VBT – Meditation 2.4
Awakening Moment
Once you are here and now – In this awakening moment you find yourself – not the ego that you used to think is you, not the old personality that you always believed in and had remained identified with. That personality, that ego, was all part of the mind; with the mind, they have all disappeared. All that fog is no more there – just a crystal-clear clarity, a transparency, a silence, alive, full of peace and a subtle joy so deep that you have never known such a depth before. You could not have even conceived or dreamed of it. This is not only your self, this is the universal self too. Because it is also the universal self, Gautam Buddha decided to call this experience ‘no-self’, simply to emphasize that you are no more. Existence is: you are gone. Now the whole has taken over. You are conscious, conscious for the first time in totality. And new things start happening to you. They are just the opposites of what the mind was creating. Instead of agony, you have ecstasy; instead of misery, you have tremendous blissfulness; instead of despair, you are utterly at ease; instead of feeling a meaninglessness, for the first time you see the significance and the beauty and the glory that has been bestowed upon you by existence. And without any effort on your part a tremendous urge arises to thank the whole, to be grateful, to dance in gratitude, to sing in gratitude. To me, the only true prayer is that which comes out of gratitude, not addressed to any god, not addressed to get anything, but addressed to the whole of existence for all that it has already given to you. It is so much. You suddenly see that you don’t deserve all this. You have never earned anything of it: all this beauty, all these blessings, all this ecstasy. You cannot conceive that it is your earning. It is simply a gift from the beyond. You can only bow down to it – not to anybody in particular, just to the whole that surrounds you. As a fish is surrounded by the ocean, you are surrounded by the whole.
Let them happen more often. This is the whole purpose of all the meditations, to bring you to a full stop. Then suddenly, the energy that was moving outwards, starts settling inwards. When all your life forces have centered at the very roots of your being, you will start growing in a new direction. Now it will not be a movement, it will be a growth. Movement is always horizontal; growth is vertical. The tree grows vertically; you move horizontally. The world is horizontal; spirituality is vertical. Once your energies are all concentrated in the roots, there will be new sprouts, new foliage, new branches, and you have started moving upwards towards the stars. And this is not an old movement, it is a totally different phenomenon. The horizontal movement we know, when we say somebody is growing old. The vertical movement is when we say somebody is growing up. Just becoming old is not going to lead you anywhere except to death and a new life with the old desires again – the same circle. Once your life starts growing instead of moving, it takes a totally different dimension upwards, against the gravitation of this world towards the open sky. And only in this growth, one day your potentiality blossoms. The day you see your flowers opening up and releasing their fragrance, you have come to know for the first time something that can be called spiritual. And it is not a goal. The trees are not growing towards some goal, they are growing towards their potential, which is intrinsic, which is hidden in them. They want to come to a point where what is hidden becomes available to the whole of existence. What is in the seed comes into the flower. Enlightenment is your flowering. Meditation will bring you to the point from where your existence takes a new dimension – the dimension of enlightenment. You can call it satchidanand.
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