“What did the Sadhu mean by ‘a long way’?” his analytical mind tried to decipher the cryptic message. “Is there no end to my suffering”, he thought aloud as the Sadhu took a Bilva leaf from the pile of leaves beside him, closed his eyes, smelled it with a long draw of breath and threw it aside.
Then he began again, “You fall in love. Sometimes you fall in love with a thought that makes you see the world the way you want to see, and sometimes you fall in love with a person who you think you emotionally identify with. There are also times when you fall in love with dreams engineered by your own imagination of an ideal future. Then, there are the other times when you give in to sensual pleasure. These are the objects of your desire.”
“The objects of our desire”, he noted silently.
“You are often so obsessed with these objects of desire that you want them to stay unchanged, so that you can continue to love them the way you do. You start hoping that the power of your love will keep them forever the way you want them to be.”
His thoughts had suddenly wandered away to the recent series of events as he continued staring blankly into the face of the Sadhu. The Sadhu gazed back into his eyes, “Even when you see early signs of change, you continue holding onto them in the belief that they will stay unchanged, sometimes trying to control them. However, such hope is naïve.”
“Naïve Hope, yes that is what had kept me awake for twenty-seven days”, he sighed. The four others who had by then circled the Sadhu were by now intently lost in their own little worlds.
The Sadhu gestured the gathering to come closer to him and continued with a tranquil smile, “The powerful mind plays a trick on you, telling you that it is possible to hold onto these objects of desire. However, these objects are illusionary by their very nature since they are a product of our desire, and cannot be imprisoned by what you have come to define as love.
The people who you once held dear will change, the thoughts that you once proudly identified with as our own will wander away. The dreams that you so elaborately built will break, and the bodies that you once felt attracted to will age away. Change is inevitable, and such is the great truth about life.”
“But I know love. I have been in love. I have experienced it”, he half muttered to himself.
The Sadhu continued as if he were a mind reader, “The love that the world propounds and you often experience, that builds your attachment to these objects of desire, in reality, is not true love, however special you may come to believe it feels, for it is the mind playing a trick you do not recognize.
Such love is but a mask for your deep desires, turning your attachment into obsession. When the inevitable change takes place, and you begin to lose the objects of your desire, the same obsession turns into sorrow, sometimes into anger, and the loss eventually leads to pain and suffering, after which the feeling of love slowly begins to fade away. Such are the ways of the world.”
Such he had already experienced. His love or as he had come to believe it, had been the cause of sufferings of unimaginable proportions. For all.
“Only if I could go back in time and change the nine years. But if what I experienced was not love, then what is love?”
As he fought back the tears that were welling up in his eyes, the Sadhu continued, “The love that you experience when you love without reservations or preferences, with no desires to obsess with and no attachments to cling to, is true and eternal in nature, for it is not affected by change or loss. As you begin to lose your sense of self with surrendered ego of your existence, you shall experience bliss”.
Transfixed by the Sadhu’s gaze, he muttered in a low feeble voice holding onto the Sadhu’s feet “I do not want this suffering. I want to experience that bliss”.
The Sadhu gently moved his hand over his head as if it were a blessing of reassurance. As he closed his eyes again, still lingering from the feeling of the heavy hand of the Sadhu on his head, the words of the Sadhu reverberated through his mind: “There is still a long way to go…”
The Sadhu asked with a knowing smile, “But how can anyone find bliss without first burning in the fire of desire?”