A professor was taking a ferry across a rather long river, and he was the only passenger with the man who was steering and directing the boat. And they began talking, and he said to the man, “Have you learned your arithmetic?”
And the man said, “No.”
He said, “Well you’ve wasted one-third of your life.” He said, “How is your reading and writing?”
He said, “I’m illiterate, I don’t read and write.”
He said, “Well, you’ve wasted another third of your life.”
Then all of a sudden a storm came up and it began to blow the boat around, and as the boat is being blown around the ferryman asks the professor, “Have you learned how to swim?”
And the professor says, “No I haven’t.”
And he said, “Well, you may have wasted your entire life,” as the boat went over and he swam away.
Well, we all are, one day, going to be in a position where we have to cross the river or, as Bawa would put it, the ocean of illusion, and we need to have the tools that allow us to cross that ocean. You can have lots of different tools in the world. You can know lots of different things in the world. But it comes down to what are you preparing yourself for, and what is your intention for your life?
Is your intention to get accolades within the world? Is your intention to make your place within the world? Or is your intention to prepare yourself for the next part of your existence? And if your intention, if you’ve been fortunate enough to understand that this existence is temporary, and there’s more to it than meets the eye, you know that there’s something else that you have to do. And the rules for that something else are different than the rules for this world.
The rules for the world are aggression, grab, and take. And that’s how you appear to be successful. Accumulation makes you successful. Gaining things makes you successful. The more toys you have the further ahead you are in the game. But if you are looking to make your way to be acceptable in the next world, and to be acceptable to God, the first thing we have to do is we have to make the intention that we want to be acceptable to God, that we have decided that our life is going to be lived in such a way that we become acceptable to God. And the mainstay of that intention, and the mainstay of that understanding, is love. Love for everything, love for everybody, love without condition.
A little girl was playing with her dolls and a friend of the family came by and was sitting with her, and she had a whole bunch of dolls, very beautiful ones, some not so pretty, and he asked her, “Which doll do you like the most?”
And he thought she was going to pick up one of the really beautiful ones, instead she had this old discarded doll that was scratched and torn, and she picked that up and she said, “I love this one the most.”
And he said, “Why that one?”
She said, “Well if I don’t love that one, nobody else will.”
And that’s the kind of understanding we need to develop in our own being…
