VBT – Meditation 59.1

VBT – Meditation 59.1

Clinging Or Escaping

When happiness is there and you are feeling especially blissful in any particular moment, don’t cling to it. Close your eyes and remain a witness to it all. Clinging or escaping are natural for the dust – covered mind. If you remain a witness, sooner or later you will fall in between because the natural law is to move to the polarity, to the polar opposite. If you remain a witness, you are in between.

Buddha has called his whole philosophy MAJJHIM NIKAYA – the middle way, because of this technique. He says remain in the middle always; no matter what the polarity, remain always in the middle. By witnessing one remains in the middle. The moment you lose your witnessing you either become attached or repulsed. If you are repulsed you will go to the other extreme; if you are attached you will try to remain at this extreme, but you will never be in between. Just be a witness.

Don’t be attracted, don’t be repulsed. The headache is there; accept it. It is there as a fact. As a tree is there, as the house is there, as the night is there, the headache is there. Accept it and close your eyes. Don’t try to escape from it.

You are happy; accept the fact. Don’t cling to it, and don’t try not to become unhappy; don’t try anything. If unhappiness comes, allow it. If happiness comes, allow it. Just remain a watcher on the hill, just seeing things. The morning comes, and then evening comes, and then the sun rises, and then the sun sets and there are stars and darkness, and again the sun rises – and you are just a watcher on the hill. You cannot do anything. You simply see. The morning has come; you note the fact, and you know that now the evening will come because the evening follows the morning.

And when the evening comes you note the fact, and you know that now the morning will be coming because the morning follows the evening.

When pain is there, you are just a watcher. You know that pain has come, and sooner or later it will go, and the polar opposite will come. And when happiness has come, you know that it is not going to remain always. Unhappiness will be just hidden somewhere, it will be coming. You remain a watcher. If you can watch without attraction and without repulsion you will fall in the middle, and once the pendulum stops in the middle you can look for the first time at what the world is.

While you are moving, you cannot know what the world is; your movement confuses everything.

Once you are not moving, you can look at the world. For the first time you know what reality is. A non-moving mind knows what reality is; a moving mind cannot know what reality is. Your mind is just like a camera: you go on moving and taking shots, but whatsoever comes is just a confusion because the camera must not move. If the camera is moving, the pictures are going to be just a confusion.

Your consciousness is moving from one pendulum to another, and whatsoever you know of reality is just a confusion, a nightmare. You don’t know what is what; everything is confused, missed. If you remain in the middle and the pendulum has stopped, if your consciousness is focused now, centered, then you know what reality is. Only a mind that is unmoving can know what the truth is. “OH BELOVED, PUT ATTENTION NEITHER ON PLEASURE NOR ON PAIN, BUT BETWEEN THESE.”