Easwaran on Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ: Talk 42

Posted on January 23, 2012  | Add Comment

This is the 42nd in a long series of talks Eknath Easwaran gave on The Imi­ta­tion of Christ by Thomas a Kem­pis. In this talk Easwaran reads and dis­cusses book 3, chap­ter 10, “That to Despise the World and Serve God is a Sweet Life.”

Here is an excerpt from the begin­ning of the talk:

“Some of the words that we come across in Thomas a Kem­pis do not exactly mean what they mean in a mod­ern short story. The word ‘despise’ for exam­ple: despis­ing the world means not being self­ishly attached to the things of the world, not going after what promises to bring us ulti­mate sat­is­fac­tion, and usu­ally brings us more and more frustration.

“In order to lead the spir­i­tual life, we are told that any kind of self­ish attach­ment, whether it is to money or mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions or to peo­ple, will bring higher and higher obsta­cles in the way of our liv­ing in abid­ing joy and unas­sail­able secu­rity. This is not some­thing we read about in books. This is some­thing that we expe­ri­ence in every­day life. If you want to ver­ify the words of Jesus the Christ, or the Com­pas­sion­ate Bud­dha, we can ask any­body who is often in great tur­moil, per­haps even in great dis­tress, how much of his time or her time is spent on brood­ing on him­self or herself.

“On the con­trary, if you come across any­one who is an unas­sail­able state of joy and secu­rity, you can con­clude and ver­ify it by observ­ing him or her that they hardly think about them­selves. Despis­ing the world in this sense means turn­ing our back upon what dri­ves us to pur­sue money, mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions, plea­sure, power, or pres­tige in the belief that they will bring last­ing joy to all of us. What brings last­ing joy to every­one is right within ourselves.

“My spir­i­tual teacher, my grand­mother, used to nar­rate a very homely story of a young woman get­ting mar­ried. On the occa­sion of the Hindu mar­riage in many parts of India, they tie what is called a man­gala sutra around the neck of the bride. This is usu­ally of black thread, and nowa­days, the black thread is encased in gold, but I still think right inside there is the black thread. Sutra means thread, man­gala means ‘of joy.’ In mar­riage, what brings joy is remem­ber­ing the joy of the part­ner first and last. This is the man­gala sutra that sym­bol­izes our find­ing our com­plete joy in con­tribut­ing to the joy of our partner.

“My grand­mother would tell a story that a young girl who had been mar­ried sud­denly lost her man­gala sutra and got com­pletely pan­icky. She went search­ing all over the place, pulling out every drawer that she could find, and when she was almost on the point of break­ing down, her mother said, ‘What’s the mat­ter, why are you so panic stricken?’ The girl said, ‘I have lost my man­gala sutra.’ The mother said, ‘Just look around your neck.’ She went and looked in the mir­ror, there it was. And she said, ‘I have been look­ing for it all over the place.’ Just as you and I — we are look­ing for our man­gala sutra — look­ing to our safe deposits, you know. When you go into a bank, the cer­e­mony of going into a safe deposit is really impres­sive. Those doors, which even ele­phants can’t tackle, and you must have two keys, one in your pos­ses­sion, the other in the pos­ses­sion of the keeper of the seal.

“It’s a big cer­e­mony because this is where peo­ple keep their valu­able deposits, and in our case the vault is right within, bur­glar proof, moth proof, rust proof, depre­ci­a­tion proof. I some­times see an adver­tise­ment about, ‘Don’t you want to join the biggest bank?’ We have. We are already mem­bers, the bank of the King­dom of Heaven within where there is abid­ing joy and unas­sail­able secu­rity ready for all of us who are pre­pared to take the trou­ble of just going in, putting our elbow on the counter and say­ing, ‘Can I see my account?’ This is all we have to ask, but we are so busy, wan­der­ing out­side, that none of us ever try to remem­ber that the source of all joy and the source of all secu­rity is within us, under every circumstance.”

For pre­vi­ous talks, see Easwaran on Thomas a Kem­pis, under Categories.

Note that all of the talks in this series are avail­able for down­load from our store. The series is described on this page.

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