The highest colour in Creation is sparkling white. The lowest colour is black. No matter what colour you add to black, it cannot turn white. But just a drop of black is enough to soil white.
Black here implies stickiness, or in other words, ‘attachment’, attachment to physical Creation. It doesn’t matter what or how much you have, a person having mere Rs 5000 can be black if he is attached to it and a person worth Rs 5000 crore maybe white, if he is detached with it.
There is a young student of mine, who is very dedicated to the subject. I have been teaching him for about a year and half and his growth has been phenomenal. All was running smooth, till one day he started arguing with me. He started explaining to me how I was wrong and he knew better. This continued for four days. On the fifth day, he walked up to me and said, “Sir, recently I have been arguing with you a lot. I notice that it started right after my interactions with an old friend, whom I had lost touch with, increased manifold. Is this a contamination in me?” I told him to see for himself, for it had never happened before that. He told me that he would stop interacting with that person and see if it changes anything. After that, there was no argument between him and me.
When you do yog and dhyan, you slowly start becoming white (black can turn white, if you remove black (attachment) from it). But then, it takes no time to turn black again; all you need to do is to attach yourself to any one thing. The moment that happens you come in clash with white, for you are no longer white.
The more the attachment, the more black you are, more will be the clash and greater would be the distance between you and your Guru.
It is the black, which is destroying your life and birth with every passing moment and this black will also not remain. No matter what your attachment is – health, job, status, relationships – till when can you hold it? You can try holding on to it, but then one day it will leave you and by then you would have aged and be left with nothing. It is a recorded fact that when Mumtaz died, Shahjahan greyed in just one night. So what is needed is to remove the black, to remove your attachment.
Black stems from your interactions. There is hardly anyone you meet in the day who will ask you how many dogs you fed or how many cows you saved. Most of them will not understand yog or charity or dhyan and will think of it as a waste of time. The thing is, majority is black, white is in minority. The moment you interact with anyone whose thought pattern is away from yog, you add black to yourself. Just one such interaction is enough. Imagine how many interactions you have through the day, what would be left in you?
Leave alone ordinary people, take a look at those giving lectures on yog on television. How many of them exhibit the glow and brightness of yog? Most of them too are soiled with black. The reason is the same – interactions. Negative commercial interactions where all day long they keep assessing how to make more money out of people. The problem is the black or attachment to physical. A black cannot see or feel the pain of suffering animals and humans for his/her vision is veiled by attachments and interactions.
The difference between black and white is that of attachment and interactions. You cannot avoid interactions, what you can do is cleanse the black so-collected through charity and service. Everyday you add black, and so everyday you need to take it off. If you don’t, layers of black will start settling on you. The more black you are, the lesser white you can see. And then one day, you think black is all there is.