VBT – Meditation 82.1
Try To Develop
So if I say, ‘This rose is not beautiful,’ you cannot argue about it. There is no need to argue. You will say, ‘That is your feeling. And the rose is beautiful – this is my feeling.’ There is no question of argument. Heads can argue. Hearts cannot argue. It is finished, it is a full stop. If I say, ‘This is my feeling,’ then there is no question of argument.
With the head, the argument can continue and we can come to a conclusion. With the heart, the conclusion has already happened. With the heart, there is no procedure towards the conclusion; the conclusion is immediate, instantaneous. With the head, it is a process – you argue, you discuss, you analyze, and then you come to a conclusion about whether this is so or not. With the heart, it is an immediate phenomenon – the conclusion comes first. Look at it: with the head, conclusion comes in the end. With the heart, conclusion comes first, and then you can proceed to find the process – but that is the work of the head.
So when such techniques have to be practised, the first difficulty will be that you don’t know what feeling is. Try to develop it. When you touch something, close your eyes; don’t think, feel. For example, if I take your hand in my hand and I say to you, ‘Close your eyes and feel what is happening,’ immediately you will say, ‘Your hand is in my hand.’ But this is not a feeling, this is a thinking.
Then I again say to you, ‘Feel. Don’t think.’ Then you say, ‘You are expressing your love.’ That too is again thinking. If I insist again, ‘Just feel, don’t use your head. What are you feeling right now?’ Only then will you be able to feel and say, ‘The warmth.’ Because love is a conclusion. ‘Your hand is in my hand’ – this is a head-oriented thought.
The actual feeling is that a certain warmth is flowing from my hand to your hand, or from your hand to my hand. Our life energies are meeting and the point of meeting has become hot, it has become warm. This is the feeling, the sensation, the real. But we go on with the head continuously. That has become a habit; we are trained for it. So you will have to re-open your heart.
Try to live with feelings. Sometimes in the day when you are not doing any particular business – because in business, in the beginning it will be difficult to live with feelings. There, the head has proved very efficient, and you cannot depend on feeling. While you are at home playing with your children, the head is not needed, it is not a business – but there too you are with the head. Playing with your children or just sitting with your wife, or not doing anything, relaxing in a chair, feel. Feel the texture of the chair.
Your hand is touching the chair: how are you feeling it? The air is blowing, the breeze is coming in.
It touches you. How do you feel? Smells are coming from the kitchen. How do you feel? Just feel.
Don’t think about them. Don’t start brooding that this smell shows that something is being prepared in the kitchen – then you will start dreaming about it. No, just feel whatsoever is the fact. Remain with the fact; don’t move in thinking. You are surrounded from everywhere. Everywhere so much is converging on you. The whole existence is coming to meet you from everywhere, from all your senses it is entering you, but you are in the head, and your senses have become dead; they don’t feel.
A certain growth will be needed before you can do this, because this is an inner experiment. If you cannot feel the outer, it will be very difficult for you to feel the inner, because the inner is the subtle.
If you cannot feel the gross, you cannot feel the subtle. If you cannot hear the sounds, then it will be difficult for you to hear the inner soundlessness – it will be very difficult. It is so subtle.
Tags: Try To Develop