VBT – Meditation 36.1

VBT – Meditation 36.1

Simple Secret

Withdraw your awareness from everywhere and just let it rest within yourself, and you have arrived home.

Whether you are afraid or not, everybody is missing the train. It is good that you are afraid, because that may help you to understand why you are missing.

You are not in the moment. You are either in the past or in the future – both are non-existent. Neither can you do anything with the past, nor can you do anything with the future. All that you can do is with the present, and the present is such a small, split second that if you are engaged somewhere else, it simply slips by and you have missed the train.

Learn to be in the present.

Withdraw your energy from the past. Don’t waste your time in memories; what is gone is gone – say goodbye to it and close the chapter.

What has not come yet has not come yet; don’t unnecessarily waste your time and energy in imagination, because no imagination is ever fulfilled. It is because of this that the proverb exists in every language: “Man proposes, and God disposes” – because you imagine a certain thing in the future, and it is never so.

Withdrawing yourself from the past and future, you will become a tremendously intense energy, focused in the present, concentrated in the present like an arrow. No train could manage to leave the platform without you.

Each moment being aware, alert, watchful, in the herenow, is the way not to miss the train. Every experience needs your presence here, this moment.

And this is a simple secret, but it opens the doors of existence, of all the mysteries, of all that is worth knowing, worth tasting, worth feeling, worth being.

Withdrawing yourself from the past and the future is real renunciation, is sannyas. Not by effort, remember: if you withdraw yourself by effort you will be deceived. If you withdraw yourself by effort, if you say, “I will withdraw myself from the past so that I can be in deep meditation,” then your deep meditation is a future project. Then it is neither meditation nor deep. You have already moved from the past to the future. If you say, “If I withdraw from the past, I will attain nirvana,” now you have only substituted the past with the future. Both are the same, both are non-existential. It does not make any difference.

If you withdraw from your future, if you say, “I will not desire the future because I have to attain nirvana, enlightenment, satori,” it is the future. You cannot withdraw by effort because with effort you will always be motivated. There will be a desire, there will be a goal.

Then how to withdraw? You withdraw only by understanding the situation: the past is not, it is futile. Not that withdrawing from the past is going to lead you into the world of truth, no. Just seeing the futility of the past – it is all memory, dust that has gathered on the mirror of consciousness, it is just useless – you wash it away, with no motivation. Just seeing the futility of it, you drop it. Not that you drop it for something else; if you drop it for something else the future has entered. You have deceived yourself.