VBT – Week’s Meditation 68
Don’t Project
The whole organism is involved. And whatsoever we say is like that. If you go to aboriginal societies in India – and there are many aboriginal tribes – they have a different language structure. Their language structure is more basic and more real, but they cannot create much poetry. Their language structure cannot be helpful for dreaming.
If it is raining, we say, “It is raining.” They ask, “What do you mean by ‘it’? What do you mean by ‘it’?”
They have simply the word rain. What do you mean by “it”? What is raining? They just say “rain.”
Rain is the reality, but we go on adding things – and the more words are added, the more we are lost, far away, thrown far away from reality.
Buddha used to say, “When you say, ‘A man is walking,’ what do you mean? Where is the man? Only walking is. What do you mean by ‘the man’?” When we say, “A man is walking,” it appears that there is something like a man and something like walking – two things added together. Buddha says there is walking.
When you say, “The river is flowing,” what do you mean? There is just flowing, and that flowing is the river. The walking is the man, the seeing is the man, standing and sitting is the man. If you eliminate all these – walking, sitting, standing, thinking, dreaming – will there be a man left behind? There will be no man behind. But language creates a different world, and by constantly moving into words we go on moving away.
So the first thing to remember is how not to allow words unnecessarily. When there is a need, you can use them, but when there is no need remain empty, remain non-verbal, MOUNA, remain silent.
There is no need to be constantly verbalizing things.
Secondly, don’t project. Don’t verbalize, don’t project. Look at what is there. Don’t add things and then look. You see a face. When you say, “It is beautiful,” you are putting something into it, or if you say, “It is ugly,” you are again putting something into it. A face is a face. Beauty and ugliness are your interpretations. They are not there, because the same face may be beautiful to someone and ugly to someone else, and to a third it may be neither. He may be indifferent; he may not even look at it – at the same face. The face is simply a face. Don’t put things into it; don’t project. Your projections are your dreams, and if you project then you miss. And this is happening every day.
You see that a face is beautiful; then desire is created. The desire is not for that face or that body; it is for your own interpretation, your own projection. The person that is there, the real person, has been used as a screen, and you have projected yourself. And then disillusion is bound to be there because the real face cannot be forced into unreality by your projection. Sooner or later the projection will have to be dropped, and the real face will come out, and then you will feel that you have been cheated. You will say, “What has happened to this face? This face was so beautiful and this person was so beautiful, and now everything has gone ugly.” Again you are interpreting.
The person remains whatsoever he is, but your interpretations and projections go on, and you are never allowing energy to assert itself. You go on suppressing it. You are suppressing inwardly and outwardly also. You never allow reality to assert itself.
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