VBT – Meditation 60.0
OBJECTS AND DESIRES EXIST IN ME AS IN OTHERS. SO ACCEPTING, LET THEM BE TRANSFORMED.
Acceptance
This technique can be very helpful. When you are angry, you always justify your anger, but when someone else gets angry you always criticize. Your madness is natural, but others’ madness is just “perversion.” Whatsoever you do is good – or even if it was not good, it was “necessary to do.” You always find some rationalization for it.
The same is done by others, but then the same rationalization is not given. If you are angry, you say it was necessary to help the other. If you were not angry, the other would have been destroyed. He would have got a wrong habit, so it was good to punish him. It was just for his “good.” But when someone gets angry at you, the same rationalization is not applicable. Then he is “mad,” he is “evil.”
We have double standards – one standard for one oneself and another standard for everyone else.
This double-standard mind is always going to be in deep misery, always. This mind is not just, and unless your mind is just you cannot have a glimpse of the truth. Only a just mind can leave this double standard.
Jesus says, “Don’t do to others what you would not like done to you.” This means a similar standard is needed. This technique is based on the idea of a single standard: “OBJECTS AND DESIRES EXIST IN ME AS IN OTHERS….” You are not exceptional, although everyone thinks he is exceptional. If you think you are exceptional, know well this is how every ordinary mind thinks. To know that one is ordinary is the most extraordinary thing in this world.
Someone asked Suzuki about his teacher: “What was exceptional in your teacher, Suzuki?” Suzuki was a Zen master, so he said, “The only thing I will never forget is this, that I have never seen a man who thought himself so ordinary. He was just ordinary, and that is the most extraordinary thing, because every ordinary mind thinks he is exceptional, extraordinary.”
But no one is extraordinary, and if you know this you become extraordinary. Everyone is just like everyone else. The same desires that hover around you hover around everyone else. But you call your sex love; others’ love you call sex. Whatsoever you do, you protect it. You say it is good. That is why you are doing it, and the same thing done by others is “not the same.” And this happens not only to persons; it happens to races, nations. This is why the whole world has become a mess, because of this.
If X country goes on strengthening its army it is “for defense,” and if Y country goes on strengthening its army it is “for attack.” Every government in the world calls its military organization “defense.” Then who attacks? If everyone is defending, who is the aggressor? If you move into history, you cannot find anyone who is an aggressor. Of course, the defeated ones prove to be aggressors. The defeated ones always prove to be aggressors because they cannot write history. The victorious ones write history.
If Hitler could have won, then history would have been different. Then he would have been the savior of the world, not the aggressor. Then Churchill and Roosevelt and the other allies would have been the aggressors, and it would have been good if they were destroyed. But because Hitler couldn’t win he was the aggressor, and Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin and the other allies saved humanity. Not only with persons, but with everything we do – as nations, as races – the same logic moves. We are something different and the other is different.
Tags: Acceptance
