April 27, 1987

When you can surpass six senses, six sense-objects, this does not mean that you lose all of your feelings, even so, your feelings will be sharper than before.

The important fact of a realized person is that he can know conscientiously the feelings but is not affected, tempted or attracted by them in quest of them. His nose smells the fragrance, but he is not attracted by the fragrance. His ears can discriminate good or bad sounds, but he is not influenced by the sounds. His tongue can taste delicious food, his eyes can discern fine clothes, and yet he does not live for good food and nice clothes. He also knows happiness and suffering, but happiness and suffering cannot make him forget his nature, nor the direction of the path that he is treading.

All of the human sense organs come from God's blessings; hence, we must know when and where to use them, and how to use them appropriately.

Religious practitioners do not mean to turn their sense organs insensitive; they should instead sharpen them for more sensitivity. Sharp sense organs can help us with better self-understanding, more scrupulous self-detecting, and more clever self-consciousness. With better-developed sense organs, we can understand ourselves better; also, understand others better, because the human mechanism is extremely delicate to be evaluated.

If our own human mechanism is not developed to the extreme point, we are unable to evaluate the mechanism of people around us.