Dissolution Into The Cosmic
Intellect is always an onlooker standing out – never in. So the more intellect grows in the world, the more we become just passive observers, in everything. You will not dance, but you will watch others dancing. If this goes on as it is going on, day by day, soon you will not be doing anything, you will just be looking at others doing. This will be possible some day: you will not love – it has become possible, it is there now – you will just watch others loving. What are you watching in a film? – others loving. You are just an onlooker – a dead, passive, onlooker. You are watching others playing. You are watching others singing, others dancing.
Somewhere one of Camus’ characters says, “Love is not for me. My servants will do it for me” – love! A really rich man – even love has to be done by his servants. Why should he do it? The logic is the same. If servants can play music for you, if servants can do prayer for you, why not love? A servant is doing worship for you in the temple, so why not love? If a servant can be used in between you and the divine, why not between you and your lover or beloved? What is wrong in it? The logic is the same, really. Soon those who are rich will not do their loving themselves because servants can do it. Only poor ones will do their own loving and will feel very miserable because of it. Everything can be deputed. You can be just an onlooker, because intellect is basically an onlooker, never a participant. If we create a world around intellect then it is going to happen.
The second center is more involved; you begin to participate. I say you will understand more if you begin to participate, because the moment you are sympathetic your mind is open, more open than when you are in a constant fight. It is open, receptive, inviting.
This is how one can listen through feeling, but still there is a depth even deeper than feeling, and that depth I call total listening, with your full being – because feeling is again a part. Intellect is a part, feeling is a part, the source of action is another. There are many parts in your existence, in your being. You can listen with feeling better than with intellect, but still it is only a part. When you are listening with your feeling the intellect will just go to sleep; otherwise it will disturb. It will just go to sleep.
The third is to listen totally – not even participating with it, but being one with it. One way is to watch dance through intellect, another is to feel dance and begin to participate in it. Sitting in your seat, the dancer is dancing. You begin to participate; you begin to keep the beat. The third is becoming the dance oneself – not the dancer, but the dance. The total being is involved. You are not even out to feel it: you are it!
So remember that the deepest knowledge is possible only when you become one with something. This is “by faith.”
How to come to it? Be aware of your intellect; be unidentified with the mind. Then come to the second – feeling. Then be aware that feeling is just a part and your whole being is just lying dead. The whole is not there, so bring the whole into it. When you bring the whole in, it is not that the intellect is denied or feeling is denied, they are in it, but now in a different harmony. Nothing is negated. Everything is there, but now in a different pattern. The whole being is participating, is in it – has become it.
Excerpted From The Ultimate Alchemy, Vol. 1 CH: 2
