VBT – Meditation 106.0
FEEL THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF EACH PERSON AS YOUR OWN CONSCIOUSNESS.
SO, LEAVING ASIDE CONCERN FOR SELF, BECOME EACH BEING.
Become Each Being
FEEL THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF EACH PERSON AS YOUR OWN CONSCIOUSNESS. In reality it is so, but it does not feel so. You feel your consciousness as yours, and others’ consciousnesses you never feel. At the most you infer that others are also conscious. You infer because you think that because you are conscious, other beings like you must be conscious. This is a logical inference; you don’t feel them as conscious. It is just like when you have a headache you feel your headache, you have a consciousness of it. But if someone else has a headache, you infer – you cannot feel the other’s headache. You simply infer that whatsoever he is saying must be true and he must have something like you. But you cannot feel it.
The feeling can come only if you become conscious about others’ consciousnesses – otherwise it is a logical inference. You believe, you trust, that others are saying something honestly, and whatsoever they are saying is worth believing because you also have similar types of experiences.
There is a logical school which says that nothing can be known about the other, it is impossible. At the most there can be an inference but nothing certain can be known about others. How can you know that others have pain like you, that others have anxieties like you? Others are there but we cannot penetrate them, we can only just touch their surface. Their inner being remains unknown.
We remain closed in ourselves.
The world around us is not a felt world, it is just inferred – logically, rationally. The mind says it is there but the heart is not touched by it. That is why we behave with others as if they are things not persons. Our relationship with persons is also as it is with things. A husband behaves towards his wife as if she is a thing: he possesses her. The wife possesses the husband just like a thing. If we behaved with the other as if they were persons then we would not try to possess them, because only things can be possessed.
A person means freedom. A person cannot be possessed. If you try to possess them, you will kill them, they will become things. Our relationship with others is really not an ‘I-thou’ relationship, deep down it is just an ‘I-it’ relationship. The other is just a thing to be manipulated, to be used, exploited.
That is why love becomes more and more impossible, because love means taking the other as a person, as a conscious being, as a freedom, as something as valuable as you are.
If you behave as if everything is a thing, then you are the center and things are just to be used. The relationship becomes utilitarian. Things have no value in themselves – the value is that you can use them, they exist for you. You can be related to your house – the house exists for you. It is a utility.
The car exists for you, but the wife doesn’t exist for you and the husband doesn’t exist for you. The husband exists for himself and the wife exists for herself. A person exists for himself; that is what being a person means. And if you allow the person to be a person and don’t reduce him to being a thing, you will by and by start feeling him. Otherwise you cannot feel. Your relationship will remain conceptual, intellectual, mind to mind, head to head – but not heart to heart.
Tags: Become Each Being
