On Khalil Gibran: The Man of God is a winner in the world

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

“Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.”

~Khalil Gibran

Question: What is full embrace? How is it different from half embrace? If half embrace creates a movement of thoughts, won’t the full embrace create even a greater restlessness?

Acharya Prashant: Man is caught in a very peculiar situation. Neither can he accept what he truly is. Nor can he ever run away from what he truly is. He swings. He oscillates. When he wants to come to his essence, the sub-essential, and the non-essential beckons him.

He feels that the juice of living is being lost. He feels that all the sensory pleasures, all the colors of the world, the music, the attractions, the emotions, the meetings, the goodbyes, all the games of time, are being lost. And when he tries to move totally into that which is space-time and material, into thoughts, into emotions, into the world of the senses, he soon starts feeling nauseatic.

Beyond a point, he cannot take the world in, anymore. He feels like throwing up. As if one has overeaten a favorite dish.

Man remains swinging, vacillating.

That is what Khalil Gibran is calling, a half embrace.

One belongs neither here nor there.

To put it straight, one simply does not belong.

One is homeless.

There is nothing called a half embrace. A half embrace means that you are embracing two at a time. You are divided into two halves. One half of you is embracing this, the other half of you is embracing that. And in trying to perform this antic, you have found that you have been split wide open.

Now, there is no firmness, no integrity, no oneness. It is as if your soul keeps changing. One has heard of forms changing, but man performs the impossible. His very soul keeps changing.