YOU SPOKE OF THE THREE WAYS: BEAUTY, GRANDEUR AND POWER.
WHICH IS YOUR WAY? OR IS IT ALL THREE?
It is neither. I have no way, because I am not leading you anywhere. I am trying to wake
you up herenow. You are already wandering all over the earth. My effort is to bring you
home. And of course your wandering is only in a dream.
It is as if you sleep in Poona and you dream of Philadelphia. In the morning you are again
in Poona. So if I see that you are dreaming of Philadelphia, what am I supposed to do?
Should I give you a path to come back to Poona? Should I arrange for a ticket so that you
can travel back to Poona? I can only give you a shock, so you jump out of your bed and
here you are. You have never been to Philadelphia, you were simply dreaming.
That's why in the East we call the world a dream, maya, illusion. It is a beautiful term. It
simply says you are dreaming. It simply says that nothing is to be done except that you
become aware, awake.
You have never gone away from the home, you have always been here; that is the only
way to be. You cannot go anywhere else, that is not permitted. In the very nature of
things everybody is there where he belongs. But everybody is dreaming and in dream one
has drifted very very long -- many lives of dreaming, and one has been drifting and
drifting and drifting, and one thing leads to another and one goes on and on.
You may have reached millions of miles away from the home, but still you are here,
because in the very nature of things nobody can go anywhere else than his own being.
Nobody can go away from his nature, his tao, his dhamma. That which you cannot lose is
your god. Howsoever hard you try, that which cannot be lost is your law, it is your tao.
So as far as I am concerned you are sleeping and you have to be awakened. There is no
path to travel, no way, because you have never gone anywhere else.
A master has to devise methods to awaken. Zen people have the right word; they call
their path 'pathless path', 'gateless gate'. Paradoxical, but exactly expressive of the reality.
And if you awake herenow, you will be full of beauty, full of grandeur, and full of power.
Those three are the qualities of the awakened soul.
The awakened soul is beautiful, nothing ugly can exist in an awakened soul. Awareness is
the only beauty there is. The awakened soul is in a tremendous grandeur, grace. It is a
mystery. You can enter into it, but you can never come to know it. It becomes known and
yet remains unknown. One is simply struck with awe, one simply is wonderstruck.
And when you are awakened you are tremendously powerful. Not powerful in the sense
that you can destroy, not powerful in the sense that you can dominate, not powerful in the
sense of the politician's use of the word, or the scientist's use of the word.
Powerful in the sense that suddenly you don't feel any limitation, you don't have any
boundary, you are infinite.
Powerful in the sense that you don't have any death, you are deathless.
Powerful in the sense that your bliss is tremendous, incredible.
Powerful in the sense that now your discipline is impeccable, perfect, and you don't have
to force it; it's simply there.
Powerful in the sense that now you are a god, nothing less.
And powerful in the sense that now there are all gods and goddesses in the world and you
are not separate, you are one with the universe, one with existence.
These three things happen to you when you are awakened. You are already that, but you
feel very impotent. You feel impotent because you don't know who you are. You feel
impotent because you don't know your treasures. You are almost drunk with ignorance.
I have heard:
Mulla Nasrudin, on his way home, accidentally staggered into the zoo, and ended up in
front of the hippopotamus' cage. He was absolutely drunk. 'Don't look at me in that way,'
he begged. 'I can explain everything.'
He thought it was his wife.
When you are drunk you see things which are not there -- a hippopotamus may look like
your wife, or your wife may look like a hippopotamus. By the morning when you are no
more drunk and the hangover is gone, things appear in their true colour.
We are drunk with ignorance, drunk with unawareness... drunkards stumbling on the path
of life for many years, for many lives. The only thing you need to do is to become a little
more alert. Get out of this hangover.
That's what meditation is all about -- to give you a little awareness. If you can become
aware even for a few moments you will be able to see what reality is, and that experience
of the reality will start transforming you. Then more and more of those moments will be
coming to you, and more and more you will become real. Right now you are unreal, that's
why you have created an unreal world around you. When you become real, a real world
arises in your vision.
God is the experience of those who are real. The world is the experience of those who are
unreal -- unreal because of unawareness. The more real you become, the more aware you
become.
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