THERE IS NO ADVANTAGE IN DECEIVING YOURSELF.

LIFE AND DEATH ARE IMPORTANT. DON'T SUFFER THEM IN VAIN. THERE IS NO ADVANTAGE IN DECEIVING YOURSELF.

And everybody is deceiving:

 a few are deceiving by earning money and thinking that when they are super-rich they will have reached to the realization of their potential;

 a few are deceiving by accumulating knowledge; 

a few are deceiving by becoming powerful, respectable;

 a few are even deceiving by becoming saints, ascetics. 

But whatever you do, unless it leads to awareness of your nature, it is a deceiving.

YOU SHOULD REALIZE THEN THAT EVERYTHING YOU SEE IS LIKE A DREAM OR ILLUSION, because death is going to take it all away.

That which death cannot take is the only criterion for reality.

I have heard about a man who had gone fishing.The whole day he tried and could not get a single fish. 

Now he was worried about his wife so he went to the fish market and purchased three beautiful big fish, but on a condition.

The fisherman who was selling those fish could not understand the condition which was very strange, and it was the first time he had come across such a thing. 

The man was ready to pay the price, whatsoever the fisherman was asking, but the condition was that he had to throw the fish and the man would catch them.

The fisherman said, "There is no problem. I will throw, you catch, but I don't understand ...what is the point of it?"

The man said, "You don't understand but I don't like to lie. When I go home, my wife will ask how many fish I have got. I will show the three fish I have caught with my own hands. I want to be exactly true."

Such a man can deceive his wife, but can he deceive himself? And is this really true or just a falseness covered with the name of truth? 

And that is the situation of all your so-called learned people.

They have caught fish, not from the lake but from a fisherman and his shop in the market, and they have certainly caught them. 

But they themselves know that they have not caught, they have purchased -- and truth cannot be purchased.

You have to catch hold of your inner light with your own awareness. Other than that there is no way.