The speck of dust and the sky, you are both

Acharya Prashant
4 min readFeb 7, 2020

Wisdom tells us we are not worthy; Love tells us we are. My life flows between the two.

~ Rumi

Kindly do not take these words to mean that wisdom and love are mutually exclusive. They are not. He is talking of the last dichotomy we live in. And that dichotomy is the difference, separation between our fact and our destiny, our life and our destiny, our periphery and our center, our performance and our potential.

This is the separation between the lover and the beloved.

We are two. We are the one who is all the time engrossed in littleness, doubts, fear, in separation, in time, in desires and anger. And then, we are also the one who knows very well that to be little and afraid, and shrunken is not destiny. That one is needlessly confining himself, so, we are two.

The speck of dust in the sky and the sky itself.

And none of them can be dismissed as false. How do you dismiss the daily facts of your life, how dismiss that you haggle over a few rupees, how to dismiss that one is suspicious of even his intimate ones, how to dismiss that there is nothing beyond doubt in one’s life, how to dismiss that nothing called immensity exists for us, and how to dismiss that the fear of death is always lurking close by.

That’s the life of the speck of dust.

And much as we may want to forget, we also cannot dismiss that something within yearns for the infinite, and something within remains continuously thirsty, seeking unfulfilled thirst. His thirst is proof that something beyond the finite exists.

You see, there are these two things. We know only the finite but the finite never satisfies us. So, we are not quite equipped or authorised to talk of infinite. But we can surely talk of something beyond the finite. These are two different things, beyond the finite and infinite. If the human tongue ventures to utter infinite, it is just being loud-mouthed. What can a pity human being talk of infinite, but surely, one can say that one wants to go beyond the finite. And beyond the finite speck of dust is nothing but sky because all else is finite.

If the speck of dust is finite, then the moons and the stars are also finite. Just the degree of…

Acharya Prashant