VBT – Meditation 36.2

VBT – Meditation 36.2

The Present Is

When you drop your past, seeing the futility of it, how can you go on living in the future? The future is always based on the past. Whatever you want tomorrow is nothing but all those beautiful things you had yesterday. You want a repetition – maybe modified, a little bit better, refined – but it is the past again. When the past is dropped by seeing the futility of it, just out of the understanding that it is futile, for no other reason, it drops out of your hands. With it the future also disappears. The future is the shadow of the past. You were with a woman yesterday and you would like to be with the woman again tomorrow: that is the future. Yesterday you went to Latif’s and the food was delicious; you are thinking of going there again tomorrow. Your tomorrow is nothing but a reflection of your yesterday. When yesterday disappears, reflections disappear. With the past, in the same package, the future is also dropped.

And then there is the present. Not that you asked for it, or you longed for it, or you desired and worked and practiced for it: no. Because the past and future are no longer there, the present is. The same space that was occupied by the past and the future is now empty. In that emptiness you feel the present.

And 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. 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 think 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 the 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 the 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.

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 you have been just swimming on the surface; you have forgotten the depth of the ocean, of this reality. So when you start falling into the depth you will become afraid, you will have a very deep, frightening, scary experience; you will be in a 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 nonessential will be gone – and it is good that the nonessential goes.”