VBT – Week’s Meditation 66
Polar Situations
Just know that the change is happening only to your periphery; it cannot happen to you, it is impossible. So you can remain detached, and this detachment is not forced. You simply know it is so. This is not a forced detachment; this is not any effort on your part to remain detached. If you TRY to remain detached, you are still on the periphery; you have not known the center. The center is detached; it has always been so. It is transcendental. It is always beyond. Whatsoever happens below never happens to it.
Try this in polar situations. Go on feeling something in you which is the same. When someone is insulting you, focus yourself to the point where you are just listening to him – not doing anything, not reacting – just listening. He is insulting you, and then someone is praising you. Just listen. Insult- praise, honor-dishonor: just listen. Your periphery will get disturbed. Look at it also; don’t change it.
Look at it; remain deep in your center, looking from there. You will have a detachment which is not forced, which is spontaneous, which is natural.
And once you have the feeling of the natural detachment, nothing can disturb you. You will remain silent. Whatsoever happens in the world, you will remain unmoved. Even if someone is killing you, only the body will be touched – not you. You will remain beyond. This “beyondness” leads you into existence, into that which is bliss, eternal, into that which is true, which is always, into that which is deathless, into life itself. You may call it God or you can choose your term. You can call it NIRVANA, whatsoever you like, but unless you move from the periphery to the center and unless you become aware of the eternal in you, religion has not happened to you, neither has life happened to you. You are missing, simply missing all. That is possible – to miss the ecstasy of living.
Shankara says that “I call the man a SANNYASIN who knows what is changing and what is non- changing, who knows what is moving and what is non-moving.” This, in Indian philosophy, is known as discrimination – VIVEK. To discriminate between these two, the realm of the change and the realm of the unchanging – this is called VIVEK, discrimination, awareness.
This sutra can be used very, very deeply and very easily with whatsoever you are doing. Do you feel hunger? Remember the two realms. Hunger can only be felt by the periphery because the periphery needs food, needs fuel. You don’t need food, you don’t need any fuel, but the body needs them.
Remember, when hunger happens it is happening to the periphery; you are just the knower of it. If you were not there, it would not be known. If the body were not there, it would not happen. By your absence only knowledge will not be there because the body cannot know. The body can have it, but it cannot know it. You know it; you cannot have it.
So never say that “I am hungry.” Always say within, “I know that my body is hungry.” Give emphasis to your knowing. Then the discrimination is there. You are becoming old: never say, “I am becoming old.” Just say, “My body is becoming old.” Then in the moment of death also you will know, “I am not dying; my body is dying. I am changing bodies, just changing the house.” If this discrimination deepens, one day, suddenly, there will be enlightenment.
Tags: Polar Situations
