VBT – Week’s Meditation 81
Crucifixion And Resurrection
Surrender is a very paradoxical state: on one hand you disappear, on the other hand you appear for the first time in your infinite glory, in your multidimensional splendor.
Yes, the dewdrop is gone, and gone forever; there is no way to recapture it, to reclaim it. The dewdrop has died as a drop, but in fact the dewdrop has become the ocean, has become oceanic. It still exists, no more as a finite entity, but as something infinite, shoreless, boundless.
This is the meaning of the myth of the phoenix. He dies, he is utterly burned, reduced to ashes, and then suddenly he is reborn out of the ashes – resurrection. The phoenix represents Christ: crucifixion and resurrection. The phoenix represents Buddha: death as an ego, and a new birth as utter egolessness. It represents all those who have known; to know means to be a phoenix. Die as you are, so that you can be that which you really are! Die in all your inauthenticity, phoniness, separation from existence.
We go on believing that we are separate. We are not, not even for a single moment. In spite of your belief, you are one with the whole. But your belief can create nightmares for you; it is bound to create them. To believe that “I am separate” means to create fear. If you are separate from the whole, you can never get rid of fear, because the whole is so vast and you are so small, so tiny, so atomic, and you constantly have to fight the whole so that it does not absorb you. You have to be constantly alert, on guard, so the ocean does not simply take you in. You have to protect yourself behind walls and walls and walls.
All this effort is nothing but fear. And then you are constantly aware that death is reaching you and death is going to destroy your separation. That’s what death is all about: death is the whole claiming the part back. And you are afraid that death will come and you will die. How to live long? How to attain a kind of deathlessness? Man tries it in many ways. To have children is one of the ways, hence the continuous urge to have children. The root of this desire to have children has nothing to do with children at all, it has something to do with death.
You know you will not be able to be here forever; howsoever you try, you are going to fail, you know it, because millions have failed and nobody has ever succeeded. You are hoping against hope. Then find some other ways. One of the simplest ways, the most ancient way, is to have children: you will not be here, but something of you, a particle of you, a cell of you, will go on living. That is a vicarious way of becoming immortal.
Death does not exist, death is unreal. But you create it: you create it by creating separation. Surrender means dropping the idea of separation: death disappears automatically, fear is found no more, and your whole flavor of life changes. Then each moment is such crystal purity, a purity of delight, joy, bliss. Then each moment is eternity. And to live that way is poetry, to live moment-to-moment without the ego is poetry. To live without the ego is grace, is music; to live without the ego is to live, to really live. That life I call poetry: the life of one who is surrendered to existence.
When you surrender to existence you are not surrendering anything real. You are simply surrendering a false notion, you are simply surrendering an illusion, you are surrendering maya. You are surrendering something that you never had with you in the first place. And by surrendering that which you don’t have, you attain that which you have.
And to know that “I am at home, I always have been and I always will be,” is a great moment of relaxation. Knowing that “I am not an outsider, I am not alienated, I am not uprooted,” that “I belong to existence and the existence belongs to me,” all becomes calm and quiet and still. This stillness is surrender.
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