VBT – Meditation 74.4
Absent Existence
You never feel yourself, and even sometimes when you feel, you feel through others – through excitement, through stimulation, through reaction. Someone else is needed, and via someone else you can feel yourself. This is absurd. Alone, without excitement, with no one there to become a mirror, you fall in sleep, you get bored. You never feel yourself. There is no presence. You live absently.
This absent existence is the non-religious mind. To become filled with your own presence, with the light of your own being, is to become religious. So remember this as a basic point: that my concern is not with your actions. What you do is irrelevant. What you are – absent, present, aware, unaware – that’s my concern. And this technique we will enter are techniques to make you more present, to bring you here and now.
Either someone else is needed for you to feel yourself, or the past is needed – through the past, through past memories, you can feel your identity. Or the future is needed – you can project in your dreams. You can project your ideals, future lives, moksha. Either you need past memories to feel that you are, or you need a future projection, or someone else, but you alone are never enough. This is the disease, and unless you alone become enough, nothing will be enough for you. And once you alone have become enough unto yourself, you have become victorious, the struggle is over. Now there will be no suffering any more. A point of no return has come.
Beyond this point there is beatitude, eternal bliss. Before this point you are bound to suffer, but the whole suffering, strangely, is your own doing. It is a miracle that you create your own suffering. No one else is creating it. If someone else is creating it then it is difficult to go beyond it. If the world is creating it then what can you do? But because you can do, it means no one else is creating your suffering – it is your own nightmare. And these are the basic elements of it.
The first thing: you go on thinking that you are, you believe that you are. This is simply a belief. You have never encountered yourself, you have never come face to face with yourself; you have never met yourself, there has been no meeting. You simply believe that you are. Throw this belief totally.
Know well that you are yet to be, that you are not, because with this false belief you will never be able to transform. On this false belief your whole life will become false.
Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples, ‘Don’t ask me what to do. You cannot do anything, because to do something first you will be needed. And you are not there, so who will do it? You can think about doing, but you cannot do anything.’
This technique is to help you, to bring you back; to help you to create a situation in which you can meet yourself. Much will have to be destroyed – all that is wrong, all that is false. Before the real arises the false will have to leave; it must cease. And these are the false notions – that you are.
These are the false notions – that you are a soul, atma, you are Brahma. Not that you are not, but these notions are false.
Tags: Absent Existence
