Accepting Yourself Is Alchemy
A sannyasin says: My mind is very stubborn. I′m leaving tomorrow and I′d like a meditation to help me with my mind.
I think you are creating the problem. The mind disappears - but
never by fighting, never by conflict. Conflict is food for the mind,
so if you fight, you feed the mind. If you don′t fight at all, if
you simply accept whatsoever is the case.... You accept the desires,
you accept the thoughts, you accept your attachments - that′s how
you are! That′s how you have found yourself in life. That′s how God
has intended you to be. This is the will of the whole and you cannot
win against it.
It is almost like a rosebush trying to get rid of roses. It is
absurd, it is not possible. The rosebush will go mad and will start
thinking that these roses are very stubborn. But those roses are not
something that are happening from the outside to the rosebush; it is
the very intrinsic nature of the rosebush. The rosebush is preparing
those roses. They are its outcome. They are not accidents but
natural growth. But rosebushes never do that nonsense - only man
gets into conflict with nature.
If you are fighting with nature, you are fighting a losing battle.
You can never win. And it is good that you can never win, otherwise
you would destroy your whole being.
So I don′t see the problem the way you see it. The problem is not
with the mind and its stubbornness. The problem is with you, your
ideology. Why should you want to get rid of something? If it is
there, it is there. It is part of life. Accept it, enjoy it. And
then I know it disappears, because when there is no conflict, the
mind cannot exist. That has to be understood as deeply as possible.
The mind is nothing but conflict. Just imagine a moment when there
is no conflict within and without... nobody to fight with and nobody
to fight. Can the mind exist in that moment? How can the mind exist
in a moment of non-conflict? There will be no need. So you are in a
vicious circle: you want to get rid of the mind, and the very effort
to get rid of the mind feeds the mind. This way you will go on
moving in a vicious circle. No, that′s not the way to get out of it.
Accept it.
Total acceptance is the key. It is the master key... it opens all
the doors. There is no lock that cannot be opened by it; it simply
fits all the locks - because the moment you accept a certain thing,
a transformation has started in your being because now there is no
conflict. You are not two. In acceptance you have become one, you
have become a unity.
Right now you say desires, thoughts, instincts, this and that.
In fact who are you? You are denying everything that constitutes
you. Who are you? Just a pure ego? Remember your unity, your
complexity. It is beautiful. Desires are beautiful. Passion is good
- if you accept it, it will become compassion. If you accept the
desires, by and by you will see that the same energy is becoming
desire-lessness. It is the same energy that was involved in the
desires. When you accept the desires, by and by you relax, you
become non-tense, and energy starts streaming more naturally. You
start seeing things as they are. You are not too much involved with
this desire or that. You have accepted, so there is no problem.
Then your insight starts opening, your third eye starts functioning.
You have a vision, a total vision of your life... of all the
desires, passions, thoughts, dreams, imagination, fantasies,
everything you can see all around you. In that vision you are beyond
it, because you become a witness.
My whole emphasis is for acceptance and becoming a witness. But the
religions all over the world have corrupted the mind of people, and
they have corrupted tremendously. They have created a bifurcation, a
split. The have made the whole of humanity schizophrenic.
Drop this schizophrenia. Don′t make any split within yourself; you
are one - and take yourself as one. And whatsoever is within you,
you have to love it, you have to move into its mystery, you have to
know it to the very end. If desire is there, then the desire has to
be penetrated to the very core af its existence; it has to be known.
And only through that knowing, the energy involved in knowing is
released; it becomes desirelessness - but it is the same energy.
This is the alchemy that I teach - how to change the baser metal
into gold. It is the same energy, just a new arrangement of the same
atoms. Do you know that coal and diamond are both the same chemical
substance? There is no difference. Coal becomes diamond in the long
run, and all diamonds were once coal pieces, nothing else.
Whatsoever you call desire will become desirelessness. It is
coal-like right now. It can be transfigured into diamonds; it
becomes precious. Just think of the man who is desireless - he will
be impotent. In fact he will not be alive because how will he live
without desires? So, desirelessness is not negative. It is the
ultimate positivity of all desires. Known, understood, lived,
experienced, you have gone beyond them. You have come of age.
So don′t think in terms of conflict. Think in terms of acceptance,
affirmation. Be life-affirmative. Life is beautiful, it is divine.
It is God′s gift. And if He has chosen to give you desires, He must
know better than you. Whenever we talk or start thinking in terms of
how to drop this and that, we are trying to improve upon God, we are
trying to improve upon the whole - which is just sheer nonsense !
The whole is wise. How can the part be more wise than the whole ? We
are just a small part.
So accept yourself, don′t condemn, and don′t create any guilt. There
is no need to drop anything. Everything has to be used in a higher
unity and nothing is to be dropped. Nothing is useless. Maybe it′s
not in the right place, that′s true. It is just like a small room in
which the furniture is upside down and everything is in the wrong
place, and you enter the room and it is a chaos. If you look a
little more consciously, you can see that things are just wrongly
arranged. The sofa is needed, the bed is needed, the books are
needed, the table is needed; everything is needed, but they are not
in their right place. So you start rearranging them, but nothing is
to be discarded.
That′s my understanding - that nothing is to be discarded.
Everything must have some meaning in it. If we don′t know, then wait
and try to know what it is. But don′t be in a hurry and don′t throw
it, otherwise later on you will repent. If you throw anger, you will
never be able to have compassion. If you throw greed, you will never
be able to share. They look opposite; they are not. It is the same
energy.
So for one year, try one thing: simply accept. Let that be your only
discipline - and continue to meditate. I don′t see anything wrong in
you... just a rearrangement of course, but that can happen only
through understanding, not by throwing things away, cutting,
uprooting. You will destroy yourself.