VBT – Meditation 83.4
You Are The Barrier
Looking at a beautiful sunrise or sunset, you forget yourself. Then suddenly you feel that something has happened to you. You are not there; something greater than you is there. This presence of the great… Jesus calls it God – that word is just symbolic. Mohammed calls it God – that word is just symbolic. ‘God’ means greater than you – a moment when you feel that something greater than you is happening to you. And you can feel this only when you are not. While you are there, the greater cannot happen to you, because you are the barrier.
In any moment, if you are absent, God is present there. Your absence is the presence of the divine. Remember it always: your absence is the presence of the divine; your presence is the absence of the divine. So really the question is not how to reach God, the question is not how to attain God; the question is how to be absent.
You need not worry about the divine, you can forget it completely. There is no need to remember even the word god. It is irrelevant, because the basic thing is not God, the basic thing is your ego. If it is not there, God happens to you. And if you try, if you make an effort to reach God, to attain God, or to be liberated, you may miss, because this whole effort may be ego-centered.
That’s the problem for the spiritual seeker. It may be just the ego which is thinking to attain God.
You cannot be satisfied by your worldly successes. You have achieved; in the outer world you have reached a certain status, position, prestige. You are powerful, you are rich, knowledgeable, respected, but your ego is not satisfied. The ego is never satisfied. And the reason? – The same. A real hunger can be satisfied. The hunger of the ego is false; it cannot be satisfied. Whatsoever you do will be futile. Because the hunger is false, no food can satisfy it. If the hunger is real, it can be satisfied.
All natural hungers can be satisfied – it is nothing, not a problem at all – but unnatural hungers cannot be satisfied. In the first place they are not hunger – how can you satisfy them? And they are unreal; just emptiness exists there. You go on throwing food, and you are throwing food into an abyss, a bottomless abyss. You will not reach anywhere. The ego cannot be satisfied.
I have heard that when Alexander was coming to India someone said to him, ‘Have you ever meditated upon the fact that there is only one world, and if you win it then what will you do?’
And it is reported that upon hearing this Alexander became very sad and he said, ‘I have not thought about it, but it makes me very very sad. Really, there is only one world and I am going to win it. And when I have won it, what am I going to do then?’
Even this whole world will not quench your thirst, because the thirst is false, unreal. Hunger is not natural.
The ego can go in search of God. In almost ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this has been my feeling – that the ego is in search. And then the search is bound to be doomed from the very beginning, because the ego cannot meet the divine, and the ego is making every effort to reach it.
Remember well, your meditation, your prayer, your worship, should not be an ego-trip. If it is, you are unnecessarily wasting your energy. So be perfectly aware.
And this is only a question of awareness. If you are aware, you can find out how your ego moves and works. It is not difficult; no particular training is needed. You can close your eyes and you can see what the search is. You can ask the question whether you are really seeking the divine, or whether it is again just an ego-trip – because it is respectable, because people think you are religious, because deep down you think, ‘How can I be satisfied – I – unless I possess God?’
Is God going to be your possession? The Upanishads say that one who says that he has achieved God, has not achieved, because the very assertion that ‘I have achieved God’, is an ego-assertion.
The Upanishads say that one who claims that he has known, has not known. The very claim shows that he has not known, because the claim that ‘I have known’, comes from the ego. And the ego cannot know. The ego is the only barrier.
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