VBT – Meditation 73.3

VBT – Meditation 73.3

Unload Yourself

Have you observed this fact anytime or not – that misery cannot exist without your mind? You cannot be miserable without your mind. The very source is not there. Who will supply you with this misery?

Who will make you miserable? And the same is true from the opposite direction also: you cannot be miserable without your mind and you cannot be blissful with your mind. The mind can never be the source of bliss.

So if the inner and outer sky meet and mind disappears, even for a moment, you will be filled with a new life. The quality of that life is absolutely different. It is life eternal, uncontaminated by death, uncontaminated by any fear. In that meeting you will be here and now, in the present – because past belongs to thoughts, future belongs to thoughts. Past and future are part of your mind. Present is existence – it is not part of your mind.

This moment doesn’t belong to your mind. The moment that has gone belongs; the moment that has to come belongs to your mind. This moment never belongs to you. Rather, you belong to this moment. You exist here, right now – here. Your mind exists somewhere else, always somewhere else.

Unload yourself.

I was reading one Sufi mystic. He was travelling on a lonely path, the way was deserted, and he saw a farmer with his bullock-cart. The cart was stuck in mud. The road was rough. The farmer was carrying a big load of apples in his bullock-cart, but somewhere on the rough road the tailboard of the wagon became unfastened and the apples were scattered. But he was not aware of it; the farmer was not aware of it.

When the cart got stuck in the mud, first he tried to bring it out somehow, but all efforts were in vain, so he thought, ‘Now I must unload my cart, then maybe I can pull it out.’ He looked back. Hardly a dozen apples were left – the load was already unloaded. You can feel his misery. The Sufi reports in his memoirs that that exasperated farmer made a remark. He said, ‘Stuck, by heck! Stuck! – and not a damn thing to unload!’ The only possibility was that if he could unload the cart it could come out; but now – nothing to unload!

Fortunately you are not stuck in such a way. You can unload – your cart is too much loaded. You can unload the mind, and the moment the mind is not there, you fly; you become capable of flying.

This technique – to look into the clarity of the sky and to become one with it – is one of the most practised. Many traditions have used this. And particularly for the modern mind it will be very useful, because on earth nothing is left. On earth nothing is left to meditate on – only the sky. If you look all around, everything is man-made, everything is limited, with a boundary, a limitation. Only the sky is still, fortunately, open to meditate on.