VBT – Meditation 57.5

VBT – Meditation 57.5

This Knowledge Of The Center

This technique is to create a feeling of two extremes within you. They are there, two polar opposites are there. Once you become aware of this polarity, you become for the first time a master of yourself.

Otherwise others are your masters; you are just a slave. Your wife knows, your son knows, your father knows, your friends know, that you can be pushed and pulled. You can be disturbed, you can be made happy and unhappy. If someone else can make you happy and unhappy, you are not a master, you are just a slave. The other has a hold. Just by a single gesture he can make you unhappy; just by a small smile can make you happy.

So you are just at the mercy of someone else; the other can do anything to you. And if this is the situation, then all your reactions are simply reactions, not actions. You simply react. If someone insults you and you become angry, your anger is not an action, it is a reaction. If someone appreciates you and you start smiling and feeling good, great, this is a reaction, not an action.

Buddha was passing by a village, and some people gathered there. They were against him, and they insulted him. Buddha listened, and then he said, “I am to reach the other village in time, so can I go now? If you have said whatsoever you have come to say, if it is finished, then I can move. Or, if you have to say something more to me, while returning I will wait here. You can come and tell me.”

Those people were just surprised. They couldn’t understand. They had been insulting him, using bad words, abusing him, so they said, “But we are not saying something to you, we are abusing and insulting you.” Buddha said, “You can do that, but if you want any reaction from me you have come late. Ten years before, if you had come with such words, I would have reacted. But now I have learned how to act, I am a master of myself now; you cannot force me to do anything. So you will have to go back. You cannot disturb me; nothing can disturb me now because I have known my own center.”

This knowledge of the center or this grounding in the center makes you a master. Otherwise you are a slave, and a slave of so many – not only of one master, but of many. Everything is a master, and you are a slave to the whole universe. Obviously, you will be in trouble. With so many masters pulling you in so many directions and dimensions, you are never together; you are not in a unity, and pulled in so many dimensions, you are in anguish. Only a master of oneself can transcend anguish.

The original mind is like a mirror: it is pure, and it remains pure, but dust can gather upon it. The purity is not lost, the dust cannot destroy the purity – but the purity can be covered up. This is the condition of the ordinary mind – covered with dust. Hidden behind the dust, the original mind remains pure. It cannot become impure; that is impossible. And if it was possible for it to become impure, then there would be no way to regain the purity again. In itself it remains pure, just covered by dust.

Our mind is the original mind plus dust, the buddha-mind plus dust, the divine mind plus dust. Once you know how to uncover it, how to reclaim it from the dust, you have known all that is worth knowing and you have attained all that is worth attaining. All these techniques are concerned with how to free your mind from the day-to-day dust that is bound to gather upon it. Dust is but-natural. Just like with a traveler passing from many, many roads, dust is gathered – and for many, many lives you have been a traveler. You have traveled long distances, and much dust has gathered.