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CHAPTER 9
9 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Veet Atito – beyond the past.…
The only problem that a seeker of truth has to encounter is the past. It is the past that stands between you and the reality; it is the past that functions as a barrier. It does not allow you to see that which is. It goes on interfering, distorting, interpreting. It goes on coloring everything. It does not allow anything to enter in its purity and reach to your being.
The past consists of all the conditionings: social, religious, political, educational. And the past also consists of all your experiences, good and bad. The past means all that has happened up to now. One has to learn how to put it aside.
That is the whole art of meditation: how to put it aside... because it is no more. It is only a memory, and the memory should not be allowed to become a screen. The memory should not be allowed to become the master of your being. The memory cripples your consciousness.
And I am not saying that the memory has to be destroyed, because it is useful, it has to be used. But it should not become the master; it should be the slave. It is a mechanism of great efficiency; life will be impossible without it. So I am not saying it has to be destroyed; I am only saying it has to be transcended, surpassed. You have to start living above it. Use it, but remain above it, so that whenever you want to put it off you can put it off. You should be the master who can put it on or off.
And that is the whole art of meditation, of sannyas, of religion.
The Western psychology is still entangled with the past. It has not yet reached to the point where meditation starts. It is still in the world of analysis, analyzing the past. And you can go on analyzing the past ad infinitum; there is no end to it. Hence no psychoanalysis is going to help. And no
psychoanalysis is ever complete; it cannot be by its very nature, because the past is vast. And if you go deeper and deeper into it, sooner or later you will come across your past lives, and then it becomes an exercise in futility. The East has done it. We have learned a lesson: that it is simply going into rubbish. And you can go on digging.
By digging Freud came from the conscious to the unconscious. By more digging Jung arrived to the collective unconscious. If the digging continues you will be surprised that you will come upon more and more deeper layers. And it is not going to solve anything; it is going only to make everything more complicated, more insoluble.
It is not an accident that Freud became very pessimistic; he lost all hope. His last years were lived in a deep despair because he could see that there is no end to analysis. No man can be called completely analyzed, hence no man can be called completely sane.
But the point has come now when the Eastern understanding and the Eastern experience should be revealed to the whole world: analysis is not the way but meditation. And the difference is that analysis goes into the past... And there can be different ways of going into the past: one can go very slowly like Freudian psychoanalysis; one can go a little faster like Janov’s primal therapy.
But it is the same game played in different ways. It can be a little faster or a little slower. And then there are people like Assagioli who start talking about synthesis, but it is another aspect of the same game. They become tired of analysis so they start talking of synthesis.
But the real thing is neither analysis nor synthesis. The real thing is to get out of the past, to make your consciousness free of the past to slip out of it. There is no need to bother about it; one can simply transcend it.
And sometimes unawares it happens. Seeing a beautiful sunset and you are not your past. Just the present is so much, the intensity of the present is such, that without your knowing you have slipped out of the past. You have not a single problem in that moment because you don’t have any mind in that moment. Mind means the past because mind means the memory. Seeing a beautiful sunset you become so absorbed in the reality of the moment, in the truth of the moment, that there is no observer and no observed. The observer becomes the observed. It is not that you are seeing the sunset, you are the sunset.
That merging, that melting, that dissolution into the moment, and you are healed. Each beautiful moment of such merger brings healing, makes you saner, because it makes you whole, because it allows your consciousness to be free of all dust that it has gathered.
And it is natural to gather dust. It is just like the mirror: every day you have to cleanse it, otherwise it is going to gather dust. As time goes, dust gathers, memories gather, and past becomes bigger and bigger and your consciousness becomes smaller and smaller. Sooner or later the past will encapsule you. You will be surrounded by the past and you will lose all contact with the present. And to be in the present is to be in God. To be now, to be here, is to be in paradise.
Veet Anagata. Veet means going beyond; Anagata means the future, that which has not come yet.
CHAPTER 9.
One problem is the past, another problem is the future. In fact, deep down they are not two problems but two aspects of the same problem. The past creates the future. You lived a beautiful moment; now it has become a memory in you and you would like to repeat it. That is future. You lived a moment of sadness and you would not like to repeat it; that is future.
Your past is deciding your future. Your future is going only to be a modified past: few things dropped, few things added, but nothing really new. It cannot be new because it is a projection of the past. From where you can bring the new? You can think only that which you know. Knowing cannot enter into the unknown; knowing remains confined to the known. And whatsoever you have known in your life, that will decide what you would like to be in the future. So it will be really a repetition of the past and you will move in a wheel. You will not grow; you will only move in a circle, you will go into circles.
That’s how people are going, because the mind asks for repetition. It wants the same again and again if it likes. If it does not like, then it never wants it. And if we become so obsessed with repetition we will miss the whole joy of life, because we will become mechanical. Repetition creates a mechanical life; it reduces you into a robot. The past has to be dropped; the future has not to be thought. How can we think about it? It has not come yet. We can only wait. We cannot project, we cannot demand, we cannot ask how it should be. We can only wait. We can be expectant... but without any expectations.
That pure waiting, with no idea what is going to happen next moment, but waiting alert, watchful, that “Whatsoever is going to happen, I am going to live it in its totality”... that makes you a sannyasin.
A consciousness free from past and future is a consciousness who knows what freedom is and who knows what love is and who knows what bliss is. And the consciousness free from past and future has only the present moment to live. Naturally life becomes very simple and very spontaneous. And also life becomes tremendously intense and total, because there is only this moment so your whole energy pours into it.
When you have a long past your energy is spread all over it. And projected by the past is a long future; your energy is spread all over. You don’t have much energy to live in this moment. That’s why people are living so half-heartedly. People are living lukewarm lives.
Many times it happens a person comes who has the name Luke. I don’t give it to him again, because it seems to be a short form of lukewarm! But people are living like Lukes – just so-so, somehow, just at the very minimum. You cannot know God at the minimum.
God is known when you live at the maximum, when your torch of life burns from both the ends together. Those are the moments which can be called divine. When you are totally in a certain moment, that very totality becomes the door to God.
By becoming a sannyasin you are becoming committed to a totally new life: the life of the present, the life of consciousness, the life of love, and the life of intense passion. Because the only way to live is to live passionately, and to live passionately one needs commitment, involvement.
You are getting involved with me, with my people. This is what initiation into sannyas means: you are becoming part of a strange endeavor that is going on here. It is strange because the whole world is living at the minimum and we are trying to live at the maximum.
And as the commune grows I will go on demanding more and more intensity. It is far better to live a single moment of totality than to live for thousands of years dragging, pretending, just hoping that something will turn up tomorrow. But the tomorrow never comes! That which always comes is today.
So we have to learn the art of living today without any past, without any future. This moment is all – there is no other moment. God knows only the present, and if we also know only the present, then the meeting...
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