Understanding of an Owl is totally different: the night is day for him and the day is night, and in the morning he settles for the night. Evening is his dawn.
And this much gap exists between the mystic and the non mystic. What is dawn for a mystic is a dark night for you, and what is a dark night for the mystic is all that your life consists of. Hence, the misunderstanding.
Mystic has always been misunderstood. They say something, we understand something totally different. Misunderstanding is so natural between a mystic and a non mystic that misunderstanding seems almost like a miracle. and when ever it happens that misunderstanding close between a mystic and a non mystic that understanding seems almost a miracle. And whenever it happens that understanding flows between a mystic and a non mystic, the non mystic is no more a non mystic, he is transformed by that very misunderstanding.
" Kindly let me help you or you will drown," said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree
Now, he is trying hard to be compassionate, trying to save the fish from drowning. He is bound to kill the fish - out of compassion. this has to be taken in very deeply, this will be the turning point.
Now, Kabir is a mystic, one of the greatest. What he is trying to say, in the first place, is much distorted the moment he says it, because he has known it in a state where words never penetrate, where silence is eternal. He has known it, experienced it, encountered it, but in a moment when he was not a mind.
Then he wants to convey it: the mind has to come in, the mind has to do a certain role. the mind tries to convey it, but in that very effort it is distorted. Now the silence has to enter sound, the silence has to enter its opposite, the wordless has to become confined to the word, the indefinable has to be reduced to a definition, and something mysterious has to become an explanation. All is lost. If not all, then almost all. Only a flicker of truth remains, just a ripple. While in his own experience it was a great ocean, now it is just a ripple.
Still the mystic has to say it. he has to share it, it is a part of this experience to share it. It is just as a flower opens and shares its fragrance: it has to be done, nobody can contain it in himself. He owes it to humanity and to although who are still struggling in the dark. May be he cannot convey the whole light, but even a reflection of it may be helpful to many. Even a distorted form of it may help to seek, to search, to enquire. It may make many thirsty for it. So the mystic has to say it and whenever a mystic says it he cries, because he can see what it was in his experience, and what it has turned out to be in his words. Ninety nine percent is lost. And then when you hear the word, you translate it again according to your experience, 100% is lost.
