VBT – Meditation 84.3
You Are Everywhere
If you ask Buddha, he will say you are nowhere. That’s why he chooses the word ‘nirvana’. Nirvana means you are nowhere. Just like a flame which has gone out – how can you say where the flame is then? He will say it is nowhere. The flame has simply ceased to be. Buddha uses a negative term – nowhere. That’s what nirvana means. When you are not attached to the body you are in nirvana, you are nowhere.
Shiva chooses a positive term – he says everywhere – but both the terms mean the same. If you are everywhere, you cannot be somewhere. If you are everywhere, it is saying almost the same thing as saying that you are nowhere.
But in the body we are attached, and we feel that we are confined. This confinement is a mental act; it is your own doing. And you can confine yourself to anything. You have a valuable diamond.
Your being can be confined to it, and if the diamond is stolen you may commit suicide or you may go mad. What has happened? There are so many persons without a diamond: no one is committing suicide, no one is feeling any difficulty without a diamond, but what has happened to you?
Once you were also without a diamond; there was no problem. Now you are again without a diamond, but there is a problem. How is this problem created? It is your own doing. Now you are attached, confined. The diamond has become your body. Now you cannot live without it; it is impossible to live without it.
Wherever you get attached, it becomes a new imprisonment. And whatsoever we are doing in life is this: we go on creating more and more imprisonments, bigger and bigger jails to live in. Then we go on decorating those jails so that they look like home, and then we forget completely that they are jails.
This sutra says that if you toss aside the attachment with the body, realization happens that I AM EVERYWHERE. You have an oceanic feeling, your consciousness exists without any location. Your consciousness exists without being tethered anywhere. You become just like a sky, enveloping all; everything is in you. Your consciousness has expanded to the infinite possibility. And then the sutra says: ONE WHO IS EVERYWHERE IS JOYOUS.
Confined to a place you will be in misery, because you are always bigger than where you are confined. This is the misery – as if you are forcing yourself into a small bowl; the ocean is being forced into a small pot. The misery is bound to be there. This is the misery, and whenever this misery has been felt, the search for enlightenment arises, the search for the Brahma. Brahma means the infinite one. The search for moksha means the search for freedom. In a limited body you cannot be free; somewhere you will be a slave. Nowhere or everywhere you can be free.
Look at the human mind: whatsoever the direction, it is always for freedom, searching for freedom.
It may be political, it may be economic, it may be psychological, it may be religious – whatsoever the direction, but the human mind is always groping for freedom. Freedom seems to be the deepest need. Wherever human mind finds any barrier, any slavery, any limitation, it fights against. The whole of human history is a fight for freedom.
Dimensions may be different. Marx, Lenin, they are fighting for economic freedom. Gandhi, Lincoln, they are fighting for political freedom. And there are thousands and thousands of slaveries; and the fight goes on. But one thing is certain – that somewhere, deep down, man is searching continuously for more and more freedom.
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