VBT – Week’s Meditation 27
Life And Labor
All the strength, all the vitality of life is lost because man’s body and man’s being have been created for a certain amount of labor, and now he has been spared from all that work.
Right labor is also an essential part in the awakening of man’s consciousness and energy.
One morning Abraham Lincoln was polishing his shoes in his house. One of his friends who was visiting him said, “Lincoln! What are you doing? You polish your own shoes?”
Lincoln said, “You surprised me! Do you polish other people’s shoes? I am polishing my own shoes; do you polish others’ shoes?”
The friend said, “No, no, I will get my shoes polished by others!”
Lincoln said, “It is worse to get your shoes polished by others than to polish others’ shoes.”
What does it mean? It means that we are losing our direct contact with life. Our direct contacts with life are those that come through labor.
Life and labor are synonymous. Life and labor have the same meaning. But slowly, slowly we have started calling those people who do not have to do physical exertion, fortunate, and those who have to do physical exertion, unfortunate. And in a way it has become so, because in a way many people have dropped doing labor so some people have to do too much labor. Too much labor kills one. Too little labor also kills one.
Hence “Right labor. Proper distribution of physical labor.” Each person should do some physical labor. The more intensely, the more blissfully, the more gratefully a man enters the labor part of his life, the more he will find that his life-energy has started moving down from the brain closer to the navel. For labor neither the brain nor the heart is needed. The energy for labor is derived directly from the navel. This is its source.
That is why much exertion is needed – so much that you feel, “Now it is going beyond me.” The first moment you feel it is going beyond you, it is not going beyond you – it is just going beyond the first layer. And when the first layer is finished, you will feel tired. When the second layer is finished, you will feel, “If I do anything now, I will be dead.” So many come to me, and they say that whenever they reach deep in meditation, a moment comes when they become afraid and scared and they say, “Now I am afraid. It seems as if I am going to die. Now I cannot penetrate any further. A fear grips me, as if I am going to die, now I will not be able to come out of meditation.”
That is the right moment – the moment when you need courage. A little courage, and you will penetrate the third, the deepest, infinite layer.
This technique helps you very easily to fall into that cosmic ocean of energy: ROAM ABOUT UNTIL EXHAUSTED AND THEN, DROPPING TO THE GROUND, IN THIS DROPPING BE WHOLE. And when you drop to the ground totally, for the first time you will be whole, unitary, one. There will be no fragments, no divisions. The mind with its divisions will disappear, and the being that is undivided, indivisible, will appear for the first time.
Tags: Life And Labor
