VBT – Meditation 18.1

VBT – Meditation 18.1

Anything Unique

Love makes anything unique. That is why without love you never feel like a person. Unless someone loves you deeply, you never feel that you have any uniqueness. You are just one in a crowd – just a number, a datum. You can be changed.

For example, if you are a clerk in an office or a teacher in a school or a professor in a university, your professor-hood is replaceable. Another professor will replace you; he can replace you at any moment because you are just used there as a professor. You have a functional meaning and significance.

If you are a clerk, someone else is easily able to do the work. The work will not wait for you. If you die this moment, the next moment someone will replace you and the mechanism will continue. You were just a figure – another figure will do. You were just a utility.

But then someone falls in love with this clerk or this professor. Suddenly the clerk is no more a clerk; he has become a unique person. If he dies, then the beloved cannot replace him. He is irreplaceable. Then the whole world may go on in the same way, but the one who was in love cannot be the same. This uniqueness, this being a person, happens through love.

This sutra says, LOOK LOVINGLY AT SOME OBJECT. It makes no distinction between an object and a person. There is no need, because when you look lovingly anything will become a person.

The very look changes, transforms.

You may or may not have observed what happens when you drive a particular car, say a Fiat. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of Fiats exactly similar, but your car, if you are in love with it, becomes unique – a person. It cannot be replaced; a relationship is created. Now you feel this car as a person. If something goes wrong… a slight sound, and you feel it. And cars are very temperamental. You know the temper of your car – when it feels good and when it feels bad. The car becomes, by and by, a person.

Why? If there is a love relationship, anything becomes a person. If there is a lust relationship, then a person will become a thing. And this is one of the most inhuman acts man can do – to make someone a thing.

LOOK LOVINGLY AT SOME OBJECT… So what is one to do? When you look lovingly, what are you to do? The first thing: forget yourself. Forget yourself completely! Look at a flower and forget yourself completely. Let the flower be; you become completely absent. Feel the flower, and a deep love will flow from your consciousness toward the flower. And let your consciousness be filled with only one thought – how you can help this flower to flower more, to become more beautiful, to become more blissful. What can you do?

It is not meaningful whether you can do or not; that is not relevant. The feeling of what you can do – this pain, this deep ache over what you can do to make this flower more beautiful, more alive, more flowering – is meaningful. Let this thought reverberate into your whole being. Let every fiber of your body and mind feel it. You will be transfixed in an ecstasy, and the flower will become a person.