………………………………………………………One. The capacity to work—to truly labor toward something—is itself a great fortune. Not everyone's luck brings it. And even when it does arrive, the moment it comes, often the mental or physical strength to sustain that labor has already departed.
What do I mean? Let me break it down.
We cannot simply choose to pour our effort into any work that might move us forward. The plain truth is, time and circumstance are often against us. It happens that we glimpse work where labor might yield something precious, yet we are denied the very opportunity to do it. The place where our effort would have been justly valued—we have not yet arrived there, perhaps never will. Not everyone is undervalued for lack of merit; many are diminished by lack of opportunity alone. And in some cases, it is weakness of will itself that accounts for their diminishment. When such things occur, the chance to work simply never materializes.
To know the work that, given time and effort, would bring richness to one's life—to recognize it and to keep oneself bent toward it—this is essential. Those to whom these two paths lie closed will not find the opportunity to labor, no matter how willing their hearts. People do not fail to advance because they refuse to work; they fail because they cannot direct their work toward the true aim. Many roads lie ahead; to recognize which one is mine, at the right moment—this matters profoundly. Yet this too occurs: the goal stands clear and true, but every path leading toward it is somehow blocked. Not finding the goal, losing the way once found, being unable to bend circumstance to serve the goal—these three things can render a person utterly helpless and void.
Many wander the roads like the lost until they find some path that makes them think, "Yes, this—this is the right road for me." Not all roads are for all people. No road is inherently wrong; yet each road is certainly wrong for someone. The phrase "wrong road" means wrong for a particular person, or for a particular time and circumstance. The road on which one travels and reaches one's destination is by no means a wrong road for that traveler. A person's will and fate together determine the path. The rightness of a road is always relative; to judge another's path as wrong is a great foolishness.
The work that, if one could do it, would open one's fortune—for lack of its even occurring to them, many must wait day after day. I have seen those who, after sincere effort and tireless labor, receive no reward worth the struggle, grow so disheartened that they lose taste for life itself. When the day is not mine, though I pour all my effort and sweat into it, the night will still be melancholy. Better to walk slowly toward a small goal and achieve greatly than to rush toward a large one and gain little. The beauty of a life lived by fate, not by merit alone, deepens. A person lives mainly in the exquisite interplay of will and destiny. Even those who do not believe in destiny cannot step outside it.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
Your efforts lack nothing, your good intentions harbor no deficit, your willpower contains no flaw—and yet, despite all this, you cannot seem to find that opportunity, or it is simply not granted to you, or it remains invisible even when it stands before your eyes—that chance through which you might have proved yourself. I have seen this happen: even after someone succeeds in proving themselves, they continue to be deprived of opportunity, again and again. Circumstances refuse to turn favorable, no matter how hard one tries! In such cases, even when the will to work burns bright, opportunity remains absent.
But if ever in life one moment arrives when your labor bears its true reward, that moment itself becomes the opportunity to labor. At such a time, the wise act is to shed all laziness, all excuses, all ego—that false self—and make fullest use of the chance before you. Such opportunities do not return often. Many wait their whole lives and never receive even one such moment. When the time to work comes, work with your whole mind. Those who carelessly squander such chances will know suffering as their inevitable lot.
People do not die from excess labor; they die from the absence of opportunity to labor. The weariness of work is the very fountain of good fortune. The history of the world is fundamentally the history of those few who have seized the chance to work.
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Two. According to various scholars, *The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna* is among the hundred most important spiritual texts of the twentieth century. The English translation of the Bengali *Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita* was rendered by the distinguished writer and philosopher Swami Nikhilananda. The foreword to this translation was written by the English author and philosopher Aldous Huxley, and it was edited by Joseph Campbell, the world-renowned professor of comparative mythology, along with Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of American President Woodrow Wilson. In this book, philosophy and spirituality have been woven together in language of remarkable simplicity, through dialogue and narrative. For many, this volume has proven infallible in dispelling mental fatigue and answering countless doubts.
Those who have read the *Devabanee*—a collection of lectures by Swami Vivekananda—know what a friend this book becomes when one wishes to plunge into the ocean of philosophical and spiritual thought! I am aware there is little discourse of such refined philosophical and Vedantic quality. From mid-June 1895 through early August of that year, at Thousand Island Park, Vivekananda delivered several lectures before a select group of disciples. Sarah Ellen Waldo recorded some of these. The lectures have been compiled in the fourth volume of *Swami Vivekananda's Words and Writings*.
Those interested in the Upanishads or Vedanta may turn the pages of the Upanishads translated by Swami Jyotirmananda. There is little discourse on Vedanta presented so accessibly and yet so moving to the heart. I believe that listening to Swami Sarvapriyananda's lectures on Vedanta on YouTube will flood one's whole being with a certain peace. I have found no better lectures than these for truly experiencing Vedanta. Through twelve lectures, the clarity with which he has explained the Drk-Drishya-Viveka—the discrimination between the seer and the seen—is such that the essence of this foundational text of Vedanta becomes comprehensible in a way that had never occurred to me was even possible. Reading Swami Lokeshwarananda's *Upanishads*, published in two volumes by Ananda Publishers, may open further paths into those deep solitudes. The path of Vedanta has always been a solitary way.
Let me say something of how I read books. When I begin reading a book and find that it does not please me, that what I seek is not there, I stop immediately. A few turned pages reveal whether a book aligns with my mind and taste.
I don't believe that buying a book means you must read it. If you buy a hundred books, perhaps you'll read ten. But if you didn't buy those hundred, how would you ever discover which ten were truly meant for you? That's where the real pleasure of book-buying lies!
Let me be clear: I have never read a book out of devotion to any particular religion. Where literature, history, philosophy, spirituality, and psychological exploration do not dwell—there I do not dwell either. It is precisely because reading has no doctrinal allegiance that I can perceive so deeply.
We owe our gratitude to several institutions for publishing philosophy, spirituality, and richly analytical books at remarkably low cost:
Udbodhan Karyalaya
Gita Press, Gorakhpur
Islamic Foundation, Bangladesh
Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture
Sri Aurobindo Ashram, PondicherryI love keeping some truly splendid books from these publishers in my personal library. I've shared photos of some volumes from my collection with you—perhaps someone will find them useful. By the way, a few days ago I managed to acquire seven more installments of the Vedic Literature series (*Vedgranthmala*) published by the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture; you can see them in the photographs. As far as I know, of the sixty installments planned, they have so far published thirty-six, and I have all of them in my collection.
Thought 832
………………………………………………………One. Those who are called ignorant—when they grieve, it is painful. When they begin to understand—I know not why—it hurts even more!
Two. I never wanted to have you.
Yet why do I weep so, not having had you?We likely only wanted to win, never to be happy. So in this life, victory came, but happiness never did. Man compromises with happiness in pursuit of victory. Later, after winning, he wants to compromise with victory itself, but can no longer do so.
Not everyone wants love; many only want a social identity. They may acquire that identity eventually, but lose the love in the bargain. Then, no matter how hard they try, they cannot fathom what they truly wanted! In the tapestry of regret, even with every identity intact, man lives bereft of identity.
Three. When some stranger comes and tells me, "I don't like you," I want to say, "Really! You don't like me! How terrible! Then what have I gained by living all these years! What will become of me now! Should I drown myself in half a glass of water right this instant, as a tribute to you, and make a run for it? Actually, does it have to be mineral water? Or would boiled water do just as well?"
You don't even know the person, yet you go to their wall or, behind their back, keep prattling and fussing like this—have you no shame, brother? You're jobless yet so busy! Do you get paid for this? Why dance attendance on someone you don't even like? Why stare at the face of someone you can't stand? If you don't like someone, will a few strands of their hair fall out?
You don't like me? Oh I see! So what...then? Do I even care? Why are you so cute, babu! Ummmah...!!
Four. Whoever you wish to have—perhaps someone else has them and is grieving terribly. Whoever wishes to have you—perhaps they don't know that someone is grieving terribly for having you. Before we possess someone, looking from afar, many things seem one way. But we cannot know what is happiness and what is sorrow until we have or have not possessed them.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
There are only a few infallible ways to know a person, and among them are two: lending money, marrying. Until money has been lent, many a devil wears the face of an angel. The one you could not marry forever seems beautiful to behold. All that we know of an untested person is conjecture, and therefore stands a far greater chance of being wrong. Only the one who has tasted knows the true sweetness of honey.
Five. There are generally two matters I am not inclined to listen to or speak of:
My personal affairs
My office mattersWhy?
You and I share no personal familiarity. You are not my friend, not my colleague, not even an acquaintance. You have never set foot in my home, nor I in yours. The likelihood of either happening is, for all practical purposes, nil. Therefore, I have not the slightest interest in your personal matters, nor shall I ever have any. And I see no earthly reason why you should take an interest in mine. Quite naturally, your comments, questions, and advice about my personal life irritate and embarrass me. I do not even know who you are, and I have no desire to know. What is all this curiosity of yours? One cannot ask personal questions of someone one does not know. Even if curiosity stirs, one must swallow it. You need not be a rocket scientist to grasp this simple thing.
If we consider my professional life, we ought not to be in touch at all! Who are you? My esteemed stakeholder? My revered colleague? You are neither of these! So what connection exists between us? Nothing—or so I thought, but I was wrong. There is one. Where? On Facebook, on YouTube. How? You know me through my writing, my speeches, my work. Beyond this, there is no other acquaintance between us. When I see your needless, unsolicited, irrelevant comments about BCS, office, government service, and such, it rankles deeply. Can one ask such things of someone whose very existence one does not know? Do I ever post something that warrants such questions or remarks? Whatever I write or post—only that deserves discussion. Common decency demands it. But when beneath a love poem you comment with words like BCS, job, cadre, English-math-guidebooks, office—then irritation is inevitable! In that moment, I do what you would do were you irritated with someone else.
In this life of ours, there are scarcely any people we truly need! A solitary life amid the crowd—that is ours. To wish to please everyone is to drown your own life in an ocean of torment. What does it matter to me if the one who annoys and embarrasses me is pleased or displeased? I am not standing for election, after all, am I? Not everyone is needed to live beautifully.
There is but one mantra for living: The fewer people you add, the more pain you remove.
Six. For fear of sin, I deprived myself day after day of every pleasure that sin promised in this life, and in the end, how much virtue was credited to my account? Not much, I discovered. How did I know it was not? If it had been credited, why would life have turned out thus? Now I wonder—perhaps those were merely failures of courage or circumstance, not fear of sin. Perhaps the race toward virtue-loss in this life runs longer than the race toward virtue-gain in that other life.
Seven. The less merit a person possesses, the more zealously he seeks the faults of others.
I have never once seen a gifted person waste their time searching out the faults of others. They simply do not have the hours to spare—all their time is consumed in the cultivation of their own virtues.
Eight. The person who says "You cannot make tea well at all!" and yet sips two or three cups from your hand with genuine pleasure and eagerness, with a contented air—that person loves you, even if the words "I love you" have never crossed their lips.
The person who daily hurls accusations, saying "My whole life has been ruined because of you!" and yet refuses to leave you—that person loves you, even if they have never spoken it aloud.
The person who, after a tremendous quarrel and three thousand, three hundred and twenty-fifth breakup, still calls to make sure you have reached home safely—that person loves you from the heart, whether or not they have ever declared it.
The forgetful, scatterbrained person who fails to remember your birthday or your anniversary, yet suddenly appears at your door with an awkward smile, pressing your favorite phuchka or chaat into your hand, or at the very least a piece of candy—that person loves you, even if their lips have never uttered the words.
The person who grows restless when you are late coming home, who reads the sorrow in your face, who hears the piercing cry of sadness hidden in the silence of your wordless laughter—that person truly loves you.
How difficult it is to say "I love you!" Only those who truly love know the weight of those words!
In truth, love itself is relative. Each person loves in their own way. Different people express and receive love in different ways. One can say "I love you" while harboring a heap of hatred or indifference in one's chest. Conversely, one can say "I hate you" while one's heart is full of love and affection, or remain silent and say nothing at all. It is a strange mystery! An unresolved circle!
Perhaps because love can never truly be conveyed through words or letters, we instinctively understand that the person who says "I am leaving you!" will never actually leave. And equally, we sense in our depths that the person who says "I will never leave you!" will abandon you within days.
People understand everything, yet they choose willfully not to understand.
People are capable of thinking, yet they lack the courage to truly think.**Reflection: Eight Hundred Thirty-Three**
……………………………………………………One. The works translated by the man who shaped Rabindranath into Rabindranath deserve special consideration. Yes, among the precious treasures we have received through the translations of Jyotirindranath Tagore—Rabindranath's elder brother—is the *Srimad Bhagavad Gita's Secret*, written in Marathi by Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Those who are devoted readers of philosophy would do well to keep this commentary within reach. I had intended to write about other works in my collection concerning the philosophical (not devotional) exegesis of the Gita, but the time has not yet come.
The first book I read, which admitted me into the school of spirituality and philosophy, was Sri Aurobindo's *The Life Divine*. The original work is in English. A distant relative of mine gifted it to me. For someone like myself, still in intermediate studies, reading a book written in such elevated English was extraordinarily difficult. Later, I obtained a translation and read it again. To be honest, even the translation was taxing to read and comprehend. In Bengali history, there are few scholars equal to the sage Sri Aurobindo. If you wish, you can read about him on the internet and find wonder and joy in the gift of that reading. I possess nearly all the books published from his ashram in Pondicherry. I shall write about them someday, when time permits.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
I wish to mention alongside this two more beloved scriptural works: *Autobiography of a Yogi* by Paramahansa Yogananda, and *Sri Ramakrishna as We Knew Him* by Mahendranath Gupta.
The learned Durgadas Lahiri, celebrated for his compilation *Songs of Bengal* (1905)—a collection of five thousand six hundred and sixty-four songs by two hundred and seven lyricists, each with brief biographical notes—has earned Bengali gratitude on another count as well. Nearly a century ago, he undertook the monumental task of producing the original texts, translations, and commentaries of all four Vedas in forty-nine volumes: sixteen volumes on the Rigveda, two on the Shukla Yajurveda, seven on the Krishna Yajurveda, nine on the Samaveda, and five on the *Jnanavaad*—a distillation of all the Vedas' essence. That imperishable legacy has become rare now, scattered thinly across a few ancient libraries in India. The Akshay Library has brought out this invaluable work in a condensed form.
It is my personal conviction that Rabindranath Tagore's finest creations are his short stories and songs. In particular, the boundless power his songs exert upon the human mind is universally acknowledged. The role of Tagore's music in music therapy cannot be denied. Scholars remain endlessly curious about the contexts in which he composed particular songs, the thoughts he harbored while writing them, and how the melodies and notations of various songs came to be. Prabir Guha's *The Comprehensive Treasury of Tagore's Music* stands as a seminal work for understanding and exploring Tagore's songs in chronological detail. Among the research-based books on Tagore's music in my library, this is by far the largest in scope.
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Two. How strange a creature is man! He imagines he weeps for love, yet in truth he weeps for illusion. Yes, sometimes a man does not weep for love, nor even for passion, but rather falls captive to illusion and weeps. When a person who has lodged the deepest wound of life deep within one's heart departs, the memory of them can jolt you awake at midnight, tears streaming from your eyes. In broad daylight, remembering them can wrench sobs from within your chest with such violence that you feel utterly consumed, and the burning continues.
The mind asks: Who is this person to me now?
The heart answers: This person is still my life.
The one who departed has wounded us, but infinitely more painful than this wound is the memory—imperishable, indelible—that this very person once wept bitterly at my smallest ache. This person once lulled me to sleep with tenderness in their voice. The person who now cuts short a phone call to wet their heart with a third, new voice—that very person once could not sleep without hearing mine. How much does time alter!
We do not cling to the person for the person's sake, but rather to the illusion woven around the memories entangled with them. This is why we suffer so, anguished all hours. The heart burns and burns endlessly.
When a beloved song of theirs drifts from somewhere, the heart breaks—that song I once waited eagerly to hear in their beautifully imperfect voice. Their favorite color, their beloved poem, even their preferred tea vendor—at the sight of such things the spirit grows heavy. In these moments of heaviness, lips bitten, a suppressed weeping wakes; sometimes a gentle smile flutters across the eyes.
With time, we learn not to hate the person, but to hate the memories. Yes, eventually we come to despise that tea vendor's shop where we once sat together, that street we once walked holding their hand, even that rickshaw with the raised hood we once rode in together. Not the person who abandoned us, but rather the time we left behind seems the great betrayer. Yet for all that, there lingers in some corner of the heart, till the very end, something unnamed—for the beloved of that departed time. That something binds us perpetually—in love, in forgiveness, in prayer.
Love dies eventually. What remains is merely a kind of habit.
That corroded familiarity gnaws at every fiber of our hearts, swallows us whole. When we try to escape it, we wonder: how do I flee from myself? Illness of the body can be cured, but when the soul burns, there is no path to healing left open.
Memory accumulates in our bodies, in our minds like the mound of termites. Those insects nibble us away, grain by grain—the mind dies long before the body does. We drag this dead mind through life, keeping ourselves barely alive. The faculty of remembering, prized as it is in school examinations, is equally a suicide in life's true test.
Memory has no eraser. If it did, we would see countless souls on this earth living in peace—souls who have not murdered themselves, fleeing the fire of remembrance.
The truth that this person now belongs to another—that becomes bearable in time. What remains unbearable is only this: that *this person*, yes, *this very person* was once mine...entirely, wholly, utterly mine!
In truth, no one truly belongs to anyone in this world. When that understanding arrives, it arrives far too late.
Even a corpse does not wound us as deeply as the tender, murderous memories we shared with that person.
Perhaps this is why, even when the departed one returns to us, we send them away empty-handed again and again—though the very next moment, for reasons I cannot name, the clock's hand wishes to freeze, my eyes brim at moonlight, my lips tremble at rain...oh, for whom do I die a little every single day! I cannot take this person back, and yet I cannot let go of their memory either—and this, this is what we call being alive.