Words To Emptiness – In Gita Verse 12.6-7 But those who worship Me, giving up all their activities unto Me and being devoted to Me without deviation, engaged in devotional service and always meditating upon Me, having fixed their minds upon Me, O son of Pṛthā – for them I am the swift deliverer from the ocean of birth and death.
When Krishna says – giving up all their activities unto Me and being devoted to Me without deviation – means those who act from their emptiness.
Man is a growing gestalt. Every day new things are to happen. Every day you have to absorb the new and to make a place for the new; the old has to be gone. The old has to be said goodbye to, with all thankfulness.
Mind means words: self means silence. Mind is nothing but all the words that you have accumulated; silence is that which has always been with you, it is not an accumulation. That is the meaning of self. It is your intrinsic quality. In the background of silence you go on accumulating words, and the words in total are known as the mind. Silence is meditation. It is a question of changing the gestalt, shifting the attention from words into silence – which is always there.
Your mind will ask you to listen to what Krishna is saying, but the reality is that whatever is significant cannot be said. All words in themselves are empty, in themselves they have no value. Words are nothing but foam swirling on the surface. From a distance, the foam on the crests of the waves looks lovely, as though the wave in the ocean is approaching wearing a silver crown, as though flowers have bloomed on the waves – an endless number of bright, white flowers – but only from a distance. If you go there and take the foam in your hands, you will find that it is only bubbles that disappear.
Words are nothing more than foam on the ocean of consciousness. And if the consciousness is deep, beautiful foam arises; if the consciousness is full of music inside, the foam too carries a music in it. If its life has come to an inner peace, a kind of poetry is born in the foam. What Krishna speaks is foam; if you experience a poetry in it, a beauty in it, understand that this is only an indication. Nothing will be gained by holding the foam in your fist or preserving it in a steel safe. Concern yourself with that emptiness from which the foam is arising, the depths from which it is coming. The words are the foam; in the emptiness is the ocean.
So, it is only when Krishna is silent between two words that the doors of the temple are open. That is when you should enter.
Your whole gestalt will have to be changed. This word gestalt is worth understanding. It is a German word, used by a school of psychologists – gestalt psychology. You must have come across a certain picture of an old woman in children’s books, and hidden in the same picture is also a young woman. If you look attentively you will be able to see the young woman, and if you continue to look, the young woman will change into the old woman. Both take shape from the same lines, but the thing that is so special about it is that both women cannot be seen simultaneously. You can see both; first you saw the old woman, then you saw the young one, so you are now acquainted with both, but whenever you look you will see only one woman, even though you know that the other is present. So now there is no question of ignorance, of non-acquaintance; but still, when you look at the young woman you won’t be able to find the old one, and when you find the old one the young one will disappear. You know that both are there in the same lines, but both cannot be seen together. This phenomenon is gestalt.
So when you hear Krishna’s words, you won’t be able to hear the silence; for that, the gestalt will have to change. When the whole of your consciousness is engaged in catching the words, you will be deprived of the silence; and when you catch Krishna’s silences you won’t be able to catch the words.
When Krishna says anything, read the words but then find understanding through your emptiness. Change your Gestalt from words to Emptiness. Unless from your total emptiness you read Krishna’s words you will not understand his message.
Tags: Words To Emptiness
