VBT – Meditation 67.0

VBT – Meditation 67.0

HERE IS THE SPHERE OF CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE. THROUGH CHANGE CONSUME CHANGE.

Everything Changes

The first thing to understand is that everything you know about is a change; except for you, the knower, everything is a change. Have you seen anything which does not change? This whole world is a phenomenon of change. Even the Himalayas are changing. They say – the scientists who work on it – that they are growing; these Himalayas are the youngest mountains in the world, still a child, really, still growing. They have not yet become mature; they have not reached the point from where something begins to decline. They are still rising.

If you compare them with Vindhyachal, another mountain, they are just children. Vindhyachal is one of the oldest – and some say the oldest mountain in the world. It is so old, it is decreasing – coming down. For centuries, it has been coming down – just dying, in its old age. So even a Himalaya which looks so stable, unchanging, unmoving, is changing. It is just a river of stones. Stones make no difference; they are also river-like, floating. Comparatively everything is changing. Something looks more changing, something looks less changing, but that is only relative.

Nothing is unchanging that you can know. Remember my point: nothing that you can know is unchanging. Nothing is unchanging except the knower. But that is always behind. It always “knows”; it is really never known. It can never become the object; it is always the subject. Whatsoever you do or know, it is always behind you. You cannot know it. When I say this, don’t get disturbed. When I say that you cannot know it, I mean you cannot know it as an object. I can look at you, but how can I look at myself in the same way? It is impossible because to be in a relationship of knowledge two things are needed – the knower and the known.

So when I look at you, you are the known and I am the knower, and the knowledge can exist as a bridge. But where to make the bridge when I look at myself, when I am trying to know myself? There only I am, alone – totally alone. The other bank is missing, so where to create the bridge? How to know myself?

So self-knowledge is a negative process. You cannot know yourself directly; you can simply go on eliminating objects of knowledge. Go on eliminating the objects of knowledge. When there is no object of knowledge, when you cannot know anything, when there is nothing but the vacuum, the emptiness – and this is what meditation is: just eliminating all objects of knowledge – then a moment comes when consciousness is, but there is nothing to be conscious of; knowing is, but there is nothing to know. The simple, pure energy of knowing remains and nothing is left to be known. There is no object.

In that state when there is nothing to be known, it is said that you know yourself in a certain sense.

But that KNOWLEDGE is totally different from all other knowledge. It is misleading to use the same word for both. There have been mystics who have said that self-knowledge is contradictory, the very term is contradictory. Knowledge is always of the other; self-knowledge is not possible. But when the other is not, something happens. You may call it “self-knowledge,” but the word is misleading.