Once he was found by a number of seekers, sitting surrounded by every imaginable luxury.
These people left his presence and sought the house of a most austere and ascetic holy man, whose sourrendings were so plain that he had nothing but a mat and a jug of water.
The spokesman of the seekers said, 'Your simple manners and austere environment are much more to our liking than the garish and shocking excesses of Junaid, who seems to have turned his back upon the path of truth'.
The ascetic heaved a great sigh and started to weep.
'My dear friends, shallowly infected by the outward signs which beset man at every turn,' he said, 'know this, and cease to be unfortunates! The great Junaid is surrounded at this moment by luxury because he is impervious to luxury. And I am surronded by simplicity because I am impervious to simplicity.'
Commentary:
The belief in the myth of change is the most dangerous kind of belief. Man has suffered much from it - much more than from any other kind of belief. The myth of change - that something better is possible, that man can improve upon himself, that there is some place to go to, that there is somebody to be, that there is some kind of utopia - has corrupted human mind infinitely down the centuries. It has been a constant poisoning.
Man is already there. Man has been all along that which he wants to be. Man need not change in order to be. All that is needed is an understanding, an awareness - not a change, Becoming is never going to give you being, Through becoming you will remain constantly in anguish, in tension - because becoming means that the goal is somewhere else, that the goal is never here, never now, that the goal is far away. You have to strive for it and your whole life is wasted in striving. And you can go on striving and you will not find it because the goal is here and now, and you are looking then and there.
Your being is in the present, and all ideas of becoming are projections into the future. By projecting into the future, you go on missing the present, That is a way of escaping from the reality. The idea that you have to become something is the idea that takes you away from your real being, from your authentic being. You are already that - that's why I say the myth of change is one of the most dangerous myths.