VBT – Week’s Meditation 91
Just Witness
Even happiness will kill you, because you get so involved. You cannot remain out of anything.
Suffering or happiness, whatsoever comes to your door, you get so involved in it you are just pushed off your feet. You are no more there. Just a breeze comes in the house and you are no more there.
What I am saying is that if you don’t choose, if you remain alert and aware that this is how life is – days and nights come and go, suffering and happiness – you just witness. There is no clinging to happiness, no hankering for happiness, and no escape from suffering. You remain in yourself – centered, rooted. This is what bliss is.
So remember, bliss is not something opposite to suffering. Don’t think that when you become blissful there will be no suffering – nonsense. Suffering is part of life. It ceases only when you are not. When you completely disappear from the body, suffering ceases. When there is no birth, suffering ceases.
But then you are lost in the totality, then you are no more – just a drop has fallen into the ocean and is no more.
While you are, suffering will continue. It is part of life. But you can become aware: then suffering happens somewhere around you, but it never happens to you. But then happiness also never happens to you. Don’t think that happiness will go on happening to you and suffering will not happen – both will not happen to you. They will just happen around, just on the periphery, and you will be centered in yourself. You will see them happening, you will enjoy them happening, but they will happen around you; they will not happen to you.
This becomes possible if you don’t choose. That’s why I said this is delicate, subtle. Because of the paradoxical life, you choose happiness and you fall into suffering. You try to escape from suffering, and more and more suffering is invited. So you can take it as an ultimate law: whatsoever you choose, the opposite will be your fate. say it as an ultimate law: whatsoever you choose, the opposite will be your fate.
So whatsoever is your fate, remember, you have chosen it by choosing the opposite. If you are suffering, you have chosen your suffering by choosing happiness. Don’t choose happiness and suffering disappears. Don’t choose at all. Then nothing can happen to you, and everything is a flux except you. That has to be understood very deeply.
Only you are the constant factor in existence, nothing else. Only you are the eternity, nothing else.
Your awareness is never a flux. Suffering comes, you witness it. Then happiness comes, you witness it. Then nothing comes, you witness it. Only one thing remains constant – witnessing – and witnessing is you.
You were a child…. Or, if you move even further backwards, once you were just an atomic cell. You cannot even imagine it – just an atomic cell in your mother’s womb, not even visible to the naked eyes. If that cell comes before you and you encounter it, you will not be able to recognize that once you were that. Then you were a child, then you became young, and now you are old, or lying on your deathbed. Many things happened. Your whole life has been a flux; nothing remained the same for even two moments.
Heraclitus says you cannot step twice in the same river – and this he says for the river of life. You cannot have two similar moments. The moment that has gone cannot be repeated. It is gone forever; you cannot have it again. The same cannot exist. In such a great flux, only one thing within you remains the same – the witnessing.
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