VBT – Meditation 101.2
Just By Believing
If you can believe, then this sutra will be helpful. BELIEVE OMNISCIENT, OMNIPOTENT, PERVADING. You are that already so just by believing it, all that is hiding you, all that is covering you, will fall down immediately. But even for those thirty percent it will be difficult because they are also conditioned to believe in something which is not the case. They are also conditioned to doubt; they are also trained to be skeptical; and they know their limitations, so how can they believe? Or, if they believe, people will think they are mad. If you say that you believe that inside you is the all-pervading, the omnipotent, the Divine, the all-powerful, then people will look at you and think you have gone crazy. How can you believe such things unless you are mad?
But try something. Start from the very beginning. Get a little feeling of this phenomenon, then belief will follow. If you want to use this technique, do this. Close your eyes and just feel that you have no body, feel as if the body has disappeared, melted away. Then you can feel your all-pervading-ness.
With the body it is difficult. That’s why many traditions go on teaching that you are not the body because with the body, limitation comes in. It is not difficult to feel that you are not the body, because you are not the body. It is just a conditioning, it is just a thought that has been forced upon your mind. Your mind has been impregnated with the thought that you are the body.
There are phenomena which demonstrate this. In Ceylon, Buddhist monks walk on fire. They do in India also, but the Ceylonese phenomenon is very rare – they walk for hours and they are not burned.
It happened once, just a few years ago, that a Christian missionary went to see the fire-walk. They do it on the night when Buddha became enlightened, a full moon night – because they say that on that day it was revealed to the world that the body is nothing, matter is nothing; that the inner being is all-pervading and the fire cannot burn it. But to do this for one year the monks who walk on the fire purify their bodies, through PRANAYAMA, breathing processes, and fasting. They meditate to purify their minds, empty their minds. For one year continuously they prepare. They live in isolated cells just feeling that they are not in their bodies. For one year continuously a group of fifty or sixty monks goes on thinking that they are not their bodies. A year is a long time. Thinking every moment only one thing – that they are not their bodies – continuously hammering that the body is illusory, they come to believe it. Then too they are not forced to walk on the fire. They are brought to the fire and then whosoever thinks that he will not be burned, jumps into it. A few remain doubting, hesitating – they are not allowed to jump because this is not a question of fire burning or not, this is a question of their doubt. If they hesitate a little they are stopped. So sixty are prepared and sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty people jump into the fire and they dance in it for hours together without getting burned.
A missionary came to see it in nineteen-fifty. He was very surprised but he thought that if belief in Buddha could do this miracle, then why not belief in Jesus? So he thought for a while, hesitated a little, but then, with the idea that if Buddha could help, Jesus would also help, he jumped. He got burned, badly burned; he had to be hospitalized for six months. And he couldn’t understand the phenomenon. It was not a question of Jesus or Buddha, it was not a question of belief in someone, it was a question of belief. And that belief has to be hammered into the mind. Unless it reaches to the very core of your being, it will not start working.
Tags: Just By Believing
