Blissfulness Beyond Ignorance
So if you are not aware of beauty, you will not be aware of ugliness. If you are aware of beauty, you have become aware of ugliness. You will enjoy and you will feel the bliss of beauty, and then you will suffer. This is part of growth. Growth always means the knowledge of the extremes which constitute life. So when man becomes aware, he also becomes aware that he is not aware of many things, and because of that he suffers.
Many times I have seen, observed: someone comes to me to meditate. He says, “I am very much disturbed, tense inside, suffering. Somehow help me to still my mind.” I suggest to him something to do. Then he comes within a week and says, “What have you done? I have become more disturbed.”
Why does it happen? Because when he begins to meditate, when he begins to feel a certain silence, he begins to feel the disturbance more. Against that silence, now this disturbance is felt more keenly. He was simply disturbed before, with no silence inside. Now he has something to judge against, to compare with. Now he says, “I am going mad!”
So whenever someone begins meditation, he will become aware of many things he was not aware of before. And because of that awareness he will suffer. But this is how things are, and one has to pass through them.
So if you start meditation and you don’t suffer, it means it is not meditation but just a hypnosis. That means you are just drugging yourself. You are becoming more unconscious. With a real, authentic meditation you will suffer more, because you will become more aware. You will see the ugliness of your anger, you will feel the cruelty of your jealousy, you will now know the violence of your behavior. Now, in every gesture, you will begin to feel somewhere a hidden animal in you. You will suffer, but this is how one grows. Growth is a painful birth. The child suffers when it comes out of the womb, but that is part and parcel of growth.
So it is right: “.awareness and knowledge give more richness, growth and depth to man’s life” – not because man doesn’t suffer, but because man suffers.
If someone has led just a smug existence – as it happens with rich families – you will feel, you will observe, that if a person is born rich and he has lived without knowing sufferings, without knowing the pain of living, without knowing anything. Whenever there is a demand, even before the demand, the supply is there. He has not suffered hunger, he has not suffered love, he has not suffered anything. Whatsoever is demanded is supplied; rather, it is supplied even before the demand is there. Then look in the eyes of that man: you will not find any depth. It is as if he has not lived. He has not struggled, he doesn’t know what life is.
That’s why it is always very difficult to find any depth in such men. They are superficial. If they laugh, the laugh is superficial. It just comes from the lips, never from the heart. If they weep, that weeping is superficial. It is not from the depths of their being; it is just a formal thing. More struggle, more depth.
Excerpted From The Ultimate Alchemy, Vol. 2 CH: 9
