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Real Renunciation

Eternity consists of the present. Then what we call “present” is nothing but the spot where eternity crosses time, where eternity penetrates time. There is a way to move into that eternity: that’s what meditation is all about.

Meditation is a drop into eternity. That’s why all techniques, all methods of meditation, insist: don’t be too obsessed with the past, let it go; and don’t be too infatuated with the future, let it go too.

Slowly, slowly withdraw yourself from past memories and future projections. The past is no more, the future is not yet; both are non-existential. To remain in the non-existential is to remain in misery, because existence is bliss, satchitananda – it is truth, it is consciousness, it is bliss. Non-existence is untruth, unconsciousness, misery; just the opposite. And we live in the non-existential.

Just watch what goes on inside you: either you are thinking of the past, the nostalgia of the past – your beautiful childhood, or your youth, your love affairs, and this and that – or you are immersed in the future – what you are going to do tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. Either you are drowned in the past or you are drowned in the future. That’s why you are not. That’s why you yourself have become a falsehood. You are too concerned with the false, and that concern makes you pseudo.

Withdraw yourself from the past and the future.

This is real renunciation, this is sannyas: withdrawing yourself from past and future; not by effort.

Remember, if you withdraw yourself by effort you will be deceived. If you withdraw yourself by effort, if you say, “I will withdraw myself from the past so that I can be in deep meditation,” then your deep meditation is a future project. Then it is neither meditation nor deep. You have already moved from the past to the future. If you say, “If I withdraw from the past I will attain to nirvana,” now you have only substituted the past with the future. Both are the same, both are non-existential. It does not make any difference.

If you withdraw from your future, you say, “I will not desire the future because I have to attain nirvana, to enlightenment, to satori” – but this is the future. You cannot withdraw by effort, because in effort you will always be motivated. There will be a desire, there will be a goal.

Then how to withdraw? One withdraws only by understanding the situation that the past is not, it is futile; not that it is going to lead you into the world of truth if you withdraw from the past, no.

Just seeing the futility of the past – that this is all memory, dust that has gathered on the mirror of consciousness; it is just useless – you wash it away, with no motivation; just seeing the futility of it, you drop it. Not that you drop it for something else; if you drop it for something else the future has entered in. You have deceived yourself.

With the past, in the same package, the future is also dropped. And then there is the present. Not that you had asked for it or you had longed for it or you had desired and worked and practised for it, no; because the past and future are no more there, then the present is. The same space that was occupied by the past and the future is now empty. In that emptiness one feels the present.