Vertical Dimension – In Gita Verse 11.35 Sañjaya said to Dhṛtarāṣṭra: O King, after hearing these words from the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the trembling Arjuna offered obeisances with folded hands again and again. He fearfully spoke to Lord Kṛṣṇa in a faltering voice, as follows.
Why was Arjuna trembling? To be in the present is to be in truth. Then you have depth, you have fallen into the vertical dimension. You have heights, heights which are higher than Everest and depths which are deeper than the Pacific. Then your life has a grandeur, a splendor.
Person who has fallen into a vertical dimension is trembling because he is facing the truth as it is. Person who has fallen into a vertical dimension will be grateful. Arjuna in this condition was praying to Krishna.
This is what is called Buddhahood, Christ-consciousness, or whatever you will.
There are people who are past-oriented, there are people who are future-oriented – both go on missing. The orthodox, the conformist, is past-oriented, and the revolutionary, the rebel, is future-oriented; there is not any difference between them. The orthodox think the Golden Age was in the past, “the Garden of Eden”. The revolutionary, the so-called communist, the fascist, the socialist – he thinks the Golden Age is to come. It is in the future, the utopia, the classless society where everyone will be equal, the world of freedom where exploitation will have disappeared and paradise will descend on earth. But paradise is right now, here.
Beware of these two traps. You need not go into the past to search for truth. You need not go into the scriptures, because scriptures belong to the past; and you need not go into imagination, logic, because all that logic can do is create utopias in the future. You need not go anywhere, neither in the past nor in the future. You have to be just here.
And the utter beauty of the moment, and the utter blessedness of the moment.. and one is transformed – not by doing anything, but just by being here.
Allow yourself this fall into the present more and more. And you will be afraid, because it is really a fall. You will be going into depths, and those depths are abysmal; there is no bottom, and we have become accustomed to floating on the surface. For many lives we have been just swimming on the surface; we have forgotten the depth of the ocean, of this reality. So when you start falling into depth you will become afraid, you will have a very deep, frightening, scary experience; you will be in panic.
That is the moment when you need a Master to say to you, “Don’t be worried, there is nothing that can be lost, and that which can be lost is not worth keeping. That which is essential will remain with you, only the non-essential will be gone – and it is good that the non-essential go.”
The man of awareness becomes the man of the essence. Personality consists of the non-essential.
Your soul consists of the essential, and the essential is immortal. The non-essential is momentary, and we cling to the non-essential; hence we suffer, because we cannot keep hold of it. It disappears sooner or later. Whatsoever we do is futile because the momentary cannot be forever. Just as it comes, it goes. It is a wave, a ripple, a bubble; sooner or later it will be gone. For the moment it looks so beautiful – the sun is reflected in it and a small rainbow surrounds it – but it is just a soap bubble. You can play with it but don’t become attached to it, otherwise you will suffer. And that’s why people are suffering: they become attached to soap bubbles.
They have given different names to the soap bubbles. Somebody calls it love, somebody calls it money, somebody calls it power, somebody calls it life, prestige, and so on, so forth – but they are all soap bubbles. Any moment, they will be gone, and you will be left in despair.
To cling to the personality is to cling to soap bubbles.
Arjuna’s trembling is revealing that he understood it is the vertical which is significant, not the horizontal. On the vertical, we are not two.
When you drop your mask, when you drop your personality, when you look inwards, when you see the inner sky, then who is Osho and who is Mahavira? Then who is Jesus and who is Abraham? Then who is Gorakh and who is Adinath? All have disappeared; it is the one truth.
Tags: Vertical Dimension
