VBT – Week’s Meditation 84
Freedom Is Joy
Look, for example: you are playing on the sports-grounds; you are playing hockey or volley-ball or something else. When you are deep in play, your attention is not on the body. Someone has hit your feet and the blood is flowing – you are not aware. The pain is there, but you are not there. The blood is flowing but you are out of the body. Your consciousness, your attention, may be flying with the ball, may be running with the ball. Your attention is somewhere else. The game finishes: suddenly you come back to the body, and the blood is there and the pain. And you wonder how it happened – when it happened and how it happened and how you were not aware of it.
To be in the body, your attention is needed to be there. So remember it – wherever your attention is, you are there. If your attention is in the clouds, you are there. If your attention is in the flower, you are there. If your attention is in money, you are there. Your attention is your being. And if your attention is nowhere, you are everywhere.
So the whole process of meditation is to be in such a state of consciousness where your attention is nowhere, there is no object to it. When there is no object to it, there is nobody to you. Your attention creates the body. Your attention is your body. And when attention is nowhere, you are everywhere – joy happens to you. It is not good to say that it happens to you – you are it. It cannot leave you now; it is your very being. Freedom is joy, that’s why so much hankering after freedom.
What is religion? Religion is falling in tune with the whole, falling in love with the whole, falling in a togetherness with the whole. A religious person is one who is not against the whole and the irreligious is one who is fighting the whole, is in conflict with the whole. The religious person is life-affirmative. The irreligious person is life-negative.
To the religious person all is good – his affirmation is absolute and total. Nothing is wrong; even if it appears at times that it is wrong, it cannot be wrong. It must be a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation. It must be based somewhere in our ignorance because we don’t know the whole story. So maybe some part looks as if not fitting with the whole. We have not heard the whole song, so some note appears to fall out of line.
But everything has to be good if there is God. God is the guarantee of goodness. Evil, as such, cannot exist. If it appears, it must be a nightmare of our own minds; we must have created it.
The religious mind denies not. His affirmation is absolute, unconditional. He says yes to existence. And his yes has no conditions – remember it; when he says yes he means it. If you find a person who says no to existence, to life, to this and that, then remember, he is just an egoist – not religious at all. He is fighting the whole, trying to prove himself a conqueror, trying to prove that he is something special. He is doomed to fail. His frustration is sooner or later going to be; it cannot be avoided for long, it is predestined. It is predestined by his own attitude of conflict. Religion is cooperation – cooperation with all that is.
Try to understand it as deeply as possible. Once you have had a vision of the whole, all becomes sublime. Then there is nothing secular; everything is sacred, and the whole existence is the temple of God, and the whole life is a prayer.
Walking, you walk in God. Dancing, you dance in God. Sleeping, you sleep in God – because nothing else exists than him.
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