Chapter #19 No Man Is An Island #19

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

(To Juliane) -- This is your name: Ma Dhyan Juliane.
Dhyan means meditation. Juliane means youthful.

Youthfulness has nothing to do with age
Youthfulness is a transcendence of time.
Whenever you are not in time, you are youthful
Whenever you are in time, you are old.
Even a one-day-old child is old enough --
He is no more youthful, he has aged,
He has died already twenty-four hours.
One day is less in his life
Something has slipped by
He has lost already something
Utterly unaware of it. And that's what
Millions of people go on doing their whole life
In fact a person becomes aware that he was alive
Only when he dies; when death knocks on the door
The shock of it makes him alert for the first time
'What have I missed? I have lost my life
And now nothing can be done about it.'

The only use of life is to transcend time.
Life is an opportunity
In time, to transcend time;
A ladder has to be created.
Time moves horizontally,
Just like an alphabet, a b c,
Linear, in one line.
Transcendence is vertical,
It is like a ladder, not linear --
You go higher or deeper
Which ultimately means the same.
If you go higher, you go deeper
If you go deeper, you go higher
But you start moving in a totally new dimension.
You are no more moving horizontally
You are moving vertically.
That movement happens through meditation
Mediation is the ladder I am talking about.
It takes you beyond time and suddenly
Great youthfulness explodes in you.

The touch of eternity is youthfulness.
Then you know that you belong to the eternal.
The experience of the eternal
Is the experience of god. And these are
The only two possibilities available for man:
Either he moves in time,
Then he moves horizontally, linear --
That is the way of the mind,
Time is the way of the mind.
Or, one moves vertically --
That is the way of no-mind,
Timelessness it the way of no-mind.
And meditation is nothing but an art
Of how to take a jump from mind to no-mind.
From horizontal to the vertical.

It is the greatest quantum leap possible
It is the most radical phenomenon;
Just a glimpse of it and you are full of god
Just a glimpse of it and you are not more the same.
And you will never be the same again.
You will live in the same world
But you will live out of it.
You will be in the world
But the world will not be in you.
That's what sannyas is all about:
Being in the world yet not of it.

(To Margarita) -- This is your name: Ma Dhyan Sangitamo.
Dhyan means meditation. Sangitamo means music.

Meditation is music, the ultimate music:
Music without sound, music of silence.
It is far richer, far more deeper
Than any music that we can create through sound
Because sound is after all, a disturbance.
Each vibration is a disturbance.
We can make the disturbance lovable
But still it is a disturbance.
Silence means no disturbance, nothing stirs
But there is great music, there is great harmony
In that wordless, soundless state.

Meditation leads into that state of silence
And unless a man knows that silence
He is not aware
Of what he is carrying in his heart
He remains unaware of his own kingdom
Of his own richness, of his own treasures.
He remains a beggar while he can be an emperor
Any moment -- just a turning in.

Silence is alchemical:
Once you have penetrated the barrier of sound
Once you have passed the barrier of sound
And reached to the very core of your being
You have reached to the very center of existence.
Those who have heard it
They have called it by many names.
One of the names is god.

Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping.
It is an absurdity:
One hand cannot make any sound
But Zen people enjoy absurdities
They express themselves in paradoxes.
In fact the ultimate truth
Can only be expressed through paradoxes.
It is so vast that
It has to contain all contradictions in it
It can't leave anything outside of it.

The outer music is only a remembrance
An effort to remind you, of the inner.
Hence I use outside music for all meditations:
It can trigger a process inside you
It can create a situation. It is a device.
If you know how to listen to the outer music
Just listening it, listening it, listening it,
Suddenly the outer disappears and
You are transported into the inner.
If the outer music is really beautiful
It provokes something in you.

Carl Gustav Jung has the right term for it.
He calls it synchronicity. That's true
Because it is not like cause and effect,
There is no certainty about it.
The outer music may be beautiful,
It may be Beethoven, it may be Mozart
But is does not work like a cause;
It may not create the effect at all and sometimes
Even the wind passing through the trees
Or just dry leaves creating noise in the wind
May be enough -- something may synchronize in you.
Something may suddenly start happening.
It happened one, a Zen disciple
Worked for twenty years with the master
And nothing happened. And he had a great master
One of the greatest, Rinzai was his master.
Rinzai is one of the very few great masters
Very few people who can be counted on fingers
But nothing happened because
It is not a question of cause and effect
Even Rinzai is there
And whatsoever he could do, he did,
But everything failed, nothing synchronized.
The disciple became a great scholar
Listening to the master for twenty years,
His beautiful discourses, his tremendously
Significant commentaries on Buddhist sutras
But that was all.
Nothing else was happening in him.
He became knowledgeable but not wise.

And one day, he was passing through the market
And just by chance he heard a shopkeeper,
A meat-seller, talking to his customer.
The customer was asking,
'Is this the best meat that you have got?'
And the shopkeeper said,
'Everything I have got here is the best!'

Now this has nothing to do with Zen
Nothing to do with meditation
But the disciple suddenly became enlightened:
'Everything I have got here is the best!'

He came running to the master
And even before he had said anything
The master hit him in great joy and he said,
'You have got it -- no need to say anything!
Keep quiet! How did it happen?'
He said, 'It is very strange
That it should happen in a marketplace
And at a meat-seller's shop; in fact
I should not be passing through that market.
Buddhist monks are not allowed
To pass though a market where meat is sold.
But I was not aware that it is a meat-market
So I was passing from there
And the shopkeeper said,
"Everything that is sold here is the best."'

And Rinzai said, 'You fool!
That's what I have been telling you
For twenty years:
Everything that is being sold here is the best!'

But one needs right time...
This is synchronicity: The outer music
Can sometimes give you a glimpse of the inner.
But once you have caught the inner thread
Then there is no need for the outside help:
You go on following it, then you are on the way.

Sannyas is a journey
Towards the innermost core of your being
The ultimate silence, the soundless silence
The wordless silence -- and the harmony of it!

(To Peter) -- This is your name: Swami Dhyan Pritamo.
Dhyan means meditation. Pritamo means beloved.

A man without meditation remains an outsider:
He exists but not as part of existence
He exists but exists as a stranger
He exists in deep alienation. There seems to be no bridge
Between him and the whole.
He seems to be uprooted
Just like a tree which is uprooted
And has lost contact with the soil:
It is bound to die
It goes on shrinking every moment.

What we call life
It more or less dying than living.
In fact, people take seventy years to die
That's all. That is the normal time
People take in dying.
Few people are speedy -- they do it quick.
Few people are lazy -- they do it
With a lazy pace: ninety-hundred,
Even sometimes hundred-ten, hundred-twenty.
But it is only a question
Of how long you take to die; it is not life.

Life begins only with meditation
Because meditation creates
The bridge between you and the whole
It gives you roots in the whole.
But without meditation you are like an island.
With meditation you become
Part of the continent, the infinite continent.
(line missing)

And remember: No man is an island
But ego tries to live like an island.
The ego is very much afraid
Of being lost into something bigger than itself,
It keeps aloof, from everything
That is bigger than itself.
Hence it is afraid of love
Because love is bigger than ego;
It is afraid of losing its identity.
Meditation is far bigger than even love
And ego is very much afraid.
Whatsoever is bigger than the ego
The ego tries to avoid.
It is always interested in doing small things
Smaller than itself. It can control them.
It needs not be afraid of them
But then one lives in misery
Because joy happens only
When you become connected with something
Bigger than yourself.

The leaf is green because it is part of a branch
The branch is green because it is part of a tree
The tree is green because it is part of the earth
The earth is alive because it is part of the sun
And the sun is alive
Because of some other greater sun.
The whole is interconnected.
It is only the foolishness of man
The stupidity of man
That he tries to live isolatedly
Tries to live in a sort of encapsulated way but
Then he is suffering, then he feels suffocated
Then he is constantly in misery
But he clings to misery
Because misery goes perfectly well with the ego
Bliss is dangerous for the ego.
Misery feeds the ego,
They are partners in the same business.
And meditation will give you a taste of bliss
A taste of something bigger than you
A taste of infinity, a taste of the oceanic.
And that immediately transforms you
You become beloved of the existence,
Otherwise you exist like an enemy.
And to exist as an enemy is an ugly way to exist.
Exist like a lover: Love the whole existence
So that the whole existence can love you.

(To Michael) -- This is your name: Swami Dhyan Samarpano.
Dhyan means meditation. Samarpano means surrender.

Meditation is a way of surrendering your ego.
Meditation is surrender,
The very essence of surrender.
Ordinarily we are clinging to our ego:
In every possible way we try to prove it.
Meditation means we drop the whole trip
We drop the whole number.
We are no more interested in proving the ego
Because we can see the falsity of it
And the whole absurdity.

Seeing it, one allows it to drop, seeing
The futility and the misery that it brings
One surrenders it and immediately
A transformation takes place.
Whenever you are emptied of the ego
Something from the beyond rushes in,
Immediately fills your inner vacuum.
That rush of energy from the beyond is god.
Meditation makes the way
For the rush of the beyond.
But we are so full of ourselves
That we go on missing.
We have to empty ourselves totally
And it has to be a total effort
Not half-hearted, not lukewarm
Because even if a part of the ego remains in
That is enough to keep the beyond away from you.
The ego has to be dropped in toto
The emptiness has to be utterly utterly empty
And then there is no barrier;
Then the guest comes in
The emptiness becomes the host for god
And there is no other way to know god.

Knowledgeable people never know god
In fact, they cannot know god.
Sinners can know, but not knowledgeable people.
Hence I love the biblical story
That the original sin was
Eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
It is really of great insight
But Christians have completely missed it,
It had fallen into wrong hands.
If it had been in the hands of Zen masters
They would have made
Something beautiful out of it.

That is the original sin because
Knowledge fills oneself, feeds the ego.
One has to be innocent, one has to function
From the state of not-knowing,
One has to feel that 'I know nothing'
Then only one can feel the wonder and the awe.
And to stand in awe and wonder
Is to face god, is to encounter god
Is to be ready for god!