VBT – Meditation 47.0
ENTER THE SOUND OF YOUR NAME AND, THROUGH THIS SOUND, ALL SOUNDS.
Use Your Name As A Mantra
Your own name can be used as a mantra very easily, and it is very helpful because your name has gone very deep into your unconscious. Nothing else has gone so deep. If we are all sitting here, and we all fall asleep and someone comes and calls “Ram,” no one will listen except the person whose name is Ram. He will listen to it; he will be disturbed in his sleep. No one else will listen to the sound “Ram,” but why does this man listen? It has gone down deep; it is not conscious now, it has become unconscious.
Your name has gone very deep within you, but there is a very beautiful phenomenon about your name: you never call it, others call it. Others use it; you never use it.
I have heard that in the first world war, for the first time in America rationing was created. Thomas Edison was a very great scientist, but he was very poor so he had to stand in the queue for his ration card. And he was such a great man that no one ever used his name before him. There was no need to use his name for himself, and no one else would use his name because he was so much respected. Everyone would call him Professor, so he had forgotten what his name was.
He was standing in the queue, and when his name was called, when he was asked who Thomas Alva Edison was, he just stared blankly. Again the name was called, then someone who was a neighbor to Edison said to him, “Why are you standing? Your name is being called. It is your name, Professor.”
Then he became aware and he said, “But how can I recognize it? No one calls me Edison. It has been so long… They just call me Professor.”
You never use your own name. Only others use it – you have heard it used by others. But it has gone deep, very deep. It has penetrated like an arrow into your unconscious. If you yourself use it, then it becomes a mantra. And for two reasons it helps: one, when you use your own name, if your name is “Ram” and you use “Ram, Ram, Ram…,” suddenly you feel as if you are using someone else’s name – as if it is not yours. Or if you feel that this IS yours, you feel that there is a separate entity within you which is using it. It may belong to the body, it may belong to the mind, but he who is calling “Ram, Ram…” becomes a witness.
You have always called others’ names. When you call your own name it looks as if it belongs to someone else, not to you, and it is a very revealing phenomenon. You can become a witness to your own name, and with the name your whole life is involved. Separated from the name, you are separated from your whole life. And this name has penetrated deep within you because everyone has called you this from your very birth, you have always heard this. So use this sound, and with this sound you can go to the very depths to which the name has gone.
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