Attention

Change In Consciousness

The Only Real Change Is a Change in Consciousness

How can you escape yourself? Wherever you go, you will be with yourself. Wherever you go, you will behave in the same way. Situations may be different, but how can you be different? You will be asleep in the Himalayas. What different does it make whether you sleep in Pune or in Boston, or you sleep in London or in the Himalayas? Wherever you are, you will be dreaming. Drop dreaming! Become more alert. Suddenly dreams disappear, and with dreams all miseries disappear.

People keep trying to change their lives by changing externals. We buy new cars, new clothes, new furniture. We get a new job. We move to a new place. We get a new wife or husband.

We can keep changing externals all we want. The key factor in how we feel is ourselves. Even with the new car, new job, new spouse, new place… we will remain the same person with the same conditioning, with the same thought patterns, with the same emotional problems.

If we want real change in life, we need a change in consciousness. Eckhart Tolle puts this nicely in The Power of Now: “You may win $10 million, but that kind of change is no more than skin deep. You would simply continue to act out the same conditioned patterns in more luxurious surroundings. Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change?”

My own experience is that if you can be silent, and if you can transcend mind and your consciousness can grow, it does not matter what you are doing; your actions are not counted at all, only your consciousness.

As you become silent, as you become conscious, your actions start changing – but not vice versa. You can change your actions, but that will not make you more conscious. You become more conscious, and your actions will change – that’s absolutely simple and scientific. You were doing something stupid; as you become more alert and conscious, you cannot do it.

It is not a question of reward or punishment. It is simply your consciousness, your silence, your peace, which makes you look so far away and so deep into everything that you do. You cannot do harm to anybody; you cannot be violent, you cannot be angry, you cannot be greedy, you cannot be ambitious. Your consciousness has given you so much blissfulness … what can greed give you, accept anxieties? What can ambition give you? Just a continuous struggle to reach higher on some ladder.

As your consciousness becomes more settled, all your life patterns change. What religions have called sin will disappear from your life, and what they have called virtue will automatically flow from your being, from your action. But they have been doing just vice versa: first change the acts. It is as if you are in a dark house and you are stumbling over furniture and things, and you are told that unless you stop stumbling, light is not possible. What I am saying is, bring light in and stumbling will disappear, because when there is light why should you stumble over things? Every time you stumble, every time you hit your head on the wall, it hurts. It is a punishment in itself – a wrong act is a punishment in itself; there is nobody recording your acts. And every beautiful action is a reward unto itself.

But first bring this light in your life. Meditation is an effort to bring this light and to bring this joy and to bring silence and to bring blissfulness.