There was a prince who had lived in the confines of his father’s, the king’s, estate his whole life. He had never really gone outside the doors of the castle grounds. One day his father said, “There’s a man that I want you to meet, he’s a holy man, and I want you to sit with him for a while and get some education.” And his father got the carriage ready, and the horses ready, and the prince who was about eighteen years old, was taking his first trip outside of his father’s huge estate and castle.
They’d been traveling a couple of days in the woods, and finally they get to a small house in the woods which is tiny and the prince had never seen anything tiny, the castle was huge, it was decorated with signs of wealth everywhere, and the coachman told him, “This is the place.”
He knocked on the door, and he knocked again, and someone said, “Come in.”
And he walked in and he saw a little man in a big room, which was the only room in the house, and all that was there was a cot and a little table next to the cot. The prince couldn’t imagine such a meager subsistence. He went up to the man and he said, “Where’s your furniture?”
And the man looked at him and said, “Where’s your furniture?”
And the prince said, “I’m only passing through.”
And the old man on the cot said, “I’m only passing through.”
Now, there are lots of stories like this about wise men and how simply they live. There’s not a lot of decoration, worldly decoration, in their lives. Their decoration comes from other places. So what’s the point of this for us? The point is that we need to live a life that’s not complicated. We need to live a life that’s simple.
Now, in this simplicity, we’re not really talking about simplicity in your daily affairs; your mentality has to be simple. If you are complicated in the way you look at things, if you see complex scenarios everywhere around you, and if you are constantly trying to solve complex scenarios, or you see things as extremely complex, what you’re doing is you’re creating a matrix of complexity between you and the truth.
Every complex situation that you are involved in, every conundrum that you’re trying to unravel is a veil that separates you from the truth of reality.
There’s the story most of you should know about Alexander and the Gordian Knot, it was this knot that everybody said couldn’t be untied. When Alexander was conquering the known world at that time he came to this knot and people told him this knot couldn’t be untied. He took the sword out of his scabbard and he cut it, and that was the end of the knot and the end of the complication.
We need to begin to understand how to do away with our complications…
