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and the sound of the passing wind though the pines is his sound. Listen to the water, the running water, and the sound of it; listen to the clouds and listen to the silence of the night. And in the same way listen to the noise of the marketplace ... the train passing by. Listen to everything with such deep silence that you become capable of not distorting the messages that are arriving every moment. God goes on pouring his messages from everywhere. The leaf falling from the tree is his message.
Lao Tzu became enlightened seeing a dry leaf falling from the tree. He must have been a man of tremendous silence. Just seeing the pale, old, dead leaf falling from the tree he realized that all is momentary, that life is going to end in death, that there is nothing to cling to, nothing worth clinging to, that this life which ends in death is not the true. The leaf became the message of God. In that very moment he became a sannyasin. In that very moment the worthless was renounced. Not that he made a deliberate decision to renounce; that is not needed -- the very understanding that life is momentary, that life is futile, that life is meaningless is enough; one starts searching for another kind of life, on another plane. One has been moving outwards, now one starts moving inwards. You have been searching for joy, bliss and have been founding frustration, misery because that's what the outside can give to you. The moment you turn in, the moment you start exploring your interiority, great joy arises.
Meditation is the art of listening to existence with deep obedience, with such totality that between you and the song of the bird there is no barrier. Then the song of the bird becomes the message of the Buddha. Then in every silence there is a scripture; then every moment of life is a contact with the divine. Then on every leaf is God's signature -- and in every stone a beautiful song is asleep, is hidden.
If you become silent the hidden starts becoming manifest. You start hearing things which are not heard ordinarily and you start seeing thing which are not seen ordinarily, as if new eyes were growing in you, new ears were growing in you.
And the definition
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