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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 6 | Previous Next | |
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was called and she tried the weeping stunt. "Ah, Your Honor, I am a respectable dressmaker with a family to support, a crippled mother and a dying baby."
"Thirty days!" rasped the judge.
Maria was called to order and the judge asked, "What is your business?"
"I am a whore," she answered.
"How is business?" he asked.
"Just lousy," said Maria, "what with all these dressmakers around!"
It is very easy, very very easy, to see others. Everybody is transparent to everybody else; just to himself he is completely blind.
And when Buddha says: HE IS AWAKE, he means: he has started changing his focus, his attention, from others to himself. He is turning inwards. He is showering his whole consciousness upon his own being. In that very showering he is bathed, he becomes new, he is reborn -- AND FINDS JOY IN THE STILLNESS OF MEDITATION.
And meditation in the East is not what is understood in the West by the word. In the West, meditation means contemplation: meditating on God, meditating on truth, meditating on love.
People ask me sometimes, "You tell us to meditate, but on what?"
If you meditate ON something, you are not meditating at all, because you are again focused on something outside of yourself. It may be love, it may be truth, it may be God, it makes no difference.
Meditation in the East has a totally different meaning, just the opposite of the Western meaning. Meditation in the East means no object in the mind, no content in the mind; not meditating upon something but dropping everything; NETI, NETI, neither this nor that. Meditation is emptying yourself of all content. When there is no thought moving inside you there is stillness; that stillness is meditation. Not even a ripple arises in the lake of your consciousness; that silent lake, absolutely still, that is meditation.
And in that meditation you will know -- you will know what truth is, you will know what love is, you will know what God is. Not by meditating on God.... See the point: how can you meditate on God? You don't know anything about God. All your meditation is going to be just imagination, an exercise of imagination. You
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