VBT – Meditation 66.0
BE THE UNSAME SAME TO FRIEND AS TO STRANGER, IN HONOR AND DISHONOR.
Never Changes
“BE THE UNSAME SAME” – this is the base. What is happening in you? Two things are happening.
Something in you remains continuously the same, it never changes. You may not have observed it, you may not have encountered it yet, but if you observe you will come to know that something in you remains constantly the same. Because of that sameness, you can have an identity. Because of that sameness, you feel yourself centered; otherwise you will be a chaos. You say, “My childhood.” Now what has remained of it? WHO says, “My childhood”? Who is this “my, me, I”?
Nothing has remained of your childhood. If your pictures of your childhood are shown to you for the first time, you will not be able to recognise them. Everything has changed. Your body is no more the same; not a single cell has remained the same. Physiologists say that the body is a flux, it is river-like. Every moment many cells are dying and many new ones are born. Within seven years your body will have changed completely. So if you are going to live seventy years, ten times over your body has renewed itself completely.
Every moment your body is changing, and your mind. You cannot recognise a photograph of your childhood, and if it were possible to give you a photograph of your mind, of your childhood mind, it would be impossible to recognize it. Your mind is even more of a flux than your body. Every moment everything changes. Even for a single moment nothing remains the same. In the morning you were different as far as your mind is concerned. In the evening you are totally a different person.
When someone would come to meet Buddha, before the person would depart, take leave of him, Buddha would say, “Remember, the man who has come to meet me is not the man who is going back. You are totally different now. Your mind has changed.” Meeting with a buddha is, of course, bound to change your mind for better or worse, but you cannot be the same.
You came here with a different mind; you will go with a different mind. Something has changed.
Something new has been added, something has been deleted. And even if you are not meeting anyone, if you are just remaining by yourself, then too you cannot remain the same. Every moment the river is moving.
Heraclitus has said, “You cannot step twice in the same river.” The same can be said about man: you cannot meet the same man again – impossible! And because of this fact, and because of our ignorance of it, life becomes a misery – because you go on expecting the other to be the same.
You marry a girl and you expect her to be the same. She cannot be! Unmarried, she was different; married, she is completely different. A lover is something else, a husband is something totally different. You cannot expect your lover to meet you through your husband. That is impossible. A lover is a lover; a husband is a husband. The moment a lover becomes a husband, everything has changed. But you go on expecting. That creates misery – unnecessary misery. If we can recognize this fact that the mind goes on moving and changing continuously, we will escape many, many miseries without any cost. All you need is simple awareness that your mind changes.
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