VBT – Meditation 105.2
Distinctions Are Dreams
Buddha says: Things are not different, they are the same; they only look different, they only appear different. The tree there, and the rock, and you, and the animals and the stars, are not different. At the innermost core, reality is one and the same. Substance is one and the same, there are no distinctions. Distinctions are dreams.
Physicists call that one reality ‘electricity’ or ‘energy’. Materialists, Marxists, communists, call that reality ‘matter’. idealists call that reality ‘mind’. Yogis call that reality ‘consciousness’. Buddha calls that reality ‘nothingness’.
Now, this word ‘nothingness’ is very important. ‘Nothingness’ means: no-thing-ness. No-thing is. All things are just forms, dreams. We are different only in form, and forms are just dreams. It is as if out of gold you can make many sorts of ornaments. Those forms, different ornaments, are just dreams, because gold is the reality. Behind all the forms is gold; behind all the forms is one reality. Buddha says: That sameness is the absolute ground of reality.
If you go in, you leave the form. First you leave the form of the body. Have you observed it? – People who are close to me and meditating, come again and again to that insight – and these sayings can be understood only if you have certain insights of your own. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand them. When you are meditating, many times it happens that you forget your form, your body; you don’t know who you are and how you look. You forget your face. In fact, in deep meditation, you completely become oblivious of your body. When you close your eyes, you are formless. Your mind also has form. You are a Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Jain, Buddhist; then you have a form of the mind: you think in terms of being a Christian, you have a certain identity, dogma defines you. But if you go still deeper, the mind also disappears. Then you are no more a Christian.
At the deepest core you are neither a body nor a mind. Then what are you?
Buddha says: Nothingness, no-thing-ness: now you are not a thing, now you are universal. Now you are not confined to any idea, you are infinite. You are that which has always been there and will remain always. You are eternal. Then there is no birth to you and there is no death to you. You are like the sky: clouds come and go and the sky remains untouched by them. Millions of times clouds have come and gone, and the sky has remained pure and virgin. It has not been corrupted or polluted by them. You are the inner sky. And when all forms disappear, the inner and the outer also disappear – because they are also forms. Then there is nothing inner and nothing outer… oneness, sameness.
Buddha does not call it ‘God’ – because to call it ‘God’ you may start thinking again of form. But that’s exactly what the word ‘God’ means, or should mean – God is that sameness that exists in all. ‘God’ means existence, isness. The tree is, the rock is, the cloud is, the man is – forms are different but isness is the same. As far as isness is concerned, a tree and you are the same. The form is different: the tree is green and you are not green, and the tree has flowers and you don’t have any flowers, and the bird can fly into the sky and you cannot fly; but these are differences of the form. But, isness is the same. To look into that isness is what meditation is all about. And to come to realize that isness is nirvana.
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