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The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 1 Talks given from 21/06/79 am to 30/04/80 am


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But what can you do? That's your whole way of life, that's how you live. You eat -- you simply go on stuffing, you don't pay any attention to what you are eating. You make love to your wife or your husband -- you don't even see the face of the woman. You have become very insensitive; you just go on moving through empty gestures, with no significance. They can't have any significance unless you are fully alert.

It is the light of awareness that makes things precious, extraordinary. Then small things are no longer small. When a man with alertness, sensitivity, love, touches an ordinary pebble on the seashore, that pebble becomes a kohinoor. And if you touch a kohinoor in your unconscious state, it is just an ordinary pebble -- not even that. Your life will have as much depth and as much meaning as you have awareness.

Now people are asking all over the world, "What is the meaning of life?" Of course the meaning is lost, because you have lost the way to find the meaning -- and the way is awareness. IT IS HIS MOST PRECIOUS TREASURE.
HE NEVER GIVES IN TO DESIRE.
What does Buddha mean by "desire"? Desire means your whole mind. Desire means not to be herenow. Desire means moving somewhere in the future which is not yet. Desire means a thousand and one ways of escaping from the present. Desire is equivalent to mind. In Buddha's terminology, desire is mind.

And desire is time too. When I say desire is time too, I don't mean the clock time, I mean the psychological time. How do you create future in your mind? -- by desiring. You want to do something tomorrow, you have created the tomorrow; otherwise the tomorrow is nowhere yet, it has not come. But you want to do something tomorrow, and because you want to do something tomorrow you have created a psychological tomorrow.

And people are creating years ahead, lives ahead. They are even thinking about what to do after life, after death. They are even preparing for that! And these people are thought to be religious; they are not religious at all. Desire takes you away from the now-here, and now-here is the only reality.

Hence Buddha says: HE NEVER GIVES IN TO DESIRE. He never moves into the future, he lives in the present. To live in the future is to live a false life, a pseudo life.


A fashionable actress refuses a young man who begs for her favors, on the grounds that he is Jewish, and laughs at his offer of one hundred thousand francs. She tells him that to show him how little she cares for his money he can make love to her for as long as it takes the hundred thousand francs to burn.

He comes back the next day with the money, lays ten bills out in a line with the ends just overlapping, lights the first one and leaps into bed with her. As the last bill burns away, she pushes him off her.

"Well, I have had you," he says triumphantly.

"Yes," she smiles, "and your hundred thousand francs are burnt to ashes."

"What does it matter?" he says, lighting a cigarette. "They were counterfeit."
The man who lives in the future, lives a counterfeit life. He does not really live, he only pretends to live. He hopes to live, he desires to live, but he never lives. And the tomorrow never comes, it is always today. And whatsoever comes is always now and here, and he does not know how to live now-here; he knows only how to escape from now-here. The way to escape is called "desire," tanha -- that is Buddha's word for what is an escape from the present, from the real into the unreal.

The man who desires is an escapist.

Now, this is very strange, that meditators are thought to be escapists. That is utter nonsense. Only the meditator is not an escapist -- everybody else is. Meditation means getting out of desire, getting out of thoughts, getting out of mind. Meditation means relaxing in the moment, in the present. Meditation is the only thing in the world which is not escapist, although it is thought to be the most escapist thing. People who condemn meditation always condemn it with the argument that it is escape, escaping from life. They are simply talking nonsense; they don't understand what they are saying.

Meditation is not escaping from life: it is escaping into life. Mind is escaping from life, desire is escaping from life.

HE NEVER GIVES IN TO DESIRE....
HE MEDITATES.
He brings himself again and again to the present. Again and again the mind starts functioning and he brings it back to the present. Slowly slowly, it starts happening: the window opens and for the first time you see the sky as it is. And for the first time you feel the wind and the rain and the sun, in their immediacy, because you become meditative. You start touching life. Then life is no longer a word but a tangible reality; then love is no longer a word but an overflowing energy. Then blessing is no longer just a desire, a hope -- you feel it, you have it, you are it.

HE MEDITATES.... Buddha is not for prayer, he is for meditation, because prayer is again somehow a kind of desiring. When you pray, you desire. Prayer is always for the future; prayer means you are asking for something. You may not be asking for money, you may be asking for God himself, but it is the same. Ask, and you have moved away. Meditation is a state of nonasking, nonquestioning, nonthinking. Prayer is still part of thinking -- a beautiful thinking, but thinking is thinking; a beautiful prison, but a prison is still a prison.

And the mind who prays is greedy, and the mind who prays goes through no transformation. It remains the same mind. And the prayer is born out of the same mind; it cannot have a very different quality. How can you pray for something which is different from you? -- it will be your prayer. It will reflect your mind, it will come out of your mind, it will sprout out of your mind. How can it take you beyond the mind? Prayer cannot take you beyond the mind. Only meditation can take you beyond the mind.

Meditation is a state of no-mind. Prayer is a state of religious mind, but mind is there. And when it has the beautiful garment of religiousness around it, it becomes even more dangerous.


A little boy on a picnic strays away from his family, and suddenly realizes that he is lost and night is falling. Becoming frightened after wandering aimlessly for some time, and shouting for his parents but receiving no answer, he kneels down and prays with uplifted hands. "Dear Lord," he says, "please help me to find my daddy and mommy, and I won't hit my little sister anymore, honest I won't!"

As he kneels praying, a bird flies over and drops a load of shit into his outstretched palm. The little boy examines it and turns his eyes back to heaven.

"Oh please, Lord," he begs, "don't hand me that shit. I really and truly am lost!"
Your prayer is your prayer; it is part of you, an extension of you. It cannot help you to surpass yourself. Meditation is the only way to surpass oneself, the only way to transcend oneself.

And what is meditation? It does not mean meditating upon something; the English word is misleading. In English there is no word adequate enough to translate Buddha's word sammasati. It has been translated as meditation, as right mindfulness, as awareness, as consciousness, alertness, watchfulness, witnessing -- but there is not really a single word which has the quality of sammasati.

Sammasati means: consciousness is, but without any content. There is no thought, no desire, nothing is stirred in you. You are not contemplating about God or about great things...nature and its beauty, the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and their immensely significant statements. You are not contemplating! You are not concentrating on any special object either. You are not chanting a mantra, because those are all things of the mind, those are all contents of the mind. You are not doing anything! The mind is utterly empty, and you are simply there in that emptiness. A kind of presence, a pure presence, with nowhere to go -- utterly relaxed into oneself, at rest, at home. That is the meaning of Buddha's meditation.

And nobody else has ever reached such a beautiful expression about meditation as Buddha. Many people have attained, but nobody has been so expressive, so capable of conveying the message, as the Buddha. HE NEVER GIVES IN TO DESIRE. HE MEDITATES.


AND IN THE STRENGTH OF HIS RESOLVE

HE DISCOVERS TRUE HAPPINESS.


Bliss is true happiness. What you call happiness is just misery in disguise. What you call happiness is nothing but entertainment, pleasure. It is momentary -- it cannot be true. Truth has to have one quality, and the quality is of eternity. If something is true it is eternal; if it is untrue it is momentary.

True happiness is found only when the mind completely ceases functioning. It does not come from the outside. It wells up within your own being, it starts overflowing you. You become luminous. You become a fountain of bliss.


HE OVERCOMES DESIRE --

AND FROM THE TOWER OF WISDOM

HE LOOKS DOWN WITH DISPASSION

UPON THE SORROWING CROWD.

FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP

HE LOOKS DOWN ON THOSE

WHO LIVE CLOSE TO THE GROUND.
As someone becomes a buddha -- desire overcome, mind overcome, time overcome, the ego transcended -- he is no longer part of this earth. He still lives on the earth, but his soul soars so high that from the sunlit tops of his being he can see the sorrowing crowd in the dark valleys of life, stumbling, drunken, fighting, ambitious, greedy, angry, violent...a sheer wastage of great opportunities. Great compassion arises in his being. His whole passion passes through dispassion and becomes compassion.

Passion means using the other as a means -- and that is the fundamental of immorality. To use somebody as a means is the most immoral act in the world, because each person is an end unto himself. To use him as a means is to exploit. And that's what we call love: the husband using the wife, the wife using the husband; the children using their parents, and the parents later on using their children -- that's what we call love!

It is not love. It is a strategy of the mind; it is poison coated with sugar. This love is really disgusting. That's why you see the whole world in such disgust. This love is sickening. It has sickened the whole soul of humanity because it is not love at all. It is passion, lust, using the other as a means.

As you start meditating you move to the second stage, dispassion -- love disappears. You come into a neutral phase; just as you change gears in the car, and each time you change gear, the gear first has to move through neutral, so passion moves through a neutral phase -- it becomes dispassion. Love disappears. For the time being, in the interval, the man who is moving towards buddhahood becomes utterly cold, dispassionate.

And then the third stage is reached. When he has attained buddhahood, he has found bliss and the inexhaustible fountains of bliss -- aes dhammo sanantano -- when he has found the principle of eternity, when he has found the inexhaustible treasure of life, he starts overflowing. Love comes back -- in fact, love comes for the first time. It is compassion. Now he showers his compassion on each and everybody; whosoever comes to him, he shares his bliss with him, he shares his way, he shares his insight.
MINDFUL AMONG THE MINDLESS,

AWAKE WHILE OTHERS DREAM,

SWIFT AS THE RACE HORSE

HE OUTSTRIPS THE FIELD.


And when you have become established in meditation and compassion you no longer fall a victim of sleep and dream. You remain awake -- even while asleep. And then your life becomes a straight arrow, moves with tremendous speed, with the speed of light, towards the goal. You become, for the first time, being.

SWIFT AS THE RACE HORSE HE OUTSTRIPS THE FIELD. MINDFUL AMONG THE MINDLESS, AWAKE WHILE OTHERS DREAM. That is the difference between Buddha and others. Others are only dreaming, not really living; hoping to live some day, preparing to live, but not living. And that day never comes -- before that day comes death.

A buddha is awake. Even while he is asleep he does not dream. When desires disappear, dreams disappear too. Dreams are desires translated into the language of sleep. A buddha sleeps with absolute alertness. The light goes on burning within him. The body needs rest, hence the body sleeps, but he needs no rest -- the energy is inexhaustible. There, at the center of his being, a small light goes on burning. The whole circumference is fast asleep, but that light is alert, awake.

We are asleep even while we are awake: he is awake even while he is asleep.


BY WATCHING

INDRA BECAME KING OF THE GODS.

HOW WONDERFUL IT IS TO WATCH,

HOW FOOLISH TO SLEEP.


THE BHIKKHU WHO GUARDS HIS MIND

AND FEARS THE WAYWARDNESS OF HIS THOUGHTS

BURNS THROUGH EVERY BOND

WITH THE FIRE OF HIS VIGILANCE.


'Bhikkhu' is Buddha's word for sannyasin. 'Sannyasin' is my word for the bhikkhu. I have not chosen Buddha's word -- for a certain reason. Bhikkhu literally means beggar.

Buddha renounced his kingdom and became a beggar. Of course, even while he is a beggar, he walks like an emperor; of course, he is far more graceful than he ever was before, and far richer that he ever was before. But because he renounced the kingdom, people started calling him a bhikkhu, a beggar. And, slowly slowly, the name was adopted by his followers too.

I don't want you to be beggars, I want you to be masters. Hence I have chosen the word 'sannyasin'. A sannyasin means one who knows how to live rightly. It is not renunciation; on the contrary, it is rejoicing, it is celebration.

THE BHIKKHU WHO GUARDS HIS MIND AND FEARS THE WAYWARDNESS OF HIS THOUGHTS BURNS THROUGH EVERY BOND WITH THE FIRE OF HIS VIGILANCE.

Yes, meditation is fire -- it burns your thoughts, your desires, your memories; it burns the past and the future. It burns your mind and the ego. It takes away all that you think that you are. It is a death and a rebirth, a crucifixion and a resurrection. You are born anew. You lose your own identity totally, and you attain to a new vision of life.

That vision of life is what is meant by god, dhamma, tao, logos. You can choose your name for it because it has no name of its own. In fact it is not expressible at all; it can only be indicated, hinted at.


THE BHIKKHU WHO GUARDS HIS MIND

AND FEARS HIS OWN CONFUSION

CANNOT FALL.

HE HAS FOUND THE WAY TO PEACE.


Mind is confusion. Thoughts and thoughts -- thousands of thoughts clamoring, clashing, fighting with each other, fighting for your attention. Thousands of thoughts pulling you into thousands of directions. It is a miracle how you go on keeping yourself together. Somehow you manage this togetherness -- it is only somehow, it is only a facade. Deep behind it there is a clamoring crowd, a civil war, a continuous civil war. Thoughts fighting with each other, thoughts wanting you to fulfill them. It is a great confusion, what you call your mind.

But if you are aware that the mind is confusion, and you don't get identified with the mind, you will never fall. You will become fallproof! The mind will become impotent. And because you will be watching continuously, your energies will slowly be withdrawn, away from the mind; it will not be nourished any more.

And once the mind dies, you are born as a no-mind. That birth is enlightenment. That birth brings you for the first time to the land of peace, the lotus paradise. It brings you to the world of bliss, benediction. Otherwise you remain in hell. Right now you are in hell. But if you resolve, if you decide, if you choose consciousness, right now you can take a jump, a leap from hell into heaven.

It is up to you: you can choose hell, you can choose heaven. Hell is cheap. Heaven needs great effort, perseverance, resolve. Hell means you can remain unconscious, you can remain as you are. Heaven means you have to rise above yourself, you have to transcend. You have to move from the valley towards the peaks.

And those peaks are yours, but you have to pay for them. Climbing to those peaks is arduous effort. Be watchful, be meditative, and one day you will find yourself on the sunlit peaks. That is liberation, moksha. That is nirvana -- cessation of the ego and the birth of God.

You are entitled to be gods. If you are not, only you are responsible and nobody else. Listen to the Buddha. Don't only listen to the Buddha -- act, be committed to the life of consciousness, get involved.

But let me remind you again: this is only one dimension of life -- immensely rich, but still one dimension. You will have to do something more. I am giving you a more arduous task than Buddha did. Buddha gave you one dimension; I want you to have all three dimensions, and a synthesis.

A new man is needed on the earth. The old is rotten and finished, it has no future, it can't survive. It has come to the very end of its tether. It is on the deathbed. Unless a new man is born -- East and West meeting, all three dimensions together -- humanity is doomed.

This experiment that I am doing here is just to create the first specimen of the new man. You are participating in a great experiment of tremendous import. Feel blessed. Feel fortunate. You may not be aware of what you are participating in, but you may create history! It all depends on how committed, how involved you become with me and with my experiment.

This is the greatest synthesis possible, that has ever been tried....

Enough for today.
The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 1

Chapter #8

Chapter title: The beginning of a new phase

28 June 1979 am in Buddha Hall


Archive code: 7906280

ShortTitle: DHAM108

Audio: Yes

Video: No

Length: 105 mins

The first question:

Question 1

BELOVED MASTER,

I NEVER DID GET TURNED ON BY CLASSICAL MUSIC, AND ART GALLERIES BORED ME SILLY. SO, IS IT POSSIBLE TO GO FROM THE FIRST LAYER, THE HEAD, TO THE THIRD LAYER, THE CENTER, AND SORT OF BYPASS ALL THIS AESTHETIC GARBAGE?
Nirgun, yes, it is true: in the name of aesthetics, there is much garbage. But when I use the word 'aesthetics' I don't mean the garbage collected in the museums and art galleries.

When I use the word 'aesthetics' I mean a quality in you. It has nothing to do with objects -- paintings, music, poetry -- it has something to do with a quality in your being, a sensitivity, a love for beauty, a sensitivity for the texture and taste of things, for the eternal dance that goes on all around, an awareness of it, a silence to hear this cuckoo calling from the distance....

It is not garbage: it is the very core of existence.

But I can understand that you must be getting bored with the so-called classical music and paintings collected in the art galleries. And you must be a little bit puzzled why people go on talking so much about all this nonsense.

Aesthetics is just an artistic approach towards life, a poetic vision. Seeing colors so totally that each tree becomes a painting, that each cloud brings the presence of God, that colors are more colorful, that you don't go on ignoring the radiance of things, that you remain alert, aware, loving, that you remain receptive, welcoming, open. That's what I mean by the aesthetic attitude, the aesthetic approach.

Music has to be in your heart, your very being has to be musical, it has to become a harmony. A man can exist as a chaos or as a cosmos. Music is the way from chaos to cosmos. A man can exist as a disorder, a discord, just noise, a market place, or a man can exist as a temple, a sacred silence, where celestial music is heard on its own, uncreated music is heard on its own.

The Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping. In India, for centuries mystics have been talking about anahat nad -- the unstruck sound. It is there in your very being; you need not go anywhere to listen to it. It is the ancientmost music, and the latest too. It is both the oldest and the newest. And it is the music of your own being, the hum of your own existence. And if you can't hear it, you are deaf.

And there is no way, Nirgun, to bypass it. Museums you can bypass, art galleries you can bypass -- in fact, you should bypass them. You need not be worried about art and art criticism -- forget all about it. But you have to become an artist of life itself.

I say Buddha is a poet, although he never composed a single poem. Still I insist that he is one of the greatest poets who has ever lived. He was not a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Kalidas, a Rabindranath -- no, not at all. But still I say: Shakespeare, Milton, Kalidas, Rabindranath, are nothing compared to his poetry. His life was his poetry -- the way he walked, the way he looked at things....

Just the other night I came across one of the most beautiful statements of Saint Teresa of Avila. She says: All that you need is to look. Her whole message is contained in this simple statement: All that you need is to look. The capacity to look -- and you will find God. The capacity to hear -- and you will find his music. The capacity to touch -- and every texture becomes his texture. Touch the rock and you find God.

It is not a question of objects of art: it is a question of an inner approach, a vision -- of seeing things artistically. And, Nirgun, you have that quality! In fact, because of that quality you were bored by classical music and you were bored by galleries -- because in an unconscious way, in a groping way, you feel something far superior inside you. But you are not yet fully aware of it.

Bypass the art galleries and you will not be losing anything. But you cannot bypass the aesthetic layer of your being: you have to go through it. Otherwise you will always remain impoverished; something will be missing, something of immense value. Your enlightenment will never be total. A part of your being will remain unenlightened; a corner of your soul will remain dark -- and that corner will remain heavy on you. One has to become totally enlightened. Nothing should be bypassed, no shortcuts are to be invented. One has to move very naturally through all the layers, because all those layers are opportunities to grow.

Remember it: whenever I use the words 'music' or 'poetry' or 'painting' or 'sculpture', I have my own meaning.
When Helen Keller, the blind woman, came to India, she visited Jawaharlal Nehru. She was blind, deaf. She touched Nehru's face; with both her hands she felt Nehru's face, and she was immensely delighted. She expressed her great joy. She stated, "I have felt the same quality in Nehru's face as I felt when I touched beautiful Roman statues -- the same coolness and the same proportion and the same form."

Now this woman has a heart of a sculptor -- blind, deaf, but she has the genius of a great artist. Because she was deaf and blind, she had to find new ways to feel life. And sometimes curses prove blessings. She would touch water, she would feel its coolness, its flow, its life, its vibe. You will never feel it, because you can see the water; you can say, "What is there?" Because she could not see, she could only feel the texture of a rock...you can see and you will miss -- you will not feel the texture of it.

Sometimes it is tremendously significant to close your eyes and just touch the rock, and feel as if you are blind and you have only hands and you have to use the hands as your eyes. And you will be surprised -- you are in for a surprise. For the first time you will see that the texture has its own dimension.

Because she had no eyes and no ears, her sense of smell was just at the optimum. She could feel the perfume of things, of people. She could discriminate between one tree and another tree just by the fragrance of it. She could even distinguish persons just by their smell.

Now she is as aesthetic as any Picasso, Dali, Van Gogh -- or even more so.
Nirgun, the aesthetic garbage is certainly there, because whatsoever man creates in his unconsciousness is bound to be garbage. The paintings of Picasso represent the mind of Picasso. Now this man seems to be insane somewhere deep down. In fact, his paintings are a way to remain sane; his paintings are cathartic. What you do in your Dynamic Meditation he is doing through his paintings: throwing out tensions, nightmares, all the ugliness that is in the mind. It has to be thrown out of the system, and it can be done through painting very easily.

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