VBT – Meditation 56.1
Nothing Is Certain
In Western languages MAYA has been translated very wrongly, and it gives the feeling in Western terms that “illusion” means “unreal.” It does not! “Illusion” means the inability to decide whether the thing is real or unreal. This confusion is MAYA.
This whole world is MAYA, a confusion. You cannot decide; you cannot be decisive about it. It is always escaping you, always changing, turning into something else. It is fantasy, a dreamlike thing.
This technique is concerned with this philosophy. “ILLUSIONS DECEIVE”: or, that which deceives is illusion – “COLORS CIRCUMSCRIBE, EVEN DIVISIBLES ARE INDIVISIBLE”: In this world of illusion nothing is certain. This whole world is like rainbows. They appear to be, but they are not.
If you are far away they are, but if you come nearer they dissolve. The nearer you come, the more they are not. If you reach a point where you were seeing a rainbow, it is no more there.
The whole world is like rainbow colors, and it is so. When you are far away everything is hopeful; when you come nearer the hope disappears. And when you reach the goal, only ashes are there – just a dead rainbow. The colors have disappeared, and things as they appeared are not. As you feel them to be, they are not.
“EVEN DIVISIBLES ARE INDIVISIBLE”: Your whole mathematics, your whole calculating system, all your concepts, all your philosophy, just become futile. If you try to understand this illusion, your very effort confuses you more. Nothing is certain there; everything is uncertain – a flux, a flux of change, with no possibility for you to decide whether this or that is true or false. What will happen?
If you take this attitude, what will happen? If you really go deep in this attitude that everything which cannot be decided is illusory, you will automatically, spontaneously turn to yourself. Then the only point where you can have a center is in your own being. That is certain.
Try to understand this: I may dream in the night that I have become a butterfly, and I cannot decide in that dream whether this is real or unreal. In the morning I may be puzzled like Chuang Tzu whether instead the butterfly may have been dreaming. These are two dreams, and there is no way to compare which is real and which is unreal.
But Chuang Tzu is missing one thing – the dreamer. He is thinking only of dreams, comparing dreams and missing the dreamer – the one who dreams that Chuang Tzu has become a butterfly, the one who is thinking that it may be quite the reverse: that the butterfly is dreaming that she has become Chuang Tzu. Who is this observer? Who was asleep and is now awake? You may be unreal, you may be a dream to me, but “I” cannot be a dream to myself, because even for a dream to exist a real dreamer is needed. Even for a false dream a real dreamer is needed. Even a dream cannot exist without a real dreamer. So forget the dream. This technique says forget dreams. The whole world is an illusion, you are not. So don’t go after the world, there is no possibility to gain certainty there. And now this appears to be proven even by scientific research.
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