VBT – Meditation 83.2
In A Dream
Once a visitor asked many people in a small town about the mayor: ‘What type of man is your mayor?’
Said the priest, ‘He is no good.’
Said the filling-station attendant, ‘He is a bum.’
And said the barber, ‘I never in my life voted for that rascal.’
Then the visitor met the mayor, a much maligned man, and the visitor asked, ‘What pay are you getting for your job?’
Said the mayor, ‘My goodness, I am not getting any pay for it. I have accepted this job just for the honor of it!’
This is the situation of the ego – only YOU think about your ego, no one else. Only you think that your ego is enthroned; for everyone else it is not so. No one agrees with your ego except you; everyone else is against it. But you go on living in a dream, in a delusion. You create your own image. You feel that image, you protect that image, and you think the whole world exists for it. This is a delirium, a madness. This is not reality.
The world does not exist for you. No one is concerned with your ego; no one at all. Whether you are or you are not, it makes no difference. You are just a wave. The wave comes and goes; the ocean is not worried about it. But you think yourself very important.
Those who want to dissolve the ego have first to recognize this fact. And unless you can put aside your egoistic structure, you will not be able to see the reality, because whatsoever you see, whatsoever you perceive, your ego distorts it. It tries to manipulate everything for itself. And nothing is for it, because reality cannot help anything which is false. Remember that.
Reality cannot support anything which is not, and your ego is the most impossible thing, the greatest falsity. It is not there; it is your creation, your imaginative creation. Reality cannot help it. The reality is always shattering it, always destroying it. Whenever your ego comes in contact with reality, reality proves shocking. Just to defend yourself against these shocks which are always coming, continuously coming to destroy your ego, by and by you avoid seeing reality.
Rather than lose your ego, you try to avoid seeing reality. And then around your ego you create a false world which you think is the reality. Then you live in your own world. You are not in contact with the real world, you cannot be, because you are afraid. You are living in a glasshouse of the ego.
The fear is there: whenever the reality comes in contact, your ego may be destroyed, so it is better not to come in contact with the reality. We go on escaping from reality just to protect, to defend, this impossible ego.
Why do I call it impossible? Why do I say it is false? Try to understand this. The reality is one: the reality exists as a whole, as a totality. You cannot exist alone, or can you? If the trees are not existing you will not be able to exist, because they are producing oxygen for you. If the air disappears you will simply die, because that air is giving you vitality, life. If the sun goes out you will be no more here, because the warmth, the rays, they are your life.
Life exists as a cosmic totality. You are not alone, and you cannot exist alone. You exist in a world.
Tags: In A Dream
