VBT – Week’s Meditation 22
Identification Is The Only Sin
One of the great tantrics of this age, George Gurdjieff, says that identification is the only sin. The next sutra, the tenth sutra on centering – which we are going to penetrate tonight – is concerned with identification. So first be crystal clear on what identification means.
You were a child once; now you are not. Someone becomes young, someone becomes old, and childhood becomes a past thing. Youth has gone, but still you are identified with your childhood. You cannot see it as happening to someone else; you cannot be a witness to it. Whenever you see your childhood, you are not aloof from it, you are one with it. Whenever someone remembers his youth, he is one with it.
Really, now it is just a dream. And if you can see your childhood as a dream, as a film passing before you and you are not identified with it, you are just a witness, you will achieve a very subtle insight into yourself. If you see your past as a film, as a dream – you are not part of it, you are just out of it…and really you are – then many things will happen. If you are thinking about your childhood, you are not in it – you cannot be. Childhood is just a memory, just a past memory. You are remaining aloof and looking at it. You are different: you are a witness. If you can feel this witnessing and then see your childhood as a film on a screen, many things will happen.
One: if childhood has become just a dream which you can see, then whatsoever you are just now will become a dream the next day. If you are young, then your youth will become a dream. If you are old, then your old age also will become a dream. One day you were a child; now childhood has become just a dream and you can observe it.
It is good to start with the past. Observe the past and disidentify yourself from it; become a witness.
Then observe the future, whatsoever you imagine about the future, and be a witness to that also.
This is an experience, and the result is phenomenal, because then you know that through many, many lives you have lived the same nonsense that you are living now. You have been doing this whole nonsense so many times, repeatedly. The pattern is the same, the format is the same, only the details differ. You loved some other woman, now you love this woman. You gathered money… the coins were of one kind, now the coins are different. But the whole pattern is the same; it is repetitive.
Once you can see that for many, many lives you have lived the same nonsense, how stupid has been this whole vicious circle, suddenly you are awakened and the whole thing becomes a dream.
You are thrown away from it, and now you do not want to repeat the same thing in the future.
Desire stops, because desire is nothing but the past being projected into the future. Desire is nothing but your past experience in search of another repetition again. Desire means just an old experience that you want to repeat again – nothing else. And you cannot leave desire unless you become aware of this whole phenomenon. How can you leave it? The past is there as a great barrier, a rock-like barrier. It is upon your head; it is pushing you toward the future. Desires are created by the past and projected into the future. If you can know the past as a dream, all desires become impotent.
They fall down, they just wither away – and the future disappears. In that disappearance of the past and future, you are transformed.
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