VBT – Meditation 92.0
PUT MINDSTUFF IN SUCH INEXPRESSIBLE FINENESS ABOVE, BELOW AND IN YOUR HEART.
Feel Presence
Three things. First, if knowledge is important then the head is the center; if childlike innocence is important then the heart is the center. The child lives in the heart; we live in the head. The child feels; we think. Even when we say that we feel, we think that we feel. Thinking becomes primary for us, feeling becomes secondary. Thinking is the tool for science, feeling is the tool for religion.
You must start to be a feeling organism again. And both the dimensions are different. When you think, you remain separate; when you feel, you melt.
Think about a flower, a rose flower. When you think, you are separate, there is a gap, a distance, a space. For thinking, space is needed; for thoughts to move, distance is needed. Feel the flower and the gap disappears, the distance drops. Because for feeling, distance is the barrier. The closer you come, the more you feel. A moment comes when even closeness appears to be a sort of distance – and then melting happens. Then you cannot feel the boundaries of where you are and where the flower is, of where you end and where the flower begins. Then boundaries melt into each other: the flower enters you in a way, you enter the flower in a way. Feeling is losing the boundaries; thinking is creating the boundaries. That is why thinking always insists on definitions, because without definitions you cannot create boundaries.
Thinking says define first, and feeling says don’t define. If you define, feeling stops.
The child feels; we think. The child comes close to existence, he melts and allows the existence to melt into him. We are isolated, imprisoned in the head. We are like islands.
This sutra says to come back to the heart center. Start feeling things. It will be a great experiment if you start feeling things. Whatsoever you do, give a certain amount of your time and energy to feeling. You are sitting with the master, you can listen to him – but that will be part of thinking. You can also feel him but that will not be a part of thinking. If you can feel his presence, then definitions are lost.
Then really, if you come to a moment of feeling, you don’t know who is speaking and who is listening.
This can happen right this very moment. Then the speaker becomes the listener and the listener becomes the speaker. Then really they are not two, rather, they are two poles of one phenomenon: on one pole is the speaker, on another pole is the listener. But these are just poles, isolated. They are not real. The real thing is just in-between these two – the life, the flow. Whenever you feel, something other than your ego becomes important. Object and subject lose their definitions. A flow, a wave, exists – on one pole the speaker, on another pole the listener, but life is the wave.
Head gives you clarity, and because of this clarity much confusion has come into being because the head defines clearly, marks boundaries, makes maps. With reason, everything is clear-cut: no vagueness, no mystery is allowed. All that is vague is rejected, only the clear is real. Reason gives you clarity, and because of clarity, a great misunderstanding arises. Clarity is not reality. Reality is always unclear, vague. Concepts are clear, reality is mysterious; concepts are rational, reality is irrational.
Words are clear, logic is clear, life is not clear. The heart gives you a melting vagueness. It reaches reality more intimately, but it is not clear. And because we have chosen clarity as the goal, we have been missing reality. You must have unclear eyes to enter reality again. You must be vague, you must be ready to enter into something which cannot be conceptualized, into something which is not a logic, into something which is staggering and real, staggering and alive.
Clarity is dead. It remains fixed. Life is a flux, nothing is fixed, nothing remains the same the next moment. How can you be clear about it? If you insist too much on clarity you will lose contact with it. That is what has happened.
Tags: Feel Presence
