VBT – Meditation 34.3
Drop The Self
Buddha’s vision is very existential and nothing is as liberating as Buddha’s vision. If you believe in a soul you can leave the world, but then you will desire paradise – because you don’t leave yourself. Desire shifts into a new dimension. You drop greed, but really you don’t drop it; subtle greed arises.
Just see the paradise of Mohammedans or Christians or Hindus. It looks so worldly, so profane because whatsoever these religions are telling you to drop here, is provided there, and in bulk. They say, “Don’t drink alcohol!” and in the Mohammedan paradise, firdaus, rivers of alcohol are there. There is no need to purchase or buy alcohol, there is no need to carry a license; you just jump in. You can bathe, you can swim. Now, what is this?
Whatsoever you are dropping here, you are dropping only to get more – this is the logic.
Buddha says unless you drop the self, you will go on perpetuating the same nonsense again and again. Your paradise will be nothing but a projected world – the same world modified, made more beautiful, more decorated. Here on the earth women age, become old. In paradise, in the Hindu paradise, they never become old; they are stuck at the age of sixteen. They must be feeling very fed up at the age of sixteen; they never grow beyond that.
Here it is impossible. Even with all the scientific gadgets, instrumentation, methods of beautification, plastic surgery, this and that, even then it is not possible. One has to age. In paradise – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish – that miracle has happened: God has prepared a beautiful walled garden paradise for you. He is waiting. If you are virtuous, if you obey him, you will be rewarded tremendously; if you disobey, then the hell.
So the self exists here as the center of desire and God exists as the center of fulfilling that desire. Buddha says both are not. Get rid of both; neither God is, nor self is. Look at reality, don’t move in desires. Drop fantasies, stop dreaming and look at what is. And he says there is only this impermanent world of processes – this flux-like world, this vortex of reality, everything impermanent and changing; nothing is permanent.
That is the meaning of his insistence that there is no self – because you are trying to make something in you permanent. You say, the body changes, okay; the world changes, okay; relationships change, become rotten, okay – but the self, the self is eternal. Yes, this visible world changes – but the invisible “God,” he is eternal. You want something eternal so desperately that you start believing in it. It is your desire that the eternal should be there.
Buddha says there is nothing eternal. Everything is impermanent, everything is in flow. Understand this, and this very understanding will liberate you.
Remember, when others talk of liberation, they talk of liberation for the self. When Buddha talks of liberation, he talks of liberation from the self. And that is a tremendously radical standpoint. Not that you will be liberated, but liberated from you.
The only freedom that Buddha says is real freedom is freedom from yourself. Otherwise your mind will go on playing games. It will go on painting new desires on new canvases. Nothing will change. Canvases you can change. You can get out of the marketplace and sit in a temple – nothing will change, your mind will project the same desires in heaven and paradise.
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