VBT – Meditation 21.2

VBT – Meditation 21.2

The Journey in Consciousness

Man is mind.

The word ‘man’ itself comes from the Sanskrit root man, which means mind. If you understand the workings of the mind, you will understand the reality of man and the possibility too. If you understand the inner mechanism of the mind, you will understand the past of man, the present and the future too.

Man in himself is not a being but a passage. In himself man is not a being, because man is continuously a becoming. There is no rest in being a man. Rest is below man or above man.

Below is nature, above is God. Man is just in between – a link, a ladder. You cannot rest on a ladder, you cannot stop on the ladder. The ladder cannot become your abode. Man has to be surpassed, man has to be transcended.

Man is a journey between your two infinities. One is your nature, one infinity; another is your hidden God, the other infinity. And man is just between the two, a ferry boat. Use it, but don’t be confined by it. Use it, but don’t be defined by it. Always remember that you have to go beyond.

The whole message of Jesus is how to go beyond man. That’s why he again and again says: I am the Son of man and the Son of God. He goes on insisting on this contradiction, because he wants it to be completely clear that man is both: on the one hand part of nature, on the other hand part of God. That is the meaning of the word ’son’: son means a part of the father.

And because man belongs to these two realities – two separate realities – there is anxiety in man, there is tension in man, there is constant conflict in man, because these two natures go on fighting. Hence, as man, there is no possibility of peace. Either you have to become absolutely unconscious, like a drunkard when he has taken so much alcohol that he has lost all his consciousness – then there is peace, or you will have to become so conscious that all the nooks and corners of your being are full of light – you become a Buddha or a Christ – then there is peace. Either fall below man, or go beyond man. Don’t go on clinging to being a man, because then you are clinging to a disease.

That’s exactly what man is: a disease, a constant tension – to be or not to be, to be this or to be that – a constant fight between the soul and the body, the lower and the higher, unconsciousness and consciousness. To understand man as a conflict, to understand man as a constant tension will help immensely, because then you stop clinging to man as such. Rather, on the contrary, you start thinking ’How to go beyond, how to transcend, how to surpass?’

Friedrich Nietzsche is right when he says that man is the only animal who tries to surpass himself, the only animal who can surpass himself. It is the greatest miracle in the world: to surpass oneself. But it has happened. It has happened in a Christ, in a Buddha, in a Krishna. It can happen in you! You are a great promise, a project, an adventure. But don’t start thinking about yourself as if you have arrived. Then you cling somewhere in between, and a part of you will be pulled to one side and the other part to another side – you will be torn apart. And you will remain in anguish, and your existence will be nothing but a long, long, on-going nightmare.