VBT – Meditation 41.4

VBT – Meditation 41.4

Nonsense Of Ideology

Now modern sleep research says that you can be deprived of sleep and not much harm will result, but you cannot be deprived of your dreams. The old idea that sleep is very necessary has been found to be false. Instead of sleep, dreams are very necessary, and sleep is necessary only because you cannot dream without sleep.

Researchers have developed techniques with which it can now be judged from the outside whether you are dreaming or whether you are simply asleep. If you are simply asleep, they will disturb the sleep – the whole night long. When you are dreaming they will allow it, when you are not dreaming they will disturb the sleep, and no bad result comes out of it.

But if they should disturb you when you are dreaming and allow you to sleep when you are not dreaming, within three days you will begin to feel dizzy, and within seven days you will feel a deep uneasiness. Your body and mind both will feel ill. Within three weeks you will feel a certain type of insanity. What happens? It is because dreams are cathartic. If you go on repressing during the day and if the repressions are not allowed to be expressed, they will accumulate in you, and that accumulation of repression is insanity.

In meditation you are not to repress any thought. But it is difficult because your whole mind consists of judgments, theories, ‘isms,’ doctrines, beliefs. So one who is very deeply obsessed with any idea, a philosophy or a religion, cannot really enter into meditation. It is difficult because his obsession will become the barrier. So if you are a Christian or a Hindu or a Jain, it will be difficult for you to enter meditation because your philosophy gives you judgements. – This is good and that is not good, this has to be repressed, this is not to be allowed.

All philosophies are repressive and all religions, all ideologies, are repressive, because they give you interpretations. They do not allow you to see life as it is. They force interpretations on it.

One who wants to go deep into meditation has to be aware of this nonsense of ideology. Just be a simple man without any philosophy, with no attitude toward life. Just be a seeker – one who is in an inquiry, in a deep inquiry to know what life is. Do not force any ideology over and above it. Then it will be very easy to move into meditation.

Because of this, the greatest meditator the world has ever known, Gautam Buddha, insisted that no ideology is needed, no philosophy is needed, no concepts about life are needed. Whether God is or is not is meaningless, irrelevant. Whether MOKSHA, liberation, exists or not is meaningless.

Whether your soul is immortal or not is meaningless.

Buddha was so much anti-philosophy not because HE was anti-philosophy, but because anti-philosophy can become the basic ground for a meditator to jump into the unknown. Philosophy means knowing something about the unknown without knowing it. It is just preconceptions, hypotheses, man-constructed ideologies.