Ima­gine your­self set­ting out on a pleas­ant jour­ney by boat. Splen­did is the dance of the boat obed­i­ent to the waves, and it is an exper­i­ence to lose the firm ground from under your feet, the bet­ter to enjoy the rock­ing. As though you had crossed into anoth­er medi­um – solid dry land until now, and now a yield­ing one. Seen from the water, the river looks quite dif­fer­ent, and so do its shore and the coun­try around it, as though the dimen­sions were chan­ging. Or is it you who are chan­ging?

For a long while you feel the boat mov­ing with the cur­rent of the river, and you see one new land­scape after anoth­er. Then sud­denly the pic­ture shat­ters, yet instead of con­fu­sion, the vis­tas rearrange them­selves. Or is it you who are chan­ging? A psy­che­del­ic exper­i­ence without any chem­ic­al help? Is it the water that makes the river, or its bed? Without water the bed is plainly dry, and without a bed the river's water does not flow; it is stand­ing water, not a river. All at once the boat stops, and the shore begins to move. Could it be that the boat stood in one place all along, and only the stage scenery of the land­scape ran past you? Like a merry-go-round pulled straight: there is no telling what stands still and what moves…

Rumi, a teach­er of great learn­ing, was read­ing aloud from his volu­min­ous manus­cripts to those around him, and teach­ing them. All at once a stranger appeared, an ascet­ic of unusu­al aspect, who showed a respect­ful interest in the teach­er and, point­ing to the book, asked:

– What is this?

Rumi, smil­ing indul­gently at the ignor­ance writ­ten all over the stranger, said only:

– Some­thing you do not under­stand…

At this the ascet­ic snatched the manus­cript pages from his hands and, to the utter con­sterna­tion of all, flung them into the well. The dis­ciples leapt to save what could be saved, while the mas­ter only stood there, stricken and stunned. With great dif­fi­culty they retrieved the pages one by one from the depths of the well, but with ever-grow­ing amazement they saw that the pages were unharmed, that they had come out of the water dry. Stunned, Rumi asked:

– What is this?

To which the ascet­ic replied only:

– Some­thing you do not under­stand…

You may think that at some point in your life you will set out on a pil­grim­age, yet it may be that this, too, is true in reverse: some­where along an end­less pil­grim­age, you sud­denly begin your present life. The exper­i­en­cing is the same: you live, you are on pil­grim­age. But which came first, the way, the jour­ney or the trav­el­ler – that is exceed­ingly hard to decide. Yet best of all is when these meet at a single point of inter­sec­tion, just as you, too, met the boat, the river and the water.

Is it the boat that drifts, or the shore? Which stands still and which moves? Do you move through the world, or does the world move around you? Is everything around you chan­ging, or is it you who are chan­ging? Which is the more con­stant? It is not you who go into the water, but the water that takes you in, for you become wet, but the water does not become human.

You might think that spir­itu­al prac­tices, too, serve your per­son­al puri­fic­a­tion and sal­va­tion, and yet they are not good for you alone. The res­on­ance of the man­tra pur­i­fies one's con­scious­ness, and that is good, but the res­on­ance of the man­tra is also good for the man­tra itself, and for the spir­itu­al medi­um it embod­ies. Jung says that it is not people who have ideas, but ideas that have people. We are not neces­sar­ily the centre of the world, and it is not around us that the uni­verse revolves. Not only do we seek the pro­cess, but the pro­cess also seeks worthy prac­ti­tion­ers. And then the per­fect com­bin­a­tion comes about: pure teach­ing from a pure source – to a pure-souled prac­ti­tion­er. Over this medi­um, illu­sion has no power.