| |
of the seeker.
Zen wants you not to stop at matter. Respect it, it serves you; care for it, it cares for you. You are not the mind -- don't make it a master. It is a good servant -- use it. Use it so that you can reach beyond it. It is a ladder to go beyond, but don't get caught up with it.
The "soul" is simply a consolation to people, because if you say to them that meditation will end up in nothingness... In a million, perhaps one person will become interested in meditation. And if you tell them, "All your effort will come to a vast nothingness," you will frighten them. You will create a question in their minds: "Then what is the purpose? We are -- at least, we are. Doing meditation, we will not be." It is going to be the ultimate death. Yes.
Gautam Buddha was continually asked, "Why do people go on coming to you when you offer nothing but nothingness?"
And Buddha said many times, "Nothingness is not just no-thing-ness. It has its own universality. It is becoming as vast as the whole universe, unlimited. Your personality is too small."
The people who are afraid of nothingness, of dissolving not only their personality but their individuality too, remain with the third standpoint.
The third is very consoling. At least it gives you something to hang on to. Zen does not give you anything; it simply takes away all the layers of the onion and then says to you, "Look, this is you -- just pure nothingness."
But the purity of it is so overwhelming that you are not, but your laughter is. You are not, but your joy is. It has become cosmic. You are not, but your ecstasy is, and now it is not confined to a small area of your personality or individuality; now the whole of existence is ecstatic. The birds flying and the flowers opening and the clouds showering -- everything is happening in the deep nothingness of your realization of the cosmic emptiness as the source of all things.
Perhaps Zen alone has given a very scientific answer to the question. "From where do things come, and to where do they go back?" Even science shrugs its shoulders the moment you start asking them questions about the origin. All that has been
|
|
|