VBT – Meditation 53.4
The Real Face
Question might arise in us – How can we learn to tell between a false image and a real one in ourselves?
Many things have to be understood. One: all your faces are false; you do not have any real face. That is why the question arises over which is false and which is real. If you have the real, you know. Then the question never arises. All the faces are unreal, false, so you do not have any comparisons to make. You do not know the real – that is the difficulty. You have not seen the real, and the real is not seen naturally; much effort is needed to find it.
In Zen they say that the real is the original face – the face you had before your birth and the face you will have after your death. That means that all the faces in life, so-called life, are false. How to find out what is the real face? You will have to go back to before your birth. That is the only way to find the real face, because the moment you are born you have started being false. You have started being false because it pays to be false.
The child is born, and he has started to be a politician. The moment he is related to the world, to the parents, to the family, he is in politics. Now he has to take care about his faces. He will smile as a bribery. He will try to find out in what ways he should behave so that he is accepted more, loved more, appreciated more. And sooner or later the child will find out what is condemned by the parents, by the family, and he will start repressing it. Then the false has entered.
So all the faces you have are false. Do not try to find out the real one among your present faces. They are all false, similarly false. They are useful – that is why they have been adopted – utilitarian, but not true. And the deepest deception is that whenever you become aware that your faces are false, you will create another face which you will think is the real.
For example, a person who lives an ordinary life, in an ordinary world, with a business, a family, comes to realize the whole of his falseness, the whole inauthenticity of his life, so he renounces it. He becomes a sannyasin and leaves the world, and he may be thinking that now the face is real. It is again a false face. It has been adopted as a reaction to other faces, and with a reaction you can never get to the real. By reacting to a false face you will create another false face. So what is to be done?
The real is not something which has to be achieved. The false is your achievement. The real is not something to be achieved, it is not something to be cultivated. It is something to be discovered! It is already there. You need not try to attain it, because any effort will only lead to some other false face. For a false face effort is needed; it has to be cultivated. For the real face you have not to do anything, it is already there. If you simply leave your clinging to the false faces, the false will drop and that which is real will remain. When you have nothing to drop, and only that which cannot be dropped is there, you will come to realize what is real.
Meditation is the way to drop the false faces. That is why there is so much insistence on being thoughtless – because without thought you cannot create a false face. In a thoughtless state of awareness, you will be real – because it is basically thought which creates false faces and masks. When there is no thought there can be no face. You will be faceless, or with the real face – and both mean the same.
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