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54
THE ART OF POSITIVE THINKING
you; no doing as you please. No talking to one another! No wastage of time! If you adhere to strict obedience for five to seven years, you will feel free to do anything for the rest of your lives. Nobody will object to anything you do; nobody will stand in your way. But if you refuse complete surrender to theguru now, you will have no freedom and will always be dependent upon another. Only a good disciple will make a good guru; he who has not lived fully the life of a disciple, will never know the fulness of a quru's life.
So dependence is no unmitigated evil. Discipline is one aspect of social life; the other is dependence, that is obedience to another. Dependence need not always mean slavery; it is merely an acceptance of another's authority on the part of one whose faculties are yet undeveloped, with a view to fuller development of one's own capacity.
This is what happens everywhere. Thousands of students go to America or Germany for specialized studies. Students from those countries come here. The exchange of students goes on because some arts are more developed in a particular country, and students from all over the world repair there, which means they depend on another country for acquiring mastery in a particular field. Not all disciplines are fully developed in each country, nor all faculties in each man. To acquire what you don't possess, you have to go to another. In olden times, a tradition was prevalent among various religious orders. A student-monk belonging to one order would go to the head of his order and say, "Master! I'm interested in studying this subject, but there is none in our organisation who can teach it. With you kind permission, I should like to migrate to another religious order where a teacher of this particular discipline is available. On completing my studies, I shall come back to you." The guru would give permission and the monk, after relinquishing his own order, would go to enrol himself as a disciple of the other order, accepting their authority and discipline. After completing his studies, the monk would return to his former guru.
The third plank of social life is synthesis or harmony. One man living alone cannot come into clash with another. But wherever there live more than one, a conflict of interests is inevitable; there are bound to be differences of opinion and thought. With these differences, there can be no harmonious living. The husband insists that they must shift to another house; the wife wants to continue where she is; the conflict begins. Struggle, conflict and dissensions prevalent in society disrupt life altogether. It is in this context that a synthesis of different points-of-view becomes important. Indeed it becomes the one great principle of humanistic, many-sided approach. Find a coordinating factor between two opposites to
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