VBT – Meditation 91.4
Life Cannot Be Divided
If you cling you will miss the opportunity also. Later on you will suffer and right now you will not enjoy it, because the fear is just around the corner – sooner or later it has to go. The guest has come to your house, and you know he is a guest and tomorrow morning he will leave. You start suffering for the future – tomorrow morning he will leave – and that pain, that suffering, that anguish, comes upon you right now. You cannot be happy while the guest is in your home. While the guest is with you, you cannot be happy because you are already in anxiety and anguish that tomorrow morning he will leave. So while he is there you will not be happy, and when he is gone you will be unhappy.
This is what is happening.
The first thing: life cannot be divided. If you divide, only then can you choose. And that which you choose is flux-like – sooner or later it will be gibe – and that which you have denied will fall over you; you cannot escape it. You cannot say, ‘I will live only in the days and I will escape the nights.’
You cannot say, ‘I will live only with the ingoing breath and I will not allow the outgoing breaths.’
Life is a rhythm of opposites. The breath comes in and goes out: between these two opposites – ingoing and outgoing – you exist. Suffering is there, happiness is there. Happiness is just like the ingoing breath, suffering is just like the outgoing breath; or day and night – the rhythm of opposites.
You cannot say, ‘I will live only if I am happy. When I am not happy, I will not live.’ You can take this attitude, but this attitude will make you suffer more.
No one chooses suffering, remember. We ask why man has chosen to suffer. No one has chosen to suffer. You have chosen not to suffer, you have chosen to be happy, and you have chosen strongly.
You are doing everything to be happy and that’s why you are suffering, why you are not happy.
So what is to be done? Remember that life is total. You cannot choose – the whole life has to be lived. There will be moments of happiness and there will be moments of suffering, and both have to be lived; you cannot choose. Because life is both – otherwise the rhythm will be lost, and without rhythm there will be no life.
It is just like music. You hear some music: there are notes, sounds, and after each sound there is silence, a gap. Because of that gap, that interval of silence, and the sound – because of both the opposites – music is created. If you say, ‘I will choose only sounds and I am not going to take the gaps,’ there will be no music. It will be a monotonous thing, it will be dead. Those gaps give life to sound. This is the beauty of life – that through opposites it exists. Sound and silence, sound and silence – that creates music, the rhythm. The same is with life. Suffering and happiness are two opposites. You cannot choose.
If you choose, you have become a victim; you will suffer. If you become aware of this totality of the opposites and the way that life functions, you don’t choose – the first thing. And when you don’t choose there is no need to cling, there is no meaning in clinging. When suffering comes you enjoy the suffering, and when happiness comes you enjoy the happiness. When the guest is at home you enjoy him, when he has gone you enjoy the suffering, the absence, the pain. I say enjoy both. This is the path of wisdom: enjoy both, don’t choose. Whatsoever falls upon you, accept it. It is your fate, it is how life is, and nothing can be done about it.
If you take this attitude, there is no choosing. You have become choiceless. And when you are choiceless, you will become aware of yourself, because now you are not worried about what happens, so you are not outgoing. You are not worried about what is happening around you.
Whatsoever happens you will enjoy it, you will live it, you will go through it, you will experience it, and you will gain something out of it, because every experience is an expansion of consciousness.
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