| |
that one is not, almost not. Just a flickering consciousness, that everything is gone, remains. But this consciousness remains so nothing is gone because your are this consciousness!
All that has gone, you were not. You may feel as if your body is no more there, you have become bodiless, but you were never the body. It was an illusion, an identity that you had made with your body... as if a car driver starts thinking that he is the car.
The mind is gone, thoughts disappear, and of course you become very much afraid because this is your subtlest identity. You have always thought of yourself as thought but that is a misunderstanding. You are not thought; when there is no thought, you still are. Between two thoughts, when there is a gap, a pause, you still are. You don't disappear by the disappearance of the thought; in fact you are far more when the thought is not. In that silence you are tremendously present.
The thought is like a cloud on you... it shrouds you. When thought is not there you are in your purity, in your primordial innocence. Your interpretation is wrong.
So next time it happens, allow it, lie down and start dying. Welcome it, accept it, say 'hello'! die to it and start disappearing.
That's how it happened to Maharshi Ramana. When he was not more than seventeen years of age, one day he suddenly found that he was dying, but he accepted it! He made himself comfortable in the middle of the room....
That is possible only in the East, because for centuries we have waited for this experience. It has been one of the greatest desires in the East -- to come to a point where you are dissolved. Because you function like a screen; because of you the reality is obstructed.
So seeing that death was coming he became very happy. He was very young, seventeen years of age, but had had many lives of experiences and had been searching for many lives. He simply made himself comfortable, closed his eyes and started dying!
The body dissolved, the mind dissolved.... Yes, there were moments when he started to tremble a little: what was happening? But again, he said, 'This is what I had been waiting for, so now the moment
|
|
|