Buddhist Doctrine

The Goose Is Out

I remind you of the story, “The Goose is Out.” It is concerned with the mind and your is-ness.

A master tells the disciple to meditate on a koan: A small goose is put into a bottle, fed and nourished. The goose goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, and fills the whole bottle. Now it is too big; it cannot come out of the bottle’s mouth – the mouth is too small. And the koan is that you have to bring the goose out without destroying the bottle, without killing the goose.

Now it is mind-boggling.

What can you do? The goose is too big; you cannot take it out unless you break the bottle, but that is not allowed. Or you can bring it out by killing it; then you don’t care whether it comes out alive or dead. That is not allowed either.

Day in, day out, the disciple meditates, finds no way, thinks this way and that way – but in fact there is no way. Tired, utterly exhausted, a sudden revelation… Suddenly he understands that the master cannot be interested in the bottle and the goose; they must represent something else. The bottle is the mind, you are the goose… and with witnessing, it is possible. Without being in the mind, you can become identified with it so much that you start feeling that you are in it!

He runs to the master to say that the goose is out. And the master says, “You have understood it. Now keep it out. It has never been in.”

If you go on struggling with the goose and the bottle, there is no way for you to solve it. It is the realization that, “It must represent something else; otherwise the master cannot give it to me. And what can it be?” – Because the whole function between the master and the disciple, the whole business, is about the mind and awareness.

Awareness is the goose which is not in the bottle of the mind. But you are believing that it is in it and asking everyone how to get it out. And there are idiots who will help you, with techniques, to get out of it. I call them idiots because they have not understood the thing at all.

The goose is out, has never been in, so the question of bringing it out does not arise.

Mind is just a procession of thoughts passing in front of you on the screen of the brain. You are an observer. But you start getting identified with beautiful things – those are bribes. And once you get caught in the beautiful things you are also caught in the ugly things, because the mind cannot exist without duality.

Awareness cannot exist with duality, and mind cannot exist without duality. Awareness is non-dual, and the mind is dual.

So just watch. I don’t teach you any solutions. I teach you to Just get back a little and watch. Create a distance between you and your mind.

Whether it is good, beautiful, delicious, something you would like to enjoy closely, or it is ugly – remain as far away as possible. Look at it just the way you look at a film. But people get identified even with films.

You get identified with anything. People get identified with persons and then they create misery for themselves. They get identified with things, then they get miserable if that thing is missing.

Identification is the root cause of your misery. And every identification is identification with the mind. Step aside, let the mind pass.

And soon you will be able to see that there is no problem at all – the goose is out. You don’t have to break the bottle, you don’t have to kill the goose either.