Live Death
I have heard…
One night the poet, Awhadi of Kerman (a very great Muslim poet) was sitting on his porch bent over a vessel. Shams-e-Tabrizi, a great Sufi mystic, happened to pass by. Shams-e-Tabrizi looked at the poet, at what he was doing. He asked the poet, ‘What are you doing?’ The poet said, ‘Contemplating the moon in a bowl of water.’ Shams-e-Tabrizi started laughing, with uproarious laughter – a mad laughter. The poet started feeling uncomfortable; a crowd gathered. And the poet said, ‘What is the matter? Why are you laughing so much? Why are you ridiculing me?’ Shams-e-Tabrizi said, ‘Unless you have broken your neck, why don’t you look directly at the moon in the sky?’
The moon is there, the full moon is there, and this poet was sitting with a bowl of water arid looking into the bowl of water at the reflection of the moon. Seeking truth in scriptures, seeking truth in philosophies, is looking at the reflection. If you ask somebody else how you should live your life, you are asking for misguidance, because that man can only talk about his own life. And never, never, are two lives the same. Whatsoever he can say or impart to you will be about his own life – and that too only if he has lived. He may have asked somebody else, he may have followed somebody else, he may have been an imitator himself. Then it is a reflection of a reflection. And centuries pass and people go on reflecting the reflection of the reflection of the reflection – and the real moon is always there in the sky waiting for you. It is your moon, it is your sky, look directly. Be immediate about it. Why borrow my eyes or anybody else’s eyes? You have been given eyes, beautiful eyes, to see, and to see directly. Why borrow understanding from anybody? Remember, it may be understanding to me. but the moment you borrow it, it becomes knowledge to you – it is no more understanding, Understanding is only that which has been experienced by the person himself. It may be understanding for me, if I have looked at the moon, but the moment I say it to you it becomes knowledge, it is no longer understanding. Then it is just verbal, then it is just linguistic. And language is a lie.
Many people live their life as language professors. That is the falsest kind of life. Reality needs no language, it is available to you on a non-verbal level. The moon is there; it needs no bowl and no water, it needs no other medium. You have just to look at it; it is a non-verbal communication. The whole of life is available – you just have to learn how to communicate with it non-verbally. That’s what meditation is all about – to be in a space where language does not interfere, where learned concepts don’t come in between you and the real. When you love a woman don’t be bothered about what others have said about love, because that is going to be an interference. You love a woman, the love is there, forget all that you have learned about love. Forget all Kinseys, forget all Masters and Johnsons, forget all Freuds and Jungs. Please don’t become a language professor. Just love the woman and let love be there, and let love lead you and guide you into its innermost secrets, into its mysteries. Then you will be able to know what love is. And what others say about meditation is meaningless. You can become very efficient in verbalising, you can become very clever in abstraction, in intellectual argumentativeness, and you can forget completely that all the time that you have been involved in these intellectual activities has been a sheer wastage. They talk about love, they know all the poetries about love, but they have never loved. Or even if they thought they were in love, they were never in love. That too was a ‘heady’ thing, it was not of the heart. People live and go on missing life. It needs courage. It needs courage to be realistic, it needs courage to move with life wherever it leads, because the paths are uncharted, there exists no map. One has to go into the unknown. Life can be understood only if you are ready to go into the unknown. If you cling to the known, you cling to the mind, and the mind is not life. Life is non-mental, non-intellectual, because life is total. Your totality has to be involved in it, you cannot just think about it. Thinking about life is not life. beware of this ‘about-ism’. One goes on thinking about and about: there are people who think about God, there are people who think about life, there are people who think about love. There are people who think about this and that.
That’s all. Don’t become a language professor, don’t become a parrot. Parrots are language professors. They live in words, concepts, theories, theologies, and life goes on passing, slipping out of their hands. Then one day suddenly they become afraid of death. When a person is afraid of death, know well that that person has missed life. If he has not missed life there cannot be any fear of death. If a person has lived life, he will be ready to live death also.
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