I said, “You should not forget that it is because of teachers like Dronacharya that teachers in India have lost their respect. You represent Dronacharya – on what grounds do you want students to respect you? And you are not even conscious of the fact you are mentioning Ekalavya. As far as I am concerned, I don’t see… I also have students, and I am a new professor. I have not seen a single student being disrespectful towards me. I love them; I respect them. Love resonates love in the other, respect creates respect in the other – these are resonances. If I had been in the place of Ekalavya, I would have cut off the head of Dronacharya! That’s exactly what he deserved.”
The old man was in such a shock and so shattered he was almost trembling. I said, “Sit down because you are trembling, and if a heart attack or something happens I will be responsible for it. Please sit down. I am not going to cut your head off; although you also need to be treated in the same way. You want students to be Ekalavyas – what about the teachers?”
The master is not a teacher. He loves; it will be better to say he is love. He respects; it will be better to say he is respectfulness. Naturally he creates a gravitational field of love, respect, gratitude. In this gravitational field, the second initiation happens. The disciple is no longer interested in knowing about himself. His only interest is in how to be dissolved into the master, how to be in harmony with the master. And the day the harmony comes to its peak, the disciple disappears; the devotee is born.
The devotee is miles away from the student. The whole journey has taken such revolutionary changes. The devotee is on the verge…the life of the devotee is not long. The longest life is that of the student. In the middle is the disciple. And the life span of the devotee is very small. It is something like a dewdrop on a lotus petal in the early morning sun, slipping slowly, slowly towards the sun into the ocean. The dewdrop is just that small fragment of time that it takes to slip from the lotus leaf into the ocean.
The devotee’s life is not long, it is very short – because once you have tasted the harmony you cannot wait to taste oneness. It is impossible to wait. The dewdrop runs fast, drops into the ocean, becomes one with the ocean.
There are two ways to say it. Kabir, one of the great mystics of India, is the only one who has used both ways. When for the first time he slipped into the ocean, he wrote a small statement in which he said, “I had been searching for myself, but, my friend, instead of finding myself, I have disappeared into the ocean. The dewdrop has disappeared into the ocean.”
After almost twenty years, when he was on his deathbed, he asked his son, Kamal, “Bring the notes you have been taking of my statements. Before I die, I have to correct one thing.” He said, “I said in one place that the dewdrop has disappeared into the ocean. Change it. Write down, ‘The ocean has disappeared into the dewdrop.’”
His own words are tremendously beautiful. The first words are Herat herat hey sakhi rahya kabir herayi; bunda samani samunda men so kat heri jayi. And the second: Herat herat hey sakhi rahya kabir herayi; samunda samana bunda men so kat heri jayi. In the first, the dewdrop has disappeared in the ocean. In the second, the ocean has disappeared into the dewdrop – perhaps two sides of the same coin.