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Reflections
Home›Reflections›Destructive enlightenment

Destructive enlightenment

By Sutapa Monk
July 7, 2018
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When a budding sculptor approached his master for guidance, he received some cryptic advice. After quizzing him on his purpose, the young craftsman replied: “More than anything else, I would like to sculpt a beautiful elephant.” Without the blink of an eyelid, the master set a block of stone and some tools in front of the young boy. “Here is some marble, a mallet, and a chisel” the master said, “all you have to do now is carve away everything that does not look like a beautiful elephant!” Simple as that.

While crafting our ideal life, we can contemplate these words and discover some valuable insight. We often equate progress with gaining, growing, increasing and adding. We dream of evolving into something different. There is a whole realm of spiritual development, however, which is about shedding, cutting, letting go and downsizing. It was the French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who said,

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

On a practical level, we must chip away at those aspects of our life which don’t contribute to the final goal. Over time, such an incremental approach will mould a focused and distilled lifestyle. Bad habits, time wasting and procrastination impede the momentum, and many other things we do just don’t have any relevance in the bigger picture. As we let the nonsense crumble away, the load of our life becomes lighter and lighter, opening the doors to real liberation and freedom.

On a deeper spiritual level, we must find our real self. We often think spirituality means to become something. Maybe, however, the journey is not so much about becoming something, but rather unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place! The Sanskrit texts explain how we are littered with anarthas (“unhelpful qualities”) and upadhis (“artificial identities”). They block us from seeing the real self. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of such untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretence. It’s the complete annihilation of everything we imagined to be true. To remember who we really are, we have to forget everything that world told us to be. This is destructive enlightenment.

Tagsenlightenmentknowledgesciencespiritualwisdomyoga
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Sutapa Monk

Sutapa has studied ancient Sanskrit texts in depth for the past 15 years, particularly the Bhagavad-gita, and has a passion to share the insights and worldviews these texts offer. Himself from London suburbs, Sutapa was always attracted to the idea of ’simple living, high thinking’. In 2002, after graduating from UCL with a BSc in Information Management, he adopted full-time monastic life to further his knowledge, deepen his spirituality, and share these timeless principles with the wider society.

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2 comments

  1. gdd 30 March, 2018 at 07:13 Reply

    a cracker! i especially like the phrase about ‘unbecoming’

  2. Ajay 11 September, 2020 at 08:02 Reply

    Hare Krishna prabhu. PAMHO AGTSP

    Wonderful realisation! My first thought was this is like the concept of neti neti…chipping away at what’s not, until we get to what is.

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