Intrinsic Nature
Your watchfulness should be total. You be identified with your watching because that is your nature, that’s what you are. There is no question of dis-identifying with it; even if you try you cannot succeed.
Your intrinsic nature is simply that of a witness. A single quality of awareness makes your whole being. So watch everything as if it is a cloud passing by.
You would like to be identified with love, you would like to be identified with happiness and you would like not to be identified with sadness, you would not like to be identified with misery. But this kind of choice is not allowed by existence.
If you really want to get beyond the mind and all its experiences – sadness and joy, anger and peace, hate and love; if you want to get beyond all these dualities, you have to watch them equally, you cannot choose. If you choose, you will not be able to watch those which you don’t want to choose. So the first thing is, just be a watcher.
It will be a little difficult in the beginning to watch those things which are so sweet, so beautiful because watching makes you distant from every experience that is passing by like a cloud. You cannot cling. Up to now that’s what you have been doing: clinging to that which you think is good and trying to get away from that which you think is ugly and miserable. But you have created only a mess of yourself. You have not been successful.
The best way is to be totally a watcher, but if you find it difficult there is an alternative. But that is harder than this; it is more difficult than this one – to get identified with every cloud that moves. If there is misery, then become absolutely miserable, then don’t hold anything back, just go with it to the very end. If you are angry, then be angry and do whatever stupidity it suggests to you to do. If some crazy cloud passes by, be crazy. But then don’t miss anything. Whatever comes to you, be totally with it in that moment, and when it is gone it is gone.
This also will liberate you, but it is a more difficult path. If you want something really dangerous to play with, you can get identified with everything. Then don’t make any differentiation, that this is good to get identified with and this is bad to get identified with. Then there is no question; without any discrimination, get identified, and within a week you will be finished with it. Just one week will be enough, because so many things are passing by; you will be so tired, so exhausted. If you survive, we will meet again. If you don’t survive, goodbye.
So if you get identified with all your ideas, then you should think before you start the practice: what people will think about it and how they will behave with you – although it is possible to get free of all those emotions if you get identified with all of them, without any choice.
Either be choicelessly identified or be choicelessly unidentified. The real thing is choicelessness.
