VBT – Meditation 53.5

VBT – Meditation 53.5

Be A Seeker

In meditation you are not to repress any thought. But it is difficult because your whole mind consists of judgments, theories, “isms,” doctrines, beliefs. So one who is very deeply obsessed with any idea, a philosophy or a religion, cannot really enter into meditation. It is difficult because his obsession will become the barrier. So if you are a Christian or a Hindu or a Jaina, it will be difficult for you to enter meditation because your philosophy gives you judgments. – This is good and that is not good, this has to be repressed, this is not to be allowed.

All philosophies are repressive and all religions, all ideologies, are repressive, because they give you interpretations. They do not allow you to see life as it is. They force interpretations on it.

One who wants to go deep into meditation has to be aware of this nonsense of ideology. Just be a simple man without any philosophy, with no attitude toward life. Just be a seeker – one who is in an inquiry, in a deep inquiry to know what life is. Do not force any ideology over and above it. Then it will be very easy to move into meditation.

Because of this, the greatest meditator the world has ever known, Gautam Buddha, insisted that no ideology is needed, no philosophy is needed, no concepts about life are needed. Whether God is or is not is meaningless, irrelevant. Whether moksha, liberation, exists or not is meaningless. Whether your soul is immortal or not is meaningless.

Buddha was so much anti-philosophy not because he was anti-philosophy, but because anti-philosophy can become the basic ground for a meditator to jump into the unknown. Philosophy means knowing something about the unknown without knowing it. It is just preconceptions, hypotheses, man-constructed ideologies.

This is to be remembered as a very foundational fact: do not judge, let the mind flow easily. As the river flows, let the mind flow easily; just sit on the bank watching. And this watching should be pure – without any interpretations. Sooner or later, when the water has flown, when the repressed ideas have moved, you will find gaps coming. A thought will go, and another thought will not be coming, and there will be a gap – an interval. In that interval, nothingness happens. In that interval you will have the first glimpse of your real face, of the original face.

When there is no thought there is no society. When there is no thought there is no other. When there is no other, no society, you need not have any face. Thoughtlessness is facelessness. In that interval, when one thought has gone and another has not appeared, in that interval, for the first time you will know in reality what is your face – the face you had when you were not born and the face you will have when you die.

All the faces in life are false. And once you know the real face, once you feel this inner nature which Buddhists call buddha swabhava – the nature of the inner buddha – when you come to feel this inner nature even once, even with a single glimpse, you will be a different person, because now you will constantly know what is false and what is real. Then you will have the criterion. Then you can compare, and there will be no need to ask what is real and what is unreal. The question comes only because you do not know what is real, and whatsoever you know is all unreal.

Only through meditation will you be able to learn what is a false image and what is a real, authentic face. Of course, the mind is automatic, and whatsoever you have done has become mechanical. It is hard to break this mechanicalness.