Facing The Reality_

Question 2:

"How can one differentiate between a projected experience and an authentic one?" -- It is difficult.

Because we have to speculate, that's why it is difficult. For example, how can you feel that you are touching a real fire or just an imagined one? If you have not touched a real fire, it is very difficult to think about it, to make any theoretical distinction. If you have touched a real fire, then it is not so difficult, then you know. A projected experience is just a dream experience.

But we can think certain things. If you have projected something, you have to go on projecting it; otherwise it will disappear. For example, if I project God and I say, "I see Him in the trees, I see Him in the sky, I see Him everywhere," if it is a projected experience, just my projection, my thought imposed on things, not a realization, but an idea, a theory imposed on things; if I project that I can see a tree as Divine - then I have to help this projection constantly. If I drop repeating, if I forget even for a single moment, the Divine will disappear and there will only be a tree.

In a projected experience you have to work for it continuously. You cannot have any leave, you cannot be on any holiday. The so-called saints cannot go on any holiday. They are continuously at work. They are working and working day and night. If you stop them for a single moment, the projected experience will disappear.

Some friends brought to me a Sufi mystic. He was an old man, and he said that for thirty years he had been experiencing God in everything. And it looked so, it appeared so! He was just ecstatic, dancing, his eyes aflame with some unknown experience. So I asked that man, that mystic, "For thirty years you have been experiencing - is there any effort you still have to make?"

He said, "I have to constantly remember. Continuously, I have to remember. If I forget, then the whole thing disappears." So I asked him to stop all effort for three days and be with me.

He was with me only one night. The next morning he said, "What have you done? You have destroyed it! My thirty years' effort, and you have destroyed everything!" He began to weep. The same eyes which had been aflame with something unknown, became ugly. Thirty years' effort - and he said, "How, in what unfortunate moment, did I come to you? What have you done? Why did you say to me to stop for three days. Now how can I get into it again?"

This is the projected experience. So I told him, "It is better not to get into it again, because you have wasted thirty years in a dream. You can waste thirty lives, but what are you gaining out of it?"

Authentic experience needs no effort. You need not maintain it. When it happens, it has happened. Now you can forget everything. You need not go on maintaining it; there is no constant maintenance. It remains. You forget it - it is there. You don't look at it - it is there. You sleep - it is there. Now the tree cannot become a tree again; now it can never again be a mere tree. Whether I remember or not, it is Divine.

So one thing: you need effort before the happening. Mm? - remember, you need effort before the happening. In both, in the authentic and the projected, effort is needed before the happening. In the authentic experience there is no need after the happening, but in the projected experience there is a continuous need, you have to go on making effort. It is just like in a cinema hall. The projector is running continuously so that the screen is filled. If for a single moment the film is broken or the projector stops, the whole thing disappears, the whole dream disappears, and there is just a plain screen and nothing else. You have to run the projector continuously; then there is no screen, but a different world.

The same is the case if you have to run your mind continuously as a projector, or if you have to remember that you are Divine, that everything is Divine, that all around is God: you have to project continuously, with no gap. And if there is a gap, the whole thing disappears. Then it is a projection. It is not authentic, it is not real.

If there is no need of this constant effort, then it is authentic, it is real. Then you can forget. The day you can forget God, only then have you realized. If you still have to remember Him, it is a projection. The day you can stop your meditation and there is no difference - whether you meditate or not it is the same - then it is authentic. If you stop your meditation, if you stop your prayer, if you stop your effort and everything changes and you feel that something is missing, then it is a projection, a projected feeling. Then it is an addiction. Then someone is a drug addict and you are a prayer addict - but it makes no difference.

One of the rarest and deepest treatises on yoga in India is the "Gherand Samhita" - the most foundational one. It says: "Unless you go beyond meditation, your meditations are of no use. Unless you go beyond prayer, your prayers have not been heard. Unless you forget God completely, you are not one with Him." A Buddha will not talk about God; there is no need. Someone has said, "There has never been such a godless man as Gautam the Buddha - and yet such a godlike one." But he could be godless because he was so god-like.

So remember one thing: no constant projecting. There is only one thing you can do. and that is to make your mind thoughtless - because thoughts are the projections. If you have thoughts, then they will be projected. If you have no thoughts, it is just as if a projector machine is there without film. If no film is there, it cannot project. Your mind is a projecting machine, and thoughts are the film. If thoughts run and the machine is working then they will be projected, then the whole world is a screen. You go on projecting.

When you love someone, the person is just a screen: you project. When you hate someone, the person is just a screen: you project. It is your thoughts that you go on projecting. The same face is beautiful today, and the next day it becomes ugly - the same face - because your beauty, your ugliness, your feeling of beauty, your feeling of ugliness, is not concerned with the face at all. The face is just a screen with your thoughts projected on it.

No thoughts, no projections! That's why my insistence is that you come to a point of thoughtlessness, of thoughtless awareness - so that there will be no projection. Then you will see the world as it is, not as your thoughts make it. If you can see the world as it is, you have come to the Divine.

Now you can feel the difference. The world is there: you project the Divine on it: it is a thought. You say, "The world is Divine" - it is a thought. You don't know. You have heard it, you have read it, someone has said it to you. You wish it should be so, you want, you long that it should be so - but you have not known it. You don't know the world is Divine. You know the world as the world.

This concept that "the world is Divine" is a thought. Now you can project. Repeat it constantly, let it remain in the mind constantly, let it be a constant thing between the world and you, then your mind will project through this thought, and some day the world will begin to look Divine. Man? This is a projection: you have thought of it as Divine, and now you feel it.

The authentic realization is totally different. You don't know what the world is. You don't say that it is Divine or not. You say, "I don't know." That's how a real, authentic seeker begins. He says, "I don't know." The false, the projecting one, always says, "I know! The world is Divine. Everywhere there is God." The real seeker will say, "I don't know. I know the tree, I know the stone - I don't know what the inside of Existence is. I am ignorant."

This feeling gives you a humility, a deep humbleness. And when you don't know, you cannot project - because now you will not cooperate with any thought. Then drop all the thoughts and say, "I don't know." Drop all the thoughts. Don't be attached to knowledge. By and by, be aware that no thoughts should be there between you and the world. This is what meditation means - a no-thought relationship. You are here; I look at you with no thought, with no prejudice, with no image, with nothing in between. You are there, I am here, and there is space - unfilled, vacant.

If this can happen between you and the world, then the world is revealed to you in its totality, in its reality, in its essence. Then you know that which is, and that is Divine. But now it is not a thought. There is no thought at all. You are vacant, empty, silent. It is a revelation, not a projection. So a meditative mind reaches to a state of thoughtlessness, and then only is revelation possible; otherwise you will go on projecting, you will go on projecting. Thought cannot do otherwise - it will project.

Go deep in meditation, and remain with reality without thoughts. Sit under a tree without thoughts, look at the tree with no thought in the mind, with no preconception. Let the tree be there, encountered by your consciousness. Be a mirror - silent, with no thought waves - and let the tree be mirrored in it. And then suddenly you will know that the tree never existed as a tree. That was only an appearance, a face, a persona. It was Divine - just clothed as a tree. The tree was just a clothing; now you have known the inside. No need to remember it! Wherever you move with this meditative state, God will be there, the Divine will be there.

I would like to say it in this way: the Divine is not an object; you cannot find the Divine as an object somewhere. It is a state of mind. When you have that state of mind, it is everywhere. And if you don't have that state of mind, you can create a false, thinking state. But that has to be continuously maintained - and you cannot maintain anything continuously.

So you will find saints weeping and repenting and feeling they have sinned because they haven't maintained continuously. How can you maintain continuously? If you are maintaining anything, you will have to relax. Any effort has to be relaxed. If you have tried to remember that the tree is not a tree but God, after a certain period you will have so much tensed the mind that you will need rest. When you rest, the tree will just be a mere tree, and the God will have disappeared. Then try again, and go on trying. With effort, relaxation is bound to come, it will follow.

You can do anything with effort, but it cannot become your nature. You will go on losing it again and again. So if you go on losing a certain feeling, know that it is a projection. When you cannot lose it, do whatsoever you want to do or don't want to do, be whatsoever....

I would like to tell you a story:

A Chinese Zen monk was living under a tree for thirty years, and he was known to be a very realized man. A woman of the village was serving that monk continuously for thirty years. The monk was known as absolutely pure. Now he was old, and that woman was also old. That woman was on her deathbed, so she called a prostitute from the village and asked her to go to the monk in the night, at midnight: "Just go and embrace him, and come back and tell me how he reacted."

The prostitute asked, "What is the purpose of it?" The old woman said, "I have served him for thirty years, but still I feel that his purity is a maintained purity. It is not yet effortless. So before dying I want to know whether I was serving a right man or whether I was just deluded as he is deluded - because I have been a part in this. So just before my death, let me know it. I want to know."

So the prostitute went. It was midnight and the monk was meditating - the last meditation of the night. The moment he saw that the prostitute was coming... he knew her, and he knew well. She belonged to the same village. And he knew well, moreover, because he had been attracted to her so many times before. Really, he was fighting against this prostitute for years. He was bewildered. He just ran out of the hut and cried, "Why have you come here? Don't touch me!" And he was trembling and perspiring. The prostitute laughed, went back, and told the old woman that this had happened.

The old woman said, "Then I was deceived. He is still the same. Nothing has changed - he reacts very ordinarily. He is afraid. His mind is still attached; his mind is still sexual."

Sex can have just the reverse aspect also. You can be attracted in two ways - positively or negatively. Negative attraction may not look like attraction, but it is.

The same happened to Buddha...

Buddha was staying under a tree in a forest. Some young men had come for a picnic, to enjoy themselves. They had brought a prostitute with them. They were eating and they were drinking, and they became so intoxicated that the prostitute escaped. When they became conscious that the prostitute had escaped, they followed her.

There was only one path. The prostitute must have passed where Buddha was sitting. So they came and asked the Buddha, "bhikkhu, have you seen a naked beautiful girl passing by here? - because this is the only path."

Buddha opened his eyes and he said, "It is difficult to say whether she was a woman or a man; it is difficult to say whether she was beautiful or not; it is difficult to say whether she was naked or clothed. But someone has passed - to this much I can be a witness. Someone has passed.

"I cannot say whether that one was a woman or a man because I am not interested - not interested at all, not even negatively. Whether she was beautiful or ugly, I am not interested. Whether she was clothed or naked, I am not interested. For this much I can vouch: someone has passed.

"And one thing more. The night is so silent - is it good, young men, to go after the one who has passed, to find that person? Or is it better to come and sit beside me and to find yourself? The night is very silent, so what do you think? Is it better to find yourself or to go in search of someone else?"

This is a very different mind - no negative, no positive attachment - as if it is meaningless. Meaning can exist even when you are antagonistic. It exists more, rather. Any maintenance for any state of mind, any effort to maintain it, shows that you are still fighting. It is not a realization; it is still an effort to impose something.

So be silent, thoughtless - and then know what is. Don't think about it and don't preformulate anything about it. Don't be concerned with philosophies and metaphysical theories, don't be concerned with ideas - only then is the reality revealed. If you are concerned with ideas, then you will project something onto the reality and the reality will just serve as a screen. And this is the danger: you can come to know anything you want, you can project anything you want.

Mind has two capacities: one is that it can project anything, and the other is that it can be totally vacant. These are the two possibilities. If the mind is used as a positive projection, then you can realize anything you like, but it is not a realization - you are living in a dream. Vacate the mind, and face reality with a vacant mind, with no thought - then you know what is.

 

Tweet