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Man is almost unconscious – there are moments, situations where he becomes conscious, but they are momentary.
For example, suddenly your house is on fire. You will feel a flare-up within you, a sense of alertness that was not there before. You may have been tired, you may not have slept for a few days, you may have been traveling and you were hoping that as you reached your house, the first thing you were going to do was to fall asleep – but the house is on fire!
All tiredness disappears. You forget the whole nightmare of the journey, and inside you find something new which perhaps you will miss because the house is on fire; so you will become not alert of your alertness, but alert of the fire that is burning your house.
In ordinary life also, there are moments when people touch a higher state of consciousness, but miss because that higher state comes as an emergency, and they have to tackle first the emergency that is facing them. And that cannot be the circumstance where they can start exploring what is happening inside them.
But if you can remember – even as a memory – some moments in your life when suddenly you were more aware than you usually are, it will be a great help to understand.
You can bridge the gap through being more alert, that’s why there is so much emphasis on being alert, aware, witnessing, watchful. Why? Because the more you become alert, the more the unconscious becomes conscious. That is the only way.
When the whole of you is out of darkness, this is samadhi, this enlightenment, this is the state of a Buddha, or an arhat: one who has no longer any unconsciousness in him, one who has no longer any dark corners within his being. The whole house is lighted. Now, you have attained to a unity – on a higher plane. So a Buddha is pure like an animal, simple like an animal. The animal has its innocence because of ignorance, and Buddha has his innocence because of his enlightened awareness. The cause has changed.
Meditation is all about — to become more alert. Live the same life, just change your alertness — make it more intense. Eat the same food, walk the same path, live in the same house, be with the same woman and the children, but be totally different from your inside. Be alert! Walk the same path, but with awareness. If you become aware, suddenly the path is no more the same, because you are no more the same. If you are aware, the same food is not the same, because you are not the same, the same woman is not the same, because you are not the same. Everything changes with your inner change.
If somebody changes his within, the without changes totally. You must be living in a deep inner darkness, hence the world. If you light your inner lamp, suddenly the world disappears, and there is only God. The world and the God are not two things but two perceptions of the same energy. If you are unaware, the energy appears to you to be as the world, the sansara; if you are alert, the same energy appears as God. The whole thing depends on your inner awareness or unawareness. That is the only change, the only transformation, the only revolution, that has to be made.
