Deep Receptivity – In Gita Verse 11.40 Obeisances to You from the front, from behind and from all sides! O unbounded power, You are the master of limitless might! You are all-pervading, and thus You are everything!
Now Arjuna is saying in gratitude that you are omnipresent.
God is not a person but only a presence.
And when I say “presence,” be very attentive, because you can go on listening according to your own conditioning. You can even make “presence” something objective – you have again fallen into the same trap. God is a presence at the innermost core of your being: it is your own presence. It is not a meeting with somebody else.
In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 7.3, blog I wrote – God is a presence, not a person. Hence all worshipping is sheer stupidity. Prayerfulness is needed, not prayer.
Real prayerfulness is not a talk, it is a listening, a deep listening. One simply sits silently, open, sensitive, alert. Have you watched it? Sometimes waiting for your beloved, your lover, your friend, a slight murmur in the trees, the wind passing by, or old leaves of the almond falling… and you rush out: ‘Maybe she has come; maybe he has come.’ And it is nothing – just wind playing with old, dead leaves. You go again, again you wait, again something else: the postman moving in the neighbourhood, footsteps, and you are again at the door.
Just as you watch for your lover, for your beloved – for small indications you remain alert – in the same way a prayerful mind remains alert for God, for His word to arrive. And it arrives!
Just prayerful patience and waiting….. In Zen it has been one of the oldest traditions that whenever a disciple is hit, the whole monastery becomes happy, and the disciple is received as something special. The master has hit him; the disciple has been chosen. People wait for years to be hit by the master. They pray, they ask the master, “When will we be capable?” or, “When will we be fortunate enough to be hit? When will your stick, your staff, descend upon us?”
A deep receptivity is needed. Only have a welcoming heart, a deep receptivity, patience; it can descend on you at any moment. Sometimes it comes near you and you become scared. Sometimes, on many centres of your body, the Master hits but then you are scared, then you want to escape from it.
Be alert to the mind; the mind will always tell you to escape. Wherever there is danger the mind will tell you: run away from here.
The mind has two ways of encouraging a situation – one is fight, another is flight. Your mind starts fighting with Master, Master can see. When the Master is talking, the Master can see in your eyes whether you are fighting or fleeing. Your very look, the way you sit, the way you hear, shows that you are fighting, resisting, withdrawn – creating a space so the Master cannot enter in you. Or, you are on a flight, and then you are sleepy and you are not listening at all. Or you are somewhere else, thinking something else, you are engaged within so you can escape.
When you are ready neither flight, nor fight exists, just a prayerful patience and waiting. There is not even an impatience about it… because impatience creates tension. You are not even impatient, just patiently waiting, passively waiting with a prayerful mood.
The disciple who can wait will find all his questions answered at the right moment. But waiting is a great quality: it is deep patience, it is great trust. The mind cannot wait, it is always in a hurry. It knows nothing about patience; hence it goes on piling questions upon questions without getting the answer.
Patience is the greatest religious quality; if you have patience nothing else is needed. Patience is enough, enough unto itself. Patience means hope, trust, and without any hurry, without any impatience. Impatience simply shows that you are not trustful. Impatience simply shows that you want to impose yourself upon the will of God, that you want it right now. You don’t want him to work on his own. Impatience means, “My will is greater than your will.” Patience means, “I surrender my will to your will. Let your be my will, so whenever I am ripe, whenever – if it takes an eternity it is okay – I will trust, I will hope. I will not lose my heart, I will not be disheartened.”
Once you are ready to wait you will find Godliness everywhere and in everything.
Tags: Deep Receptivity
