VBT – Meditation 63.4
An Innocent Animal
Meditation is not just a certain thing which you do for one hour and forget. Really, the whole life has to be meditative. Only then will you begin to feel things. And when I say that the whole life is to be meditative, I do not mean to go and close your eyes for twenty-four hours and sit and meditate – -no! But wherever you are you can be sensitive and that sensitivity will pay….
…Can you weep? Can you laugh spontaneously? Can you dance spontaneously? Can you love spontaneously? If you cannot, how can you meditate? Can you play? It is difficult! Everything has become difficult. Man has become insensitive.
Bring your sensitivity back again. Reclaim it! Play a little! To be playful is to be religious. Laugh, weep, sing, do something spontaneously with your full heart. Relax your body, relax your breathing, and move as if you are a child again….
…Regain feeling–less thought, more feeling. Live more by heart, less by head.
Sometimes, live totally in the body; forget about the soul. Live totally in the body–because if you cannot even feel your body, you are not going to feel your soul. Remember this. Come back into the body. We are really hanging around the body; we are not in the body. Everyone is afraid to be in the body. Society has created the fear; it is deep-rooted.
Go back into your body; move again; be like an innocent animal.
Look at animals jumping, running. Sometimes run and jump like them, then you will come back to your body. Then you will be able to feel your body, the rays of the sun, the rains, and the wind blowing. Only with this capacity of being aware of all things happening around you will you develop the capacity to feel what is happening within.
Austerity cannot be practiced. You simply have to look at life and see that the more complicated you become, the less sensitive you become. And the less sensitive you are, the farther away from the divine you are. The more sensitive you become, the closer and closer and closer you come. A day comes when you are sensitive to the very roots of your being; suddenly you are no longer there, you are just a sensibility, a sensitivity. You are no longer there, you are just an awareness.
And everything is beautiful then, everything is alive; nothing is dead. Everything is conscious, nothing is unconscious. With your sensitivity, the world changes. At the last moment, when the sensitivity reaches its total, its ultimate climax, the world disappears; there is godliness. God is not to be found, really; sensitivity has to be found. Be sensitive so totally that nothing is left behind, no holding back; and suddenly, God is there. God has always been there, only you were not sensitive. …And you can be free. You need not wait for the whole world to be freed first. You can be blissful. You need not wait for the whole world to be freed from miseries. If you wait, you will wait in vain – it is not going to happen. This is an inner phenomenon: to be freed from bondage. You can live totally free in a totally unfree world. You can live totally free; even in a prison it makes no difference, because it is an inner attitude. If your inner seeds are broken, you are free. You cannot make Buddha a prisoner. You can throw him in the prison but you cannot make him a prisoner. He will live there, he will live there with full awareness. If you are in full awareness you are always in moksha, always in freedom. Awareness is freedom, unawareness is bondage.
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