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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 5 | Previous Next | |
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You are passing through an identity crisis. The old is lost and the new has not been found. You have left the old shore and the new shore is not even visible. And the Zen people say: When the meditation is complete, when you have entered into no-mind, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers; of course on a totally different plane, but things are again things. Everything settles again, crystallizes again, but now with a difference.
First others had told you that mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers, now YOU know -- and that makes the real difference. Information is never transformation.
Buddha says: THE WORLD IS ON FIRE! Fortunate are those who can understand it, not only intellectually but existentially. Can't you see your life is nothing but anguish? Now there are two ways to get rid of this anguish, this fire; one is to become so involved in meaningless things that you can forget your anguish, so that the anguish cannot raise its head because you are so occupied: the whole day occupied with money, power, prestige, running after shadows, and when you come back home you are so utterly tired that you fall asleep. And then too you remain engaged in your dreams. Dreams are nothing but reflections of your day; the same game continues in your sleep.
People pass their whole lives in this way. People cannot sit silently even for a few minutes. And the whole Buddhist approach is that unless you are capable of sitting silently for hours together, doing nothing, just being, you will never know who you are and you will never go beyond your anguish. So the first way is to become occupied, involved in anything, whatsoever it is, the only purpose being that you can keep the ultimate question of your life repressed. There is no time.
People come to me, I tell them to meditate. They say, "But we don't have any time." And these are the same people who are sitting for hours in the movies and they have time. And these are the same people who go to the Rotary Club and just go on doing stupid things. These are the same people whom you will find in the hotels, at football matches; these are the same people who will be playing cards
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