The Art_of_Dying

 

What others say about meditation is meaningless.

Once I came upon a book written by a Jaina saint about meditation. It was really beautiful but there were just a few places by which I could see that the man had never meditated himself -- otherwise those places could not be there. But they were very few and far between. The book on the whole, almost ninety-nine per cent, was perfect. I loved the book.

Then, I forgot about it. For ten years I was wandering around the country. Once in a village of Rajasthan, that saint came to meet me. His name sounded familiar, and suddenly I remembered the book. And I asked the saint why he had come to me. He said, 'I have come to you to know what meditation is.'

I said, 'I remember your book. I remember it very well, because it really impressed me. Except for a few defects which showed that you have never meditated, the book was perfectly right -- ninety-nine percent right. And now you come here to learn about meditation. Have you never meditated?'

He looked a little embarrassed because his disciples were also there.

I said, 'Be frank. Because if you say you know meditation, then I am not going to talk about it. Then finished!
You know. There is no need. If you say to me frankly -- at least be true once -- if you say you have never meditated, only then can I help you towards meditation.'

It was a bargain, so he had to confess. He said, 'Yes, I have never said it to anybody. I have read many books about meditation, all the old scriptures. And I have been teaching people, that's why I feel embarrassed before my disciples. I have been teaching meditation to thousands, and I have written books about it, but I have never meditated.'

You can write books about meditation and never come across the space that meditation is. You can become very efficient in verbalising, you can become very clever in abstraction, in intellectual argumentativeness, and you can forget completely that all the time that you have been involved in these intellectual activities has been a sheer wastage.

I asked the old man, 'How long have you been interested in meditation?'

He said, 'My whole life.' He was almost seventy. He said, 'When I was twenty I took sannyas, I became a Jaina monk, and those fifty years since then I have been reading and reading and thinking about meditation.'

Fifty years of thinking and reading and writing about meditation, even guiding people into meditation, and he has not even tasted once what meditation is! But this is the case with millions of people. They talk about love, they know all the poetries about love, but they have never loved. Or even if they thought they were in love, they were never in love. That too was a 'heady' thing, it was not of the heart. People live and go on missing life. It needs courage. It needs courage to be realistic, it needs courage to move with life wherever it leads, because the paths are uncharted, there exists no map. One has to go into the unknown.

Life can be understood only if you are ready to go into the unknown. If you cling to the known, you cling to the mind, and the mind is not life. Life is non-mental, non-intellectual, because life is total. Your totality has to be involved in it, you cannot just think about it. Thinking about life is not life. beware of this 'about-ism'. One goes on thinking about and about: there are people who think about God, there are people who think about life, there are people who think about love. There are people who think about this and that.

Mulla Nasrudin became very old and he went to his doctor. He was looking very weak so the doctor said, 'I can say only one thing. You will have to cut your love-life to half.'

The Mulla said, 'Okay. Which half? Talking about it or thinking about it?'

That's all. Don't become a language professor, don't become a parrot. Parrots are language professors. They live in words, concepts, theories, theologies, and life goes on passing, slipping out of their hands. Then one day suddenly they become afraid of death. When a person is afraid of death, know well that that person has missed life. If he has not missed life there cannot be any fear of death. If a person has lived life, he will be ready to live death also. He will be almost enchanted by the phenomenon of death.

When Socrates was dying he was so enchanted that his disciples could not understand what he was feeling so happy about. One disciple, Credo, asked, 'Why are you looking so happy? We are crying and weeping.'

Socrates said, 'Why should I not be happy? I have known what life is, now I would like to know what death is. I am at the door of a great mystery, and I am thrilled! I am going on a great journey into the unknown. I am simply full of wonder! I cannot wait!'

And remember, Socrates was not a religious man; Socrates was not in any way a believer.

Somebody asked, 'Are you so certain that the soul will survive after death?'

Socrates said, 'I don't know.'

To say, 'I don't know' takes the greatest courage in the world. It is very difficult for the language professors to say, 'I don't know'. It is difficult for the parrots. Socrates was a very sincere and honest man. He said, 'I don't know.'

Then the disciple asked, 'Then why are you feeling so happy? If the soul does not survive, then...?'

Socrates said, 'I have to see. If I survive there can be no fear about it. If I don't survive, how can there be fear? If I don't survive, I don't survive. Then where is the fear? There is nobody there, so fear cannot exist. If I survive, I survive. There is no point in getting afraid about it. But I don't know exactly what is going to happen. That's why I am so full of wonder and ready to go into it. I don't know.'

To me, this is what a religious man should be. A religious man is not a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a Mohammedan. All these are ways of knowledge. A Christian says, 'I know.' And his knowledge comes from the Christian dogmas. The Hindu says, 'I also know.' And his knowledge comes from the Vedas and the Gitas and his dogmas. And a Hindu is against the Christian, because he says, 'If I am right, you cannot be right. If you are right, then I cannot be right.' So there is great argument and there is much dispute and much debate and unnecessary conflict.

A religious man, a really religious man -- not the so-called religious people -- is one who says.'I don't know.' When you say 'I don't know' you are open, you are ready to learn. When you say 'I don't know' you don't have any prejudice this way or that, you don't have any belief, you don't have any knowledge. You have only awareness. You say, 'I am aware and I will see what happens. I will not carry any dogma from the past.'

This is the attitude of a disciple, the attitude of one who wants to learn. And discipline simply means learning. A disciple means a learner, one who is ready to learn, and discipline means learning.

I am not here to teach you any dogmas; I am not imparting any knowledge to you. I am simply helping you to see that which is. Live your life whatsoever the cost. Be ready to gamble with it.

I have heard about a business man. He was walking from his office to a restaurant for lunch when he was stopped by a stranger who said to him, 'I don't think that you remember me, but ten years ago I came to this city broke. I asked you for a loan and you gave me twenty dollars because you said you were willing to take a chance to start a man on the road to success.'

The business man thought for a while and then he said. 'Yes, I remember the incident. Go on with your story.'

'Well,' remarked the stranger, 'are you still willing to gamble?'

Life asks you the same question again and again and again: 'Are you still willing to gamble?' It is never certain. Life has no insurance to it; it is simply an opening, a wild opening, a chaotic opening. You can make a small house around you, secure, but then that will prove to be your grave. Live with life.

And we have been doing that in many ways. Marriage is man-created; love is part of life. When you create marriage around love you are creating security. You are making something which cannot be made -- love cannot be made legal. You are trying to do the impossible, and if, in that effort, love dies, it is no wonder. You become a husband, your beloved becomes a wife. You are no longer two alive persons, you are two functionaries. The husband has a certain function, the wife has a certain function: they have certain duties to fulfil. Then life has ceased to flow, it is frozen.

Watch a husband and wife. You will always see two persons frozen, sitting side by side, not knowing what they are doing there, why they are sitting there. Maybe they have nowhere to go.

When you see love between two persons, something is flowing, moving, changing. When there is love between two persons they live in an aura, there is a constant sharing. Their vibrations are reaching to : each other; they are broadcasting their being to each other. There is no wall between them, they are two and yet not two -- they are one also.

The husband and wife are as far away as it is possible to be, even though they may be sitting by the side of each other. The husband never listens to what the wife is saying; he has become deaf long ago. The wife never sees what is happening to the husband; she has become blind to him. They take each other absolutely for granted; they have become things.

They are no longer persons because persons are always open, persons are always uncertain, persons are always changing. Now they have a fixed role to fulfil. They died the day they got married. Since that day they have not lived.

I'm not saying not to get married, but remember that love is the real thing. And if it dies then marriage is worthless.

And the same is true about everything in life, about everything. Either you can live it -- but then you have to live with this hesitation, not knowing what is going to happen the next moment -- or you can make everything certain about it.

There are people who have become so certain about everything that they are never surprised. There are people whom you cannot surprise. And I am here to deliver to you a message which is very surprising -- you will not believe it, I know. You cannot believe it, I know. I am here to tell you something which is absolutely unbelievable -- that you are gods and goddesses. You have forgotten

Let me tell you an anecdote.

Harvey Firestone, Thomas A. Edison, John Burroughs and Henry Ford stopped at a rural service station on their way to Florida for the winter. 'We want some bulbs for our headlights,' said Ford. 'And by the way, that is Thomas Edison sitting there in the car, and I am Henry Ford.'

The fellow at the service station did not even look up, just spat out some tobacco juice with obvious contempt. 'And,' said Ford, 'we would like to buy a new tire if you have any Firestone tires. And that other fellow in the car is Harvey Firestone himself.'

Still the old fellow said nothing. While he was placing the tire on the wheel, John Burroughs, with his long white beard, stuck his head out the window and said, 'How do you do, stranger?'

Finally the old man at the service station came alive. He glared at Burroughs and said, 'If you tell me you are Santa Claus I will be damned if I don't crush your skull with this lug wrench.'

He could not believe that in one car Harvey Firestone, Thomas A. Edison, John Burroughs and Henry Ford were travelling. They were all friends and they used to travel together.

When I say to you you are gods and goddesses you will not believe it because you have completely forgotten who is travelling within you, who is sitting within you, who is listening to me, who is looking at me. You have completely forgotten. You have been given some labels from the outside and you have trusted those labels -- your name, your religion, your country -- all bogus! It does not make any sense if you are a Hindu or a Christian or a Mohammedan if you don't know your self. These labels make no sense at all except that they may be of a certain utility. What sense does it make whether you are a Hindu, or a Christian, or a Mohammedan, or an Indian, or an American, or Chinese? How does it make sense, how does it help you to know your being? All are irrelevant -- because the being is neither Indian, nor Chinese, nor American; and the being is neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian. The being is simply a pure 'is-ness'.

The pure 'is-ness' is what I call God. If you can understand your inner divinity you have understood what life is. Otherwise you have not been able yet to decode life. This is the message. The whole life is pointing at one thing, continuously -- that you are gods. Once you have understood it, then there is no death. Then you have learned the lesson. Then in death, gods will be returning back to their homes.

The whole life...just a training for how to go back home, how to die, how to disappear. Because the moment you disappear, God appears in you. Your presence is God's absence; your absence is God's presence.

 

 

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