VBT – Meditation 89.4

VBT – Meditation 89.4

Inner Consciousness

How can you create the quality? – For that is the technique. You are sitting near a tree. Look at the tree. It is outside you, but if it is really outside you, you cannot know it. Something of it has already travelled within you; that’s how you can know the tree is there. It is green. But do you know that the green exists in you, not in the tree? When you close your eyes, the tree is not green.

Now scientists say this – that the colour is given by you. Everything in nature is colourless; there exists no colour. Colour comes into being when rays travelling from a particular object meet your eye.

Then the colour is created. So colour is given by your eye. It is a meeting of the tree and you where green-ness happens. The flowers are there in bloom: the scent comes to you, and you smell it. But that fragrance also is given by you; it is not in nature. Only waves are coming towards you which you translate as smell. It is your nose which smells it. If you are not there, there will be no smell.

There have been philosophers like Berkeley or Nagarjuna, Shankara, who say the world is unreal, it exists in your mind, because whatsoever we know about the world is really given by us. Because of this, Immanuel Kant, a German thinker and philosopher, says that the thing-in-itself cannot be known. Whatsoever we know is not the thing; it is our projection.

Your face looks beautiful to me. Your face is neither beautiful nor ugly; it is my attitude. It is I who makes you beautiful or ugly. It depends on me: it is my feeling. If you are alone in the world and there is no one to say that you are ugly or beautiful, you will not be either. Or will you be? If you are alone on the earth, will you be beautiful or ugly? Will you be intelligent or foolish? You will be nothing.

Really you cannot exist alone on the earth. You cannot be.

If you are sitting near a tree, meditate. Open your eyes and look at the tree, and then close your eyes and look at the tree within. If you try it – again open the eyes, meditate on the tree and then close the eyes and look at the tree within – in the beginning the tree within will be a faint shadow of the tree without, but if you go on continuing, by and by it will come to have the same reality and being as the tree without.

And if you continue and persist, which is difficult, a moment comes when the outer tree becomes just a shadow of the inner. The inner becomes more beautiful, more alive, because now your inner consciousness is the soil for it. Now it is rooted in the inner consciousness. Now it is feeling on the consciousness, really. It is something rare.

So when Jesus or people like Jesus talk about the kingdom of God, they talk in such colourful language that we think that either they are mad, or just in hallucination. They are neither. They have learned how to include existence. Their own inner consciousness has become now a life – giving phenomenon. Now whatsoever is planted within becomes alive. It is more colourful, more fragrant, more vital – as if it doesn’t belong to this world, this mundane world; it belongs to some other world. Poets know this a little. Mystics know it very deeply, but poets also know it a little. They have a glimpse. They can feel the world included in them.

Try it – to be inclusive. This is what I mean when I say to be inclusive: let the tree go in and be rooted there. Let the flower go in and allow it to flower there. You cannot believe it, because there is no way unless you experience it. Concentrate on a bud, a bud of a rose flower. Concentrate on it, go on concentrating on it, and allow it to be transferred to the inner.

And when really your inner experience of the bud has become so real that the outer, the real bud, the so-called real bud, appears to be just a shadow of it – the real idea is now inside, the real essence is inside, and the outer is just a faint copy – when you have come to this point, close your eyes and concentrate on the inner bud. You will be amazed, because the inner bud will start opening.

It will become a flower, and such a flower that you have not known. And you cannot meet that flower outside. Now this is a rare phenomenon when something starts growing within you, opening, blooming.

In this way be inclusive, and then by and by allow your boundaries to expand. Include your lovers, your friends, your family, include strangers, and then by and by you will be able to include the enemy.

That will be the last point. And when you can include the enemy and you can allow him to enter in you and be rooted there and become part of your consciousness, then nothing is inimical to you.

Then the whole world has become your home. Then nothing is strange, no one is alien, and you are at ease in it.

But be aware of the cunning mind. The mind will always say to you something which you cannot do, and when you cannot do it, the mind will say, ‘These are absurd things. Leave them.’ The mind will set a target which cannot be reached. Always remember that, and don’t be a victim of your own mind. Always start from somewhere which is possible; don’t jump to the impossible. If you can grow in the possible, the impossible is only the other end of it. It is not opposite to it; it is only the other end. It is the same spectrum – the other end of the spectrum.