VBT – Meditation 36.3
A Man Of Essence
The man of awareness becomes a man of essence. Personality consists of the nonessential. Your soul consists of the essential, and the essential is immortal. The nonessential is momentary, and you cling to the nonessential; hence you suffer because you cannot keep hold of it. It disappears sooner or later. Whatever you do is futile because the momentary cannot be forever. Just as it comes, it goes. It is a wave, a ripple, a bubble. Sooner or later it will be gone. For the moment it looks so beautiful – the sun is reflected in it and a small rainbow surrounds it – but it is just a soap bubble. You can play with it but don’t become attached to it, otherwise you will suffer.
That’s why people are suffering: they become attached to soap bubbles. They have given different names to the soap bubbles. Somebody calls it love, somebody calls it money, somebody calls it power, somebody calls it life, prestige, and so on, so forth – but they are all soap bubbles. Any moment they will be gone, and the person will be left in despair. To cling to the personality is to cling to soap bubbles.
But this has been the attitude of your so-called thinkers down the ages. One party says the old is gold, and the older it is, the better. That’s what Hindus say: their Vedas are the oldest scriptures. That’s what the Jainas say their first tirthankara, Adinatha, is the most ancient master in the world. It may be so, but it has nothing to do with truth. It has something to do with history, it has something to do with the body and the personality of Adinatha, but it has nothing to do with his inner truth, not at all.
Jesus said of Abraham: I am before Abraham was. Abraham preceded Jesus by at least twenty-five centuries, just as Mahavira has preceded me. But Jesus says, “I am before Abraham was.”
Once Osho also had said – “I am before Mahavira was.” The difference between me and Mahavira is only on the surface, on the horizontal line where we are separated by twenty-five centuries. But on the vertical? And it is the vertical which is significant, not the horizontal. On the vertical, we are not two.
That’s what Jesus is saying: “I am before Abraham was.” He is not saying that Jesus is older than Abraham. He is saying that this reality of I-amness, this truth of being, is eternal. It was there even before Abraham.
Gorakh says, “My master is my son, and my master’s master is my grandson, and my master’s master’s master is my great-grandson.” What does Gorakh mean? Is he just destroying the whole idea of history? The disciple saying that “My master is my son” now, is he putting things upside down? How can Gorakh be the father of his own master? And how can he be the grandfather of his own master’s master?
What he is saying is simply this: there is a sequence in time – the father precedes the son, never otherwise – but in the world of eternity nothing is preceded by anything, all simply is. There, distinctions, distinctions of time, disappear. Only one remains.
Mahavira moved in the vertical, disappeared as a personality and became the essence; so has it happened to Mohammed, so has it happened to Bahauddin, so has it happened to me – so can it happen to anybody who is courageous enough to take the jump into the vertical.
The moment you take the jump into the vertical, personality disappears; you are no longer abc. Then the taste is the same, just as it is the same salty taste from wherever you taste the ocean. The taste of truth is one. It is the same truth that Jesus tasted, it is the same truth that Buddha and Mahavira tasted. It is the same truth that I am tasting and you can taste. And that taste knows no time, no distance.
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