VBT – Week’s Meditation 92
Catch Yourself
Swami Ramteerth has said somewhere that he was staying in a house, in a poor villager’s house.
The small child of the villager was playing just in front of the hut, and the sun was rising and the child saw his shadow. He tried to catch it, but the more he moved, the more the shadow would move ahead. The child started crying. He was a failure. He tried in every way to catch it, but it was impossible. To catch a shadow is impossible – not because a shadow is such a difficult thing to catch, it is impossible because the child was moving to catch it. When he was moving, the shadow moved ahead. You cannot catch a shadow because a shadow has no substance, and only a substance can be caught.
Ramteerth was sitting there. He was laughing and the child was crying, and the mother was at a loss about what to do. How to console the child? So she said to Ramteerth, “Swamiji, can you help me?” Ramteerth went to the child, caught the child’s hand and put it on his head – the shadow was caught. Now that the child had put his hand on his head, the shadow was caught. The child started laughing. Now he could see that his hand had caught the shadow.
You cannot catch a shadow, but you can catch yourself. And the moment you catch yourself, the shadow is caught.
Suffering is just a shadow of the ego. We are all like that child, fighting with suffering, anxiety, anguish, and trying to disperse them. We can never be victorious. It is not a question of strength – the whole effort is absurd, impossible. You must catch the self, the ego, and once you catch it, suffering suddenly disappears. It was just a shadow.
There are people who start fighting with; self. It has been taught, “Disperse the self, be egoless, and you will be in bliss,” so they start fighting the self, the ego. But if you fight you are still believing that the self exists. Your fight will give food to it, it will become an energy-giving thing to it, you will be feeding it. This technique says don’t think of the ego, just move from the head to the heart and the ego will disappear. The ego is a projection of the head. Don’t fight with it. You can go on fighting for lives together, but if you remain in the head you cannot win.
Just change the standpoint, just move from the head to a different standpoint, to a deeper standpoint of the being, and the whole thing changes because now you can look from a different perspective.
From the heart there is no ego. Because of this we have become afraid of the heart. We never allow it to have its own way, we always interfere with it, we always bring our minds into it. We try to control the heart through the mind because we have become afraid – if you move to the heart, you lose yourself. And this, losing is just like death. Hence the incapacity to love, hence the fear of falling in love. Because you lose yourself, you are not in control. Something greater than you grips you and takes possession. Then you are not on sure ground and you don’t know where you are moving. So the head says, “Don’t be a fool, move with reason. Don’t be mad.”
Whenever someone is in love everyone thinks that he is mad. He himself thinks that something has gone crazy, “I am not in my senses!” Why does it happen? Because now there is no control.
Something is happening that he cannot control, he cannot manage and manipulate. Rather, something is manipulating him, a greater force has taken him over. He is possessed….
But unless you are ready to be possessed there can be no God for you. Unless you are ready to be possessed there is no mystery for you, and no bliss, no benediction. One who is ready to be possessed by love, by prayer, by the cosmos, means one who is ready to die as an ego. Only that one can know what life really is, what life has to give. What is possible becomes immediately actual, but you must put yourself at the stake.
This technique is beautiful. It doesn’t say anything about your ego. It doesn’t say anything about it.
It simply gives you a technique, and if you follow the technique, the ego will have disappeared.
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