Silence...2
Upadesa is verbal teaching, teaching by means of a dualistic instrument (language), which cannot hope to do more than suggest the truth and which, owing to its inherent limitations, at the same time obscures it.
But in silence Pure Intelligence can function directly and with immediacy, unhindered even by Time. Its potency is incomparable.
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Choice
Why chose? Why not just do what you have to do anyhow? Not to choose is 'd'être présent dans le Présent'.
Our whole life as prisoners of the personal illusion is a series of choices. From morning till night we do nothing but choose.
If we ceased to choose and just responded to circumstances that would be to act in accordance with the 'true nature of things'. But that is what the integrated do.
Yes, we choose from morning till night, yet there is no such thing as choice.
Silence...3
Whoever has studied the mondo of the Zen Masters has noted with surprise and mystification tales, of different periods and different sages, according to which a pupil after years of residence in a monastery goes to the master in profound discouragement, tells him how long he has been with him and asks when he may hope to begin receiving some instruction. At which the Master turns in apparent astonishment and says something such as 'But you have brought me my tea every day!'
Few, if any, of us have understood. Rather have we thought how strange and different the Chinese must be, patiently to spend years without being taught anything.
Then perhaps we have come across the tale of the pupil who lived for years with an old master in the hope of being taught 'intemporal' swordsmanship, serving him day and night in his house. Whenever he asked for instruction he received a blow with a stick. Then one day, in exasperation, while the old man is bending over the fire poking the embers, he seizes a stick and tries to bring it down on his master's shoulders. But the old master, without looking round, without seeing what is happening, swings the poker over his head, wards off the blow and continues his business with the fire. The pupil has understood in a flash.
What a silly story, we say! Or do we too see in a flash the meaning of these symbolic tales?
* * *
But if we come to study the life of the Maharshi, which is almost to live with him in his ashram, we observe the whole process in operation. There, too, there are people who complain that they receive no instruction - although the Maharshi answered more questions in plain dualistic language than any Zen master ever seems to have done. But we also perceive that the disciples are receiving instruction during twenty-four hours of each day, and we come to understand that this instruction is more real and immeasurably more potent than any discursive, and so necessarily false, teaching could ever be. Thus we also have understood.
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