VBT – Non-Dual Love 00.1
Formless Presence
Devi asks Shiva, OH SHIVA, WHAT IS YOUR REALITY? – who are you? The form has disappeared; hence the question. In love you enter the other as himself. It is not you answering. You become one, and for the first time you know an abyss – a formless presence.
That is why for centuries together, centuries and centuries, we were not making any sculptures, any pictures of Shiva. We were only making SHIVALINGA – the symbol. The Shivalinga is just a formless form. When you love someone, when you enter someone, he becomes just a luminous presence. The Shivalinga is just a luminous presence, just an aura of light.
That is why Devi asks, WHAT IS YOUR REALITY?
WHAT IS THIS WONDER-FILLED UNIVERSE? We know the universe, but we never know it as wonder-filled. Children know, lovers know. Sometimes poets and madmen know. We do not know that the world is wonder-filled. Everything is just repetitive – no wonder, no poetry, just flat prose.
It doesn’t create a song in you; it doesn’t create a dance in you; it doesn’t give birth to the poetry inside. The whole universe looks mechanical. Children look at it with wonder-filled eyes. When the eyes are wonder-filled, the universe is wonder-filled.
When you are in love, you again become like children. Jesus says, “Only those who are like children will enter my kingdom of God.” Why? Because if the universe is not a wonder, you cannot be religious. The universe can be explained – then your approach is scientific. The universe is either known or unknown, but that which is unknown can be known any day; it is not unknowable. The universe becomes unknowable, a mystery, only when your eyes are wonder-filled.
Devi says, WHAT IS THIS WONDER-FILLED UNIVERSE? Suddenly there is the jump from a personal question to a very impersonal one. She was asking, WHAT IS YOUR REALITY? and then suddenly, WHAT IS THIS WONDER-FILLED UNIVERSE?
When form disappears, your beloved becomes the universe, the formless, the infinite. Suddenly Devi becomes aware that she is not asking a question about Shiva; she is asking a question about the whole universe. Now Shiva has become the whole universe. Now all the stars are moving in him, and the whole firmament and the whole space is surrounded by him. Now he is the great engulfing factor – “the great encompassing.” Karl Jaspers has defined God as “the great encompassing.”
When you enter into love, into a deep, intimate world of love, the person disappears, the form disappears, and the lover becomes just a door to the universe. Your curiosity can be a scientific one – then you have to approach it through logic. Then you must not think of the formless. Then beware of the formless; then remain content with the form. Science is always concerned with the form. If anything formless is proposed to a scientific mind, he will cut it into form – unless it takes a form it is meaningless. First give it a form, a definite form; only then does the inquiry start.
In love, if there is form then there is no end to it. Dissolve the form! When things become formless, dizzy, without boundaries, everything enters another, the whole universe becomes oneness, then only it is a wonder-filled universe.
Tags: Formless Presence
