Plate

Learning

Know how to behave at a buffet. Take a clean Plate for a second helping.

Every moment brings new reality. It’s empty. The way in which for before every helping plates are empty. Before we take any action we need to be empty.

We have brought many philosophies with us.

Drop them. They have not helped us at all, they have not done anything for us. It is time enough, the right time. Drop them wholesale, not in parts, not in fragments.

I have heard about a man who was traveling in a train for the first time, a villager. He was carrying his luggage on his head, thinking: “Putting it down will be too much for the train to carry, and I have paid only for my own self. I have purchased the ticket but I have not paid for the luggage.” So he was carrying the luggage on his head. The train was carrying him and his luggage, and whether he carried it on his head or put it down made no difference to the train.

Your mind is unnecessary luggage. It makes no difference to this existence that is carrying you; you are unnecessarily burdened. Drop it. The trees exist without the mind and exist more beautifully than any human being; the birds exist without the mind and exist in a more ecstatic state than any human being. Look at children who are still not civilized, who are still wild. They exist without the mind, and even a Jesus or a Buddha will feel jealous of their innocence. There is no need for this mind. The whole world is going on and on without it. Why are you carrying it? Are you just thinking that it will be too much for God, too much for existence? Once you can put it down, even for a single minute, your whole existence will be transformed. You will enter into a new dimension, the dimension of weightlessness.

Weightlessness gives wings into the sky, into the heaven – weightlessness gives you these wings – and roots into the earth, a groundedness, a centering. This earth and that heaven: they are two parts of the whole. In this life, your so-called ordinary life, you must be rooted; and in your inner space, in the spiritual life, you must be weightless and flying and flowing, floating.

This Samadhi for inner ecstasy and enlightenment, is just going to be a help for you so that which you have carried like a seed up to now can come out of your soil and become an alive thing, an alive plant. But the basic thing will be that if you want to be you cannot be with your mind. Both cannot happen simultaneously.

Learning from Plate: Be Empty