VBT – Meditation 69.4
Truth Is One
If something is seen, it is just a reflection. Truth is one; many can only be reflections. Once this is understood – not theoretically, but existentially, through experience – you are liberated, liberated from both bondage and liberation.
Naropa, when he became enlightened, was asked by someone, “Have you achieved liberation now?”
Naropa said, “Yes and no both. Yes, I am not in bondage, and no because that liberation was also a reflection of bondage. I thought about it because of bondage.”
Look at it in this way: you are ill then you long for health. That longing for health is part of your illness. If you are really healthy, you will not long for health. How will you? If you are really healthy, where is the longing? What is the need? If you are really healthy, you never feel that you are healthy.
Only ill, diseased persons feel that they are healthy. What is the need? How can you feel that you are healthy? If you are born healthy and you have never been ill, will you be able to feel your health?
Health is there, but it cannot be felt. It can be felt only through contrast, through the opposite. Only through the opposite are things felt. If you are ill, you can feel health – and if you are feeling health, remember, you are still ill.
So Naropa says, “Yes and no both. ‘Yes’ because there is no bondage now, but with the bondage liberation has also disappeared; that is why ‘No’. It was part of it. Now I am beyond both – neither in bondage nor in liberation.”
Don’t make religion a search, a desire. Don’t make MOKSHA, Liberation, NIRVANA, an object of desire. It happens when there is no desiring.
You must understand what desire means, and religions have confused you much about it. If you desire something of the world, they call it desire. If you desire something of the other world, they call it by a different name. This is absurd. Desire is desire! It makes no difference what the object of desire is. The object may be anything – of this world, material, or of another world, spiritual – but desiring remains the same.
Every desire is a bondage. Even if you desire God, it is a bondage; even if you desire liberation it is a bondage. And liberation cannot happen unless this desiring goes away totally. So remember, you cannot desire liberation, that is impossible; that is contradictory. You can become desireless, and then liberation happens. But that is not a result of your desire. Rather, it is a consequence of no-desire.
So try to understand what desire is. Desire means that right now you are not okay, you are not at ease. This very moment you are not at ease with yourself, and something else in the future, if fulfilled, will bring you peace. The fulfillment is always in the future; it is never here and now. This tension of the mind for the future is desire. Desire means you are not in the present moment, and all that is there is only the present moment. You are somewhere in the future, and the future is not.
It never has been, it will never be. All that is, is always the present – this moment.
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