VBT – Meditation 6.1
Penetrate Inwards
Man is as if he is a circle without a center. His life is superficial; his life is only on the circumference. You live on the outside, you never live within. You cannot, unless a center is found. You cannot live within, really you have no within. You are without a center, you have only the without. That is why we go on talking about the within, about how to go in, how to know oneself, how to penetrate inwards, but these words do not carry any authentic meaning. You know the meaning of the words, but you cannot feel what they mean because you are never in. You have never been in.
Even when you are alone, in your mind you are in a crowd. When no one is there outside, still you are not within. You go on thinking of others; you go on moving outwards. Even while asleep you are dreaming of others, you are not within. Only in very deep sleep, when there is no dreaming, are you within; but then you become unconscious. Remember this fact: when you are conscious you are never within, and when you are within in deep sleep you become unconscious. So your whole consciousness consists of the without. And whenever we talk about going within, the words are understood but the meaning is not – because the meaning is not carried by the words, the meaning comes through experience.
Words are without meaning. When I say “within,” you understand the word – but only the word, not the meaning. You do not know what within is because consciously you have never been within. Your mind is constantly outgoing. You do not have any feel of what the inner means or what it is.
That is what I mean when I say that you are a circle without a center – a circumference only. The center is there, but you drop into it only when you are not conscious. Otherwise, when you are conscious you move outwards, and because of this your life is never intense; it cannot be. It is just lukewarm. You are alive as if dead, or both simultaneously. You are deadly alive – living a dead-like life. You are existing at the minimum – not at the maximum peak, but at the minimum. You can say, “I am,” that is all. You are not dead; that is what you mean by being alive.
But life can never be known at the circumference. Life can be known only at the center. On the circumference only lukewarm life is possible. So really, you live a very inauthentic life, and then even death becomes inauthentic – because one who has not really lived cannot really die. Only authentic life can become authentic death. Then death is beautiful: anything authentic is beautiful. Even life, if it is inauthentic, is bound to be ugly. And your life is ugly, just rotten. Nothing happens. You simply go on waiting, hoping that something will happen somewhere, someday.
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