Nature Of The Fence

You Are Unlimited

That’s what many people have been doing down the centuries. They think they are in a prison, so they fight with the prison, they fight with the guards, they fight with the jailer; they fight with the system. They fight with the walls; they go on filing the bars of the windows. They want to escape from the prison, they try to unlock the prison, but it cannot be done – because the prison does not exist. The jailer and the guard and the bars and the locks are all imagination.

You are in a deep sleep and you are seeing a nightmare. The basic question is how to come out of sleep.

I have heard…

No durance vile could be more pathetic than that suffered by the drunk who was found wandering agonizingly around and around on the sidewalk outside the fence which encloses a public park, beating upon the bars and screaming: “Let me out!”

That is your situation. You are not locked up, you are not imprisoned; you are simply drunk. You think that you are imprisoned. This is just a thought. I know why that thought arises in your mind: because you feel yourself, so limited from everywhere, out of the limitation the idea of prison arises. Wherever you move there is a limitation, you can go only so far and then you cannot go any further; then there must be a wall which is hindering you. So you infer that there is a wall all around – maybe not visible, maybe it is a glass wall made of very transparent glass: you can see through it, but whenever you move in any direction you stumble again and again and you cannot go beyond a certain point. This gives you the idea of a prison, that you are imprisoned. But this limitation is also because of sleep. In sleep you become identified with the body, so the limitations of the body become your limitations. In sleep you become identified with the mind, so the limitations of the mind become your limitations.

You are unlimited. You are unbounded. As you are in your pure being, no limitation exists; you are a god. But to know that godhood, don’t start fighting with the prison; otherwise you will never be a winner. More and more you will be defeated, and more and more you will feel frustrated, and more and more you will lose self-confidence; more and more you will feel that it seems impossible to get out of it.

Start by becoming more aware. Start by becoming more alert, more attentive. That is the only thing that has to be done. Being aware, you will start feeling that the walls that were too close are no longer so close; they are widening. Your prison is becoming bigger and bigger. The more your consciousness expands, the more you will see that your prison is no longer that small, it is becoming bigger and bigger. More expansive consciousness and bigger space is available to you to move, to be, to live, to love. Then you know the basic mechanism: less conscious, and the walls come closer; unconscious, and the walls are just touching you from everywhere; you are in a small cell, even a slight movement is not possible.

Remember this phrase: expansion of consciousness. With that expansion, you expand. One day, when your consciousness is absolute and there is not a lingering shadow of darkness inside, when there is no unconscious in you, all has become conscious, when the light is burning bright, when you are luminous from the inner awareness, then suddenly you see that even the sky is not your limit. There is no limitation to you.