Language Of Silence

Seeing The Futility

Remember, if you withdraw yourself by effort you will be deceived. If you withdraw yourself by effort, if you say, “I will withdraw myself from the past so that I can be in deep meditation,” then your deep meditation is a future project. Then it is neither meditation nor deep. You have already moved from the past to the future. If you say, “If I withdraw from the past I will attain to nirvana,” now you have only substituted the past with the future. Both are the same, both are non-existential. It does not make any difference.

If you withdraw from your future, you say, “I will not desire the future because I have to attain nirvana, to enlightenment, to satori” – but this is the future. You cannot withdraw by effort, because in effort you will always be motivated. There will be a desire, there will be a goal.

Then how to withdraw? One withdraws only by understanding the situation that the past is not, it is futile; not that it is going to lead you into the world of truth if you withdraw from the past, no.

Just seeing the futility of the past – that this is all memory, dust that has gathered on the mirror of consciousness; it is just useless – you wash it away, with no motivation; just seeing the futility of it, you drop it. Not that you drop it for something else; if you drop it for something else the future has entered in. You have deceived yourself.

And when you drop your past seeing the futility of it, how can you go on living in the future? – Because the future is always based in the past. Whatsoever you want tomorrow is nothing but all those beautiful things that you had yesterday. You want a repetition – maybe modified, a little bit better, refined – but it is the past again. When the past is dropped seeing the futility of it – for no other reason – just out of this understanding that it is futile it drops out of your hands, with it the future also disappears. Future is the shadow of the past. You had been with a woman yesterday and you would like to be with the woman again tomorrow – that is the future. Yesterday you had been to Latif’s and the food was delicious; tomorrow you are again thinking to go there. Your tomorrow is nothing but a reflection of your yesterday. When yesterday disappears, reflections disappear.

With the past, in the same package, the future is also dropped. And then there is the present. Not that you had asked for it or you had longed for it or you had desired and worked and practised for it, no; because the past and future are no more there, then the present is. The same space that was occupied by the past and the future is now empty. In that emptiness one feels the present.

And to be in the present is to be in truth. Then you have depth, you have fallen into the vertical dimension. You have heights, heights which are higher than Everest and depths which are deeper than the Pacific. Then your life has a grandeur, a splendor.

This is what is called Buddhahood, Christ-consciousness, or whatever you will.

There are people who are past-oriented, there are people who are future-oriented – both go on missing. The orthodox, the conformist, is past-oriented, and the revolutionary, the rebel, is future – oriented; there is not any difference between them. The orthodox thinks the Golden Age was in the past, “the Garden of Eden”. The revolutionary, the so-called communist, the fascist, the socialist – he thinks the Golden Age is to come. It is in the future, the utopia, the classless society where everyone will be equal, the world of freedom where exploitation will have disappeared and paradise will descend on earth. But paradise is right now, here.