“Never complain, never explain. Resist the temptation to defend yourself or make excuses.”
– Brian Tracy
 
Kabir – The couplet
ज्ञान कथे बक बक मरे, काहे करे उपाधि ।
सद्गुरु हमसे एनु कहे, सुमिरन करे समाधि ||

Transliterated:
Gyan Kathe Bak Bak Mare, Kaahe Kare Upaadhi |
Sadguru Hamse Enu Kahe, Sumiran Kare Samadhi||

Translation:
Why do you try to impress others by incessant demonstration of your knowledge |
The Guru has told me thus – meditate, silence and find true inner illumination ||

My understanding:
Our association with the external, physical world grows stronger every living moment, and each step in this path takes us further away from our association with our own self, our understanding or the reason for our existence. This association with the external, which we accept as our real world, is both our perceived El Dorado and our Waterloo. Why, one may ask?

Our acceptance of our physical existence as our real space is the veil that society and we have drawn over our collective eyes. It is not that the world is not real – it is very real. Neither is our perception of it unreal – we are very accurate in our perception of it.

However, this is where it gets tricky. We rapidly begin to color perception with expectation. Where we see a rose, we immediately try to bring our nose to it to smell, and then express disappointment when the scent is not there or not right. The rose did its best to look good – why does it need to smell the way I want it to? This colored view of the external world is what makes the view wrong – and hence the statement that the world we see is not real.

We meet a person, and stick out our hand to shake. When the person does not respond the way we expect, we cloud ourselves with doubt, unhappiness and unpleasant thoughts. Who is responsible for the unpleasantness? Me. But whom do I ascribe it to? Him. And we continue our life in this fashion, ascribing our misses to someone or something else – and hence unable to resolve them. For when the nut is broken, no fixing of the bolt will resolve the problem. We need to wither fix or replace the nut – but can do that only when we accept the problem to be with the nut.

Coming back to the couplet above, rather than spout our misplaced and wrongly notional understanding of the world, or the undigested acquired knowledge that is leading us in the wrong direction, why not focus on finding that true inner quiet so that we can take of this veil that is misrepresenting the world to us?