After years away at school, Shvetaketu returned home to his father, Uddalaka.
Uddalaka could tell from Shvetaketu’s boasting about how much he’d learned that he hadn’t learned anything at all. Or at least nothing really worth knowing.
“Did your teacher teach you how to hear that which can’t be heard or know what can’t be known?” Uddalaka asked. “Oh-oh. That wasn’t in the curriculum.” “Go outside and get me a fruit from the banyan tree.”
Shvetaketu ran outside for the fruit. “Now cut it in half,” his father instructed. “What do you see?” “I see the seeds, Dad.”
“Cut one of those in half.” This wasn’t very easy, banyan seeds are extremely small. Finally Shvetaketu managed to slice one evenly. “What do you see?” Uddalaka asked.
The boy was baffled. “What do you mean dad? There is nothing there.”
Uddalaka looked his son in the eye, “From that ‘nothing’ an enormous tree arises. When you understand what ‘nothing’ is, you will understand yourself. The nothing you can’t see is the very essence of the reality of the tree. The unperceivable essence of being is also what you are. You are that, Shvetaketu.”
“Pour some salt into this bucket of water,” Uddalaka continued. Shvetaketu obeyed. “Now give me the salt back.” “I cant do that!” Shvetaketu objected. “It is gone!”
“Take a sip of the water. You taste the salt, don’t you? You couldn’t see it, yet it was there all along. Just as the salt pervades the water, so the subtle essence of reality pervades your body. That subtle essence is true being. You are that, Shvetaketu.”
Source [Slightly adapted]
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
“The unperceivable essence of being” and “the subtle essence of reality” may not be seen and therefore, are ignored but they are the elements that are at the centre of all God’s creation. Little attention is paid to this type of education because we are a task-oriented society and education tends to be equated to learning skills to earn a living rather than learning life-giving skills.
The irony there is, we better prepare our children to earn their living if we include the aspects of education the task-oriented people think are a waste of time – recess, music, art, humanities, and all things related to the purpose of living. The research is solid on this, but (again, ironically) those hard-nosed realists aren’t very interested in reality. I guess it’s similar to praying loudly in the street; it’s more about how you look than what you are.
Jim,
I’ve been reading a book recently about how we’re turning real education into job skill preparation and that we are losing massively as a result.
Paul
Lynda,
Too right. We are a task-oriented society and, while this has many benefits, it obviously has major down-sides.
Paul
I love this one on lots of levels. It is relevant to a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the misplaced idea that the Boson Higgs particle is definitively
equated with God, when in reality it is just another small particle in a much longer story. That does not take away from the wonder of science, nor the hard work of scientists and their excitement at finding it after 45 years of searching for it.
On a different level, a friend commented recently on spiritual health check lists being distributed at her church- nothing wrong with that per se, but as Lynda says as this story beautifully demonstrates, task oriented spirituality is still an exercise in slicing a banyan seed.
Blessings
Phil,
This whole Higgs Boson thing has done a number on my mind. It amazes me how we as a culture can focus on the wrong aspect of things to the extent that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Ah, well.
Paul
There is always something…
• to be thankful for
• to discover
• going on
• to learn
• to hope for
• to do
• to talk about
• good around the corner
We just need to open our eyes.
Have a great weekend everyone, go find something…
Tim,
Just lovely. Thank you.
Paul
At my book club last night, we talked about “nothingness”: practicing it, recognizing it, valuing it. We had read an excerpt from Thomas Moore’s lovely little book Meditations on the Monk who Dwells in Daily Life: “Just as a loaf of bread needs air in order to rise, everything we do needs an empty place in its interior.”
Our tag line for the night (courtesy of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon panel): “There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”
May everyone have the time to do a bit of nothing this weekend, and the grace to experience God within it.
Michelle,
Love, love, love the Calvin & Hobbes line and it is already in the “Words of Wisdom.” Hope you don’t mind.
Paul
Mikey likes it. Steven Colbert had a scientist on the show who wrote a book saying there is no God because science now proves that the universe came from nothing, and Steven asked him who made nothing. We are all no-thing. Excellent wisdom story!
Mike, I enjoyed that Colbert piece, that was such a great line! Next week I’m giving a talk followed by a Q&A at the Franklin Institute on God, science and all that jazz and will be that questions about the Higgs boson will be on the table – maybe I should watch it again to get psyched up?!
I also find it curious that anyone could say science has proven the universe came from nothing. I haven’t taken a physics course in a while, but I was under the impression that science couldn’t say much about what happened before the universe was about 10^-37 seconds old. The little I’ve heard about string theory also says the universe may have come from something, but not the kind of something we can detect, at least at this time.
Apart from all that, (1) no one ever said God couldn’t have made the universe from nothing (quite the contrary), and (2) to my mind, there is an important difference between “no god was involved in creating the universe” and “there is no god.”
Mike,
Sorry I missed the scientist’s appearance on Colbert. It would have been a lot of fun to watch. Was it Colbert who characterized atheists as being a religion of smug self-satisfaction?
Paul
I am tempted (maybe like other PFOers?) not to comment today and to think about this one in silence. Afetr all, the story reminds us that the ones who talk the most about how smart/wise they are are rarely the ones who know anything worth knowing. But everyone else has such great resposes today to this great story — and really, I’m not good at resisting temptation — I thought I’d throw in my 2 cents and see what happens.
In the phrases “the unperceivable essence of being is also what you are,” and “the subtle essence of reality pervades your body, ” I hear beautiful, poetic echoes of one of my favorite lines from scripture: “In Him we live and move and have our being.” They’re all reminders that even in those moments of self-delusion when we think we want God to go away and leave us alone, we are still not only surounded by his presence and his love, but filled with it.
Have a nice weekend everyone.
Denise,
As you say, “the ones who talk the most about how smart/wise they are are rarely the ones who know anything worth knowing.” Does that mean I should just shut up? Probably! Will I? Not for the present, I’m afraid.
Paul
“Does that mean I should just shut up?” No!
“Will I? Not for the present, I’m afraid.” Good.
The subtle essence of reality. I think I will take these words with me in the garden and sit in the shade of a tree with them for a while.
Thank you.
Claire,
What a lovely thought – sitting in a shaded garden. Even thinking about it is refreshing to the soul.
Paul