2. Kill out desire of life.
3. Kill out desire of comfort.
Work as those work who are ambitious.
Respect life as those do who desire it.
Be happy as those are who live for happiness.
Seek in the heart the source of evil and expunge it.
It lives fruitfully in the heart
of the devoted disciple as well as in the heart
of the man of desire.
Only the strong can kill it out.
The weak must wait for its growth,
its fruition, its death.
The law of life is very paradoxical. It brings contradictory outcomes. For example, someone who wants to run away from his shadow finds out that while running away, his shadow is moving alongside him. There is no way to escape from your shadow by running away from it. If you stop, the shadow also stops. If you run, the shadow will chase you with equal energy. There is only one way to get rid of the shadow and that is to realize that it is a shadow, that it is not something substantial. Then whether it is there or not makes no difference. Running away from your shadow is not the way to save yourself from it – the only way is to become aware of the shadow’s reality. Then, realizing that a shadow is just a shadow, you drop the effort to save yourself from it; after all, why try to save yourself from something that doesn’t exist?
And the moment you drop the effort to escape, you are saved. This is the paradox. As long as you wanted to escape, you couldn’t and as soon as you no longer want to, you can.
In the same way a living person may drown in the river, but a dead body won’t; a dead body will float on the river. A living person drowns, a dead one floats – and this appears to be very contradictory. The laws of the river seem to be very illogical. The living person should be saved because even if the dead one drowns it doesn’t matter – but it is the living person who drowns, and the dead one who doesn’t. Perhaps the dead person understands the laws of the river better; he seems to know how to be with the river. But whatever the living person does, he gets into trouble.
What is it that the dead body knows that the living person doesn’t? The dead body knows the art of leaving itself in the hands of the river and letting the river do what it wants to. If you can do that, the river will not allow you to drown, it will help you to float. The living person struggles with the river and in that very struggle he is destroyed and drowns. The river doesn’t drown him; the person destroys himself through his own struggle and drowns. If the river can help a dead body float, it can also help you to float. And if a living person behaves in the same way with the river as a dead one, it will be impossible for the river to drown him. But to do this is extremely difficult.