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Where you miss Him is where you will find Him || On Mundaka Upanishad (2021)
Author Acharya Prashant
Acharya Prashant
34 min
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मनोमयः प्राणशरीरनेता प्रतिष्ठितोऽन्ने हृदयं सन्निधाय । तद्विज्ञानेन परिपश्यन्ति धीरा आनन्दरूपममृतं यद् विभाति ॥

manomayaḥ prāṇaśarīranetā pratiṣṭhito'nne hṛdayaṃ sannidhāya tadvijñānena paripaśyanti dhīrā ānandarūpamamṛtaṃ yad vibhāti

The mental being, leader of the life and the body, has set the heart in matter, in matter He has taken His firm foundation. By its knowing the wise see everywhere around them That which shines in its effulgence, a shape of bliss and immortal.

~ Verse 2.2.8

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Acharya Prashant: “The mental being,” manomaya , “leader of life and body,” prāṇaśarīranetā , “has set the heart in matter,” pratiṣṭhito'nne hṛdayaṃ sannidhāya , “in matter He has taken His firm foundation.”

To the living being, the jīva , the disciple, the one to whom all the revelations are addressed, the Supreme Being makes Himself felt as the mind.

It is your mind that craves for the Truth; it is your mind that desperately wants to avoid the Truth.

It is your mind that embraces the false; it is your mind that drops the false.

It is your mind that leads the body and the entire life in various directions, some leading directly to the Truth, and some leading very, very indirectly to the Truth.

The mind is both: that which separates us from who we really are, and that which drives us towards our reality. In the mind is the prāṇaśarīranetā . As is the disposition of the mind, so is the direction of life. The mind can be disposed towards or away from the Truth.

“He has set the heart in matter.”

Now, this is very, very interesting. The verse opens with manomaya , and all that the mind can directly perceive or experience is the matter, and the sage says here that He has set the heart in matter.

The mind perceives the matter, sometimes thinking that the matter is all that there is, and the mind sometimes abhors the matter, thinking that the matter is a barrier to the Truth. But here, something very interesting is being said: the heart has been set in matter itself. Which means that the mind has no need for and will find no utility in running away from the matter, because it is the mind’s prakriti (nature) to dwell in matter, to deal in matter.

As they say, you play the cards you are dealt. The moment you took the bodily form, the world was the card you were dealt; you will have to play that card. Once you have your cards in your hand, can you complain? Now, what do you do? “But why am I 5 feet 4? Why are all my cards so bad? What kind of distribution is this? He has all the kings and queens and aces, I do not even have a joker!”

But then, you play the card you were dealt; that’s it. This is all that you have. You need not run away from what you have because it is in matter that the heart—what does the heart stand for? Truth. It is in the matter that the Truth has been set. It is in the cards you have been dealt that your victory has been set.

Now, no point cribbing. Hone your skills, learn to play the game, and rest assured that the possibility of victory is always there irrespective of how bad you find your cards. And the possibility of defeat is always there irrespective of how lucky you are with your cards.

And stuff cannot change. Stuff need not change, because the heart has been set in matter itself. And why has the heart been set in matter itself? Because the mind is your primary identity, and all that the mind can deal in is the matter. So, mind is looking for Truth, mind experiences matter, and that’s not a bad deal at all because in the matter you can discover Truth. You have the light, you have the possibility. Do you have the resolution? Do you have the will? Do you have the patience? Do you have the love that enables patience?

“In matter He has taken His firm foundation.”

The Rishi reinforces, further clarifies. Where do you find Him? You can only find Him in places that are accessible to you, right? Are the other worlds accessible to you? But if you convince yourself of the belief that He is not to be found here, then you start convincing yourself that there do exist other worlds where He is to be found. And what do you do then? You start neglecting, disrespecting life in this world. Because what have you told yourself? That this world is just mithya , illusion; you are here to prepare for some other world, you are here to prepare for reincarnation, a rebirth or something. And obviously, if you are using the world as a waiting room, then you won’t commit yourself to any meaningful action here.

The Upanishad is making it very, very clear. He has set Himself in the world itself. He has taken foundation in matter itself.

So, no need to tell yourself that your real home is elsewhere; no need to tell yourself that only after freedom the real life or the real world will open up to you. Bondage or freedom, life is here. You decide whether it is going to be free or fettered. No scope of redeeming yourself anywhere else, anytime else; this is the only time, and it is slipping away fast—very, very fast.

Unfortunately, when you realize that time is slipping away fast, time has already slipped away fast. Most people will realize only when they are very sick that time is short, or when they are old. But if you realize it then, you have already lost the game, haven’t you? And when you do not realize that time is slipping away, that’s usually when you do have time: when you are young, when you are healthy, when you still have the chance to make good of life.

This is the place, this is the chance, this is the time. It’s in everyday affairs of life that you have to allow the Truth to strike you, pierce you. You have to allow the Truth to talk you at the most unexpected places.

But if you again convince yourself that the territory of Truth is only some special or holy place, then you will not be receptive to reality when it strikes you at the unlikeliest of places—a railway crossing, a shopping mall, a grocery mart, a police station. You will say, “But this is just a grocers shop! What kind of revelation can I expect here?” That’s exactly the place where stuff will be revealed to you, and if you do not get it there, there is nowhere you can get it.

If you suspend life telling yourself that, “No, this is just an ordinary place, this is a very, very worldly place, this is a shallow place, this is no spiritual place, so let me just shut down my spiritual faculty here,” then you will learn nothing. But that’s how we have been raised in the spiritual subject. “Spirituality belongs to temples; spirituality belongs to places where there is austerity, piety, piousness, chanting of mantras. That’s where I have to turn spiritual; that’s where I have to start having spiritual thoughts.” Standing at a railway crossing, it doesn’t cross you to be spiritual.

But the sage is telling us that the Truth has set itself in matter. The Truth is available only in the world, only in material affairs. Equally, nothing obfuscates the Truth, hides the Truth more than material affairs. Now, this is… (chuckles) Somebody is having fun, somebody is teasing us. It is to be found only in the material and nothing hides the Truth more than the material.

Now, it depends on you. This is where He is. Find Him or miss Him—it depends on you.

Fun loving is He, playing hide and seek. He hides, you seek. And if you can’t seek properly, He assists. And He doesn’t make himself available too soon, else the game will stop. Please tell me, when you play hide and seek, do you hide at an expected place? You must be a very lousy player then.

When He hides, is He really going to hide in a temple? That’s anyway the place where millions are decidedly going expecting to find Him. You really think He is such a mindless player? Krishna is going to hide himself in the statue of Krishna? He won’t. He is playing hide and seek. When you play the game, you hide yourself in the unlikeliest of places; the most unexpected place is where you hide yourself.

And that’s why most of us lose the game very badly: because we have already ascertained that He is to be found in holy books, holy places, all the nice stuff, you know. You won’t get Him there. And if you get Him there, then He is probably not worth getting; then you get Him and teach Him how to hide Himself better!

That’s how we are, you know. We have pre-set ideas even about divinity. We instruct divinity how to be divine; we tell the hiding one where to hide. What’s more, we expect Him to follow our instructions. We take stone to carve a statue out of it, and no, the divine is still not expected to hide in it; one fine day you will say, “I am consecrating it,” and now the divine is not only allowed but actually ordered to sit in it! “I have done everything. Now, you come and sit here!” And then you say, “Hide and seek, hide and seek. Let me seek you. I am a seeker!” What kind of a seeker are you?

To seek means to admit that you do not know. Else, what are you seeking? If you already know where He is hiding, what is left to seek then?

Not only is He hiding there, you have actually taken Him by the collar and made Him hide there. And then you say, “Oh, I do not know where He is! Oh my God, why are you hiding yourself like this? Where are you, where are you? Oh, are you there?” And then you play innocent: “Maybe He is there! Let me go and offer all kinds of sacrifices and prayers, and then maybe He will reveal himself.”

What? Have you rigged the game here as well? Already decided!

“You hide in the statue, you hide in the holy book, you hide in the holy river, you hide in that particular city, and I will come. And when I come, I will do all these things for 4.5 hours, and after 4.5 hours, your job is to show up. That’s how we will play.” And He says, “Okay, got it.” Silly of us, not Him. Because He doesn’t really play such a game.

Let this enter you very, very deeply. You will not find Him where you expect to find Him because your expectations are of the one who has not yet found. Who is the expectant one? The one who has not yet found.

So, the one who has not yet found is deciding where to find Him. How much substance is there in the decision? If someone who has found says the Truth is to be found at place X, then we can trust him. But here you are, and admittedly you have not found, and still you say He is to be found at place Y. You have not found, and still you are expecting something from your center that has not yet found. Should we trust your expectation?

But you trust your expectation blindly. You say, “I haven’t found Him, but I know the way.” The way that you know boomerangs back only to the same place it came from: the ego. Start from the ego and find that you get nothing but the ego.

Stuff that you do in an unholy way is the stuff holiness hides itself in. If you can remember this, your life will change. Everything, every moment that you have spent in an unholy way was exactly the opportunity where something crucial might have been revealed to you. But you missed it because you were not expecting it there and then.

That’s the mark of the really spiritual man: to go meditative at places, in times where meditativeness seems very unlikely or unprofitable or undue. And that is the reason why the really spiritual one needs no special occasion or place to be meditative: he is anyway meditative at places that are considered odd for meditation. He will not excuse himself from the world for a while to meditate, to read, to be composed, to contemplate. He will meditate and contemplate right in the middle of worldly activity.

In the middle of a conversation dealing with money, he will forget when the money matter has transformed itself into a love song. Maybe some ordinary fellow to whom he was talking would feel surprised. He will say, “But this was a business meeting, we were discussing investment. How is it that you have turned to another language, another dimension?” “That’s the way it is. The two are not different for me; they are intertwined, inseparable.”

The entire world is the temple—or has He reserved only the corner room for Himself? Some landlords do that. There will be a huge complex consisting of some 48 rooms, and the landlord fellow would block one corner room for himself and say the rest has been leased out.

So, if you have to find the landlord, you have to go to that particular room, room number 48. The one in question here is not that kind of a silly landlord. He is the rooms, all 48 of them. I didn’t say He is in the rooms—He is the rooms, all 48 of them. It is very disrespectful of us to accord 47 of them to ourselves and assume that He sits only in the 48th one.

You got the mantra, right? He is where you are expecting Him the least. Learn to shock yourself. When you are expecting Him the least, tell yourself: He is right here—right here for you , not in an absolute sense. This is the place where you are missing Him; therefore, this is the place where you will find him. He is here for you. And He is there in the unlikeliest of situations and the unlikeliest of faces.

Think of the most material face you encountered today, the face farthest from the Truth. Think. Oh, you missed Him, He was right there. Not in the sense that He has especially chosen that particular face; he was there for you . Why? Because you were the one who was missing Him in that particular face. Otherwise, He is everywhere, all 48 rooms. But you were missing him in room number 36. Room number 36, you thought, you know, “Laundry room? Is He to be found in soiled stuff?” Yes, He is to be found even in the most soiled of faces and minds.

Think of the most soiled mind you encountered today. Oh, you missed Him, He was there. He was there even in the cleanest of minds you encountered today, no doubt, He is there in all 48 rooms; but in the clean one you are not missing Him, you were already expecting Him.

And He has this habit, this nature to defy expectations. He is called aprameya (immeasurable, unbounded); He is called akalpa (uncontrollable); He is called achintya (inconceivable, incomprehensible), which means you cannot capture Him or predict Him.

You cannot outsmart Him. If He comes to know that you expect Him at such particular place, at such particular hour, rest assured, that is the place and hour He won’t be found. Not that He won’t be there; He won’t be found. He would be there, but in a way that would belie your expectations.

Equally, when you are looking at a very ignorant face doing the most carnal of activity, He is laughing from behind the face, teasing you. “Come on, get me! Show me what you got! I am here. I made a fool of you once again!” He loves you. And isn’t it cool to wear a fancy dress and a fancy mask in front of your loved one and enjoy how he fails to recognize you? Isn’t it fun?

You sit on the bed with your back to the door, and your beloved comes in and pounces on you—he is in the mood—and then you turn around and show your face, and on your face is a scary mask. And the one who was so excited and aroused till as second back gives up a holy shriek, gets a shock, and falls down from the bed, and you laugh and clap. It’s good fun, no? That’s how He plays with you. “I made a fool of you once again!”

He is nearest when He appears the farthest. In that moment, if you can hold yourself a little, if you can pull yourself back, if you can switch your center and pay attention, it would raise your consciousness just greatly in no time.

The greatest revelations will come to you when you are not expecting them. And when you are struggling, trying hard with thought, and you have sat down specially to contemplate, it is unlikely that you will come upon anything worthwhile. You may get some conclusions, but they will be of little value. But sitting in a railway coach, just thoughtlessly looking out of the window, you may suddenly have a flash of realization that would have been otherwise difficult to get.

If you can stay composed even in the middle of a heated argument, you may find that you have just learned a lot in a split second; that much learning would have otherwise probably taken years. But an argument is not the occasion when you expect a revelation, so that is where the revelation will come more strongly and the most easily to you—provided you can stop, provided you are not held hostage by your expectation that, “This is not the time to be spiritual; this is the time to be worldly, this is the time to be smart.” Drop that compartmentalization.

Heed the Rishi’s advice. He has founded Himself, set Himself strongly in matter. That’s what the verse is asserting. It is in your matters that He is hiding.

And what is meant by ‘He’? Are we talking of an image? Are we talking of a person? Are we talking of a concept here? We are just talking of realization, bodha . Truth is realization. And that is the reason I keep asserting that the ones from whom these lines, these verses came to us, were people who lived no ordinary life. The depth in these revelations is actually just the depth in their lives.

But there, again, we have created imaginary, fancy, juvenile stories; we have a ready-made character sketch of the rishi in mind. “The rishi looks this way, the rishi lives this way, the rishi eats this way, the rishi speaks this way.” The proof is: you look at popular media—for example, audio-visual media, films, TV, web—or take up popular literature, stories, novels, and you will always find the rishi stereotyped in a particular way.

The rishi is being depicted in movie X and in movie Y. How is it possible that both the depictions have so much in common? The rishi is being talked of in story X and novel Y. How is it so that both the descriptions tally with each other? It obviously means that we have a stereotyped, cast-in-stone kind of image.

And if we have an image, then logically we should have just followed the image and obtained what the rishi did. If you know exactly how the rishi lives, how he thinks, how he feels, how he speaks, then what prevents you from becoming a rishi? Go and become a rishi if you know so much! Then we should have had millions of rishis by now, and billions of Upanishads. But you see, that’s the way we live and behave, as if we know everything about sages and saints, don’t we?

People ask me, “You don’t look as peaceful as the sages.” How many sages have you seen? How many of them have you met? All you have is stories and movies.

But look at your confidence, your arrogance: you have convinced yourself that you know exactly what a rishi should be like, and you know exactly that all the rishis followed a set template. Even the length of the beard is within a certain range: minimum X inches, maximum Y inches. You know all that. Maybe you know, but then, my question is: if you know so much, then why are you not a rishi? Just follow your image, just duplicate, and you will have a rishi at hand. That doesn’t seem to happen, which means your images are all bogus.

It also means that your images are just being used by charlatans of all kinds. You say, “This is the way a rishi should be,” and everybody knows that this is the popular image. So, if somebody wants to make an ass of you, it is very easy. What does he have to do? He simply has to copy the image. The beard should be minimum 8 inches, maximum 12 inches long, so he sets his beard exactly at 10 inches. He should speak in this way, he should sit in this way—he does all those things. The moment he does all those things, you say, “Oh, a sage has arrived, a sage has arrived!”

I repeat, be it the rishi or your daily life, you are missing Him right when he is in front of you.

Five years back when we had the first Myth Demolition Tour in Rishikesh, it was to the audiences from the West that I said, “You are not missing the secret, you are missing the obvious.” You think you are missing Him because He is hiding in some inaccessible cave in the Himalayas. No, you are missing Him because He is there right in front of you, in the most unlikely of faces and clothes. Or He might just be a little behind you, or to the left of you, or to your right. If you expect Him to be at your left, He is probably at your right. That doesn’t mean that you expect Him to be at your left and stretch one hand to the right and say, “Gotcha!” He will then be neither to the left nor to the right.

The trick, then, is to not expect anything. Conversely, the trick is to keep expecting Him anywhere and everywhere at all times. This is what I call continuous remembrance. This is what I call uninterrupted 24-hour meditation—because you never know where He is. You actually know where He is. Where is He? Where you do not think He is. So, you cannot let the guard down at any time; you cannot close your eyes even for a second, because if you close your eyes, that’s the moment you miss Him.

The mind loves Him so much that it starts weaving stories. That’s often what silly lovers do, no? When you are in love, it becomes difficult to leave things open-ended. You want a surety, a certainty, and therefore you weave expectations.

Suppose your beloved has just gone away; would it be comfortable for you to tell yourself that you just do not know when he might return? It becomes uncomfortable, no? So, what do you do then? You weave a story. You say, “He has probably gone away for this purpose, so I think he will be back in four days, or he might take only two days.” Some kind of wild estimate you will come up with. Why? Because uncertainty is too much to bear.

And that’s why the ego starts expecting where to find the Truth: the ego loves the Truth so much.

But the story does not stop there. When you say, “He will probably come after four days,” it allows you to fall asleep because He is not to return before four days. You fall asleep, and the AC has been switched on and the TV is blaring away. Quite a lot of noise, as is there in our lives—and then you can’t hear the doorbell. He is already here, but you think He will be here the fourth day.

And it is such a pleasant thought, a reassuring thought, no? “He has not gone away! He will be back the fourth day.” It reassures you so much that you comfortably fall asleep, even forgetting to turn the TV off, and then you can’t hear the doorbell. You missed once again.

Mind you, you never expect that He is already here. No lover has ever expected that, right? Somebody has gone away; have we ever expected that he has actually not gone away at all and he is here? Do you ever expect that? Even in your deepest love, the best you expect is that he will be back soon. You do not expect that He is already back because He never went away. Do you ever expect that?

Even if your love is severely strong, what do you expect? That he will be back in two days or in two hours, and that is enough to console you. You say, “He will be back in two hours.” The fact is, He never went away; He is already at the door. But you say, “Two hours!” and fall asleep. What is meant by falling asleep? Falling inattentive. Or you think, “Two hours!” and that peps you up so much that you pick up the phone and start talking to some silly friend of yours. “Now I am happy. He is coming back in two hours, I have two hours of spare time. What do I do? Let me chat away the interim.” And now you are busy in your stupid conversation, and you missed.

Even to think you are getting Him soon is to ensure that you are not getting Him at all. Even to think that you have already received Him is to miss receiving Him. The only way that works is the way of a high consciousness that is so much in love and so much in suffering that it just cannot forget to be attentive.

There is an attention that you have to remember of, it is usually activity-based. You say, “At 5 in the morning, I am going to be attentive; I will do dhyāna .” And then there is a suffering within that you just cannot forget; it just sucks in your attention like an aching tooth. Try forgetting it. Can you?

You must have an aching heart. ‘Heart’ is a technical word in Vedanta, so I will say an aching mind. Just as an aching tooth won’t allow you to forget pain, similarly you should have a mind aching in love; it will not allow you to lose attention. Come what may, irrespective of what you are doing, you would always be experiencing the suffering. No pleasure, no consumption of any kind, no goodies that the world can offer, would succeed in elevating your pain.

You are speaking in pain. Even as you are speaking, the pain is there, and you are experiencing it even more deeply than the point your speech is coming from. Speech is superficial, pain is deeper.

You are running; irrespective of how fast or slow you run, you are not able to forget the ache. Bodily action is superficial, the pain is deep. You are doing all kinds of worldly activities, but no activity is powerful enough to kill your pain.

This is continuous attention. That’s the kind of pain you must have, and that kind of pain is gifted only to those who live in the higher echelons of life. It is not for those who choose basements to dwell in. This pain is a gift; not everybody will get it.

People indulge in worldly activities to forget their pains. The really spiritual man is very different: he indulges in worldly activities from the pain. It is the pain that drives him; the pain is his master. The worldly man does not allow the pain to drive him because he has first of all not chosen the high life that can give him a deep pain; all that he has are little discomforts. And if all that you have are little discomforts, then they can be drowned in pegs of vodka or pools of shopped stuff; the thing is so little, you can just drown it, and then you can forget the pain.

Work hard to get a life in which the pain becomes unforgettable; then you will be left with no hope to beat the pain; then you rather allow the pain to master you, control you, and then all your worldly activities will continue driven by the pain. That’s when your relationship with the world is perfect. Now you are not dealing with the world to gain pleasure; now you are dealing with the world out of your deep pain. It’s difficult to understand. These are the Upanishads, please; not some shallow stuff.

No hope is left—we do not even want any hope. You are in love, and that’s driving your relationship with the world, and that’s the perfect relationship. Now you do not do what you want to do; now what gets done by you is stuff that is needed to be done. Pleasure has failed, so what do you live for now? Pleasure didn’t suffice, what do you live for now?

The insane ones who have known have said: beyond all the pleasures you have known, the deepest pleasure is in the deepest pain.

There comes a point where all the lines that we have drawn, all the divisions we have created, just go hazy. Your state becomes difficult to describe. Are you in pain? Yes. Are you in sorrow? No. Are you happy? No. Then why is there something inside that feels like bursting open to give itself to the world, to distribute everything that it has?

To the mind that lives in ordinary duality, it would be very difficult to comprehend how deep pain is deep pleasure. In general, as the severity of pain increases, its distance from pleasure keeps increasing. But there does indeed come a point when the pain attains such depth that it meets pleasure. It is as if that depth has a point where pain dissolves into pleasure and neither of them remain.

“By its knowing the wise see everywhere around them That which shines in its effulgence, a shape of bliss and immortal.”

Not that we do not see; we too see, we too seek. Just that we do not see and seek everywhere. And what’s that about the wise? To the wise, shadow is a clear proof of light. They look at a shining object, and they say, “Light”; and then they look at shadow, and they say, “Light.” The worldly man, he looks at shadows and he says, “Absence of light, not here”; then he looks at an unholy object—even if it’s shining—and he will say, “No, not here”; then he will look at another shining object and say, “No, not here either.” And he is missing and missing and missing.

The wise one says, “Irrespective of the type of object, the quality of object, light is light. If I can see the object, there is light. If I can understand even nonsense to its core, holiness has revealed itself, has it not?”

It is not that the subject has to be discreet about the object he seeks to understand. The object might be holy, unholy, type A, type B; understanding is irrespective of the object. You look at this stuff, you look at that stuff; you might decide to go for this stuff and proceed towards it, or you might decide to discard that stuff. But whether you chose something or rejected something, you understood before the choice or rejection, no? That understanding is revelation, and the opportunity for that understanding is there irrespective of the type and quality of the object.

So, never complain, “Oh, right now I do not have right quality of objects around me, so there is no point of any discovery here, there is no hope of any revelation here.” Sir, it doesn’t matter who the people around you are. Can’t you understand what is going on? It doesn’t matter what kind of nonsense you are embroiled in. Can’t you understand what is going on? And if you can understand, then you have made good of the occasion; this was the opportunity.

Light can fall on the face of the most attractive person in the world, and you then sense that face, and light can fall on the rotting body of a dead rat, and then you sense the rat. It is probably difficult for you to equate a beautiful face with a rotting rat; I am not pushing you to do that. All I am saying is: concentrate on the light. The objects will be varying; see what it is that enables you to know the object. And if you have to see that, then you will have to turn to yourself because you have to figure out what enables you to know the objects.

Irrespective of the object in front of you, try to understand. See how difficult it becomes to understand objects of a certain type and quality. That difficulty is because of our expectations. So, to understand the object, you will have to understand what blocks you from understanding that object; else, understanding is easy, sahaja (natural). But there is something within that blocks it.

So, to know that object, you will have to first of all clear the blockage within. That’s called self-realization. Nothing else is self-realization.

There is no Ātman within to be known; there are only blockages here, blockages that prevent you from understanding the world, and it is in the world that the Truth resides. Clear the blockages within, and these two eyes will look at the Truth, these two ears will hear the Truth. You won’t need a third eye or a third ear. The nose will smell the Truth; fragrance would be everywhere. Clear the blockages.

Irrespective of the situation you are in, ask yourself: What is it that is preventing you from knowing? What is it that is preventing you from understanding what is going on? The moment you ask this question, you will be forced to look at your biases, patterns, thoughts, expectations, and the rest of it.

Don’t get distracted. Let there be depth in your love. Miss Him very, very deeply. Let the pain be so much that you cannot forget Him. Let there be such depth in the pain that no entertainment, no pleasure succeeds in overcoming it and distracting you. Be alert, be attentive.

All attention is actually born out of suffering. If suffering is not there, then what is left is pure realization. Attention is needed because there is suffering within. So, if you don’t have that suffering, attention will be impossible, and nothing but love can give you that suffering.

So, if you really want deep attention, that will have to be powered by deep love. And when I say deep love, I mean unbearable separation. Love that has resulted in union is no more love; it is just pure union. In union, there is no love left. Love implies separation, and separation implies unbearable pain. So, there has to be that pain echoing within at all times—eating, sitting, walking.

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