There is one more interesting thing that needs to be understood. Thinking means to repeat, in the mind, what we already know. Thinking is never original – although we ordinarily say that such and such a person’s thoughts are highly original. No, thought is never original. Thoughts can never be original. Darshan, seeing, can be original.

Thoughts are always stale. If I ask you to think about this roseflower, what will you think? You will simply reiterate what you already know about a rose. What else would you do? What else can you do with thinking? Could even one single unheard-of and original viewpoint about a rose ever appear in your thoughts? How can it?

Thinking is nothing but reiterating a thought. You may say, “The roseflower is very beautiful,” but how many times have you heard this before? How many times have you read this before? Or you may say, “The roseflower is just as beautiful as the face of my beloved.” How many times have you heard this before too? How many times have you read it before? Or you may say, “The flower is very fresh” – but this too, how many times have you heard or read it before? What good are thoughts? How will you be able to enter the being of that roseflower by thinking about it? Thinking can only lead you into whatsoever is in your memory about a rose. That’s why thinking is never original. There can never be an original thinker – only seers are original.

The first condition in looking at a roseflower is that the person looking at it should not think. He should remove thoughts from his memory; he should become empty, and live in that moment with the flower. Let the roseflower be on one side and you be on the other, and let there be no one between you – nothing you’ve ever heard, nothing you’ve ever read, nothing you’ve ever known. Nothing you’ve ever experienced should be in between. No one should be between you two. Only then, the unknown seated within the rose will begin to enter your being. Finding no hindrance in between, it will enter, and then you won’t feel you want to know the rose, you will feel you are one with the rose. Then you will know the flower from its interiority.

A seer penetrates inside an object, while a thinker hovers around it on the outside – and therefore a thinker has no achievement of his own; only a seer enjoys achievement. A seer penetrates within because there remains no wall between him and the object before him – the wall crumbles, disappears.

Once Kabir asked his son Kamaal to go to the forest and bring some hay for their cattle. Kamaal went as he was told. It was morning when he left, but when the sun was overhead and Kamaal had not yet returned, Kabir became worried. And even by the waning hours of afternoon there was no sign of Kamaal. Kabir grew even more worried. Soon it was evening and the sun was about to set, so finally, accompanied by a few of his devotees, Kabir set out in search of Kamaal.