The content of the word ‘I’ is pure awareness,
without any form or thought.
When you hear, you become a
hearer.
So too, when you think, you
become a thinker;
doubt, doubter; decide,
decider; inquire, inquirer.
All these are so many roles
you can play-
walk, walker; speak,
speaker; drive, driver.
In these various roles that
you play,
Consciousness, Awareness, is
invariable,
not really affected by what
happens to the role.
As long as you are just a
perceiver or thinker,
you have no problems;
but when you interrelate
with people, or even objects, assuming
different roles—
like father or mother, son
or daughter, husband or wife,
neighbor or friend, member
of a religion, citizen of a country,
person of a given race—
these roles bring about certain
reactions on your part.
Since to be father is a
role,
the problems of a father
belongs to the role, and should be
confined to the role.
It takes self-knowledge to
make a role simply a role.
Lack of knowledge makes the
role yourself
and because of the
non-recognition of oneself playing a role
reactions come, and become
very real.
The reactions, everyday,
leave behind a personality.
When as a father or mother
you want your son to behave
in a manner acceptable to you,
and he doesn’t,
it does leave a hurt.
For a husband and wife,
when in an interaction with
each other there is frustration
due to lack of mutual
understanding,
there is anger, often locked
up inside because of the over-
riding values.
As a citizen of this
country,
when policies and actions of
the government are not in
common with your values, you
are going to react—
with despair, anger,
frustration—
and all of them have no
vent. They all get embedded in the person.
A number of prejudices
against races, against other beliefs and religions, customs and manners of
different people in the world again find no expression,
and they again create a
personality.
There are persons in your
life whom you have to suffer-
like an employer.
You cannot say much, for
obvious reasons, against the person
to his face,
but there is anger,
unreleased anger.
That you control your anger
is prudence,
but that you are angry is an
indelible fact.
It is this person, with all
these reactions, who sits in meditation.
That is why meditation
doesn’t take place.
If meditation is to be
yourself, you must get rid of the left-overs
of all these roles;
to be yourself is not to
play a role.
At this moment you are not
father or son, husband or wife,
employer or employee,
neighbor or friend, American or Indian.
You are just a person.
This is what you pay
attention to now, in meditation.
You don’t play roles now;
but the angry person whom you saw
as yourself while playing a
given role is not gone,
the anger being there,
sadness being there, regret,
disappointment, failure
being there, despair and frustration
being there.
There is no way of being
yourself unless you strip yourself
of all these left-over
roles.
How do you get rid of these
left-overs?
Just to be a person, free
from all these left-over roles,
is to look at yourself as a person,
a simple person.
First, visualize the blue
sky. How do you relate to the sky?
As a person who has no
complaint against the sky being what
it is,
you find yourself as a simple, conscious person,
seeing the sky and the stars
therein.
You are an appreciative, a
conscious, person.
You can be so in all other
situations, too – even situations that
cause problems in you – by
being objective to situations.
When you are meditating, you
can command this objectivity,
the situation not really
being there but only visualized on your own volition.
Think of the clouds or the
absence of them;
the rains, the absence of them.
You accommodate. You accept
the situation as it is—
that there is air, that
there is sun, that there is moon, does not
become a source of botheration
for you.
In fact, you appreciate
these things.
Because there are planets,
our system is filled with further beauty.
Earth is not alone;
Jupiter, Mars, Mercury,
Venus, Saturn – all these do not create
any kind of reaction in you.
That the earth is a globe
doesn’t create any reaction in you.
That it has mountains,
valleys, oceans, islands, islets, minerals,
trees, plants, weeds,
doesn’t bother you.
Varieties of flowers and
fruits, varieties of animals, including insects,
they are to be accepted first
and dealt with.
You cannot react with hatred
to a mosquito,
but you can act to
exterminate the mosquitoes.
Action without hatred to
achieve a given result which enhances the
quality of your life is
necessary.
Act. But take into account
when you act that there is no reaction.
An insect is just an insect,
whatever it does, in whichever
form it is, that is how it
was made to be.
Accept it, and act.
Now visualize different
races—
the Mongolian race, the
Polynesian, the Negro, the Caucasian,
and the mixtures all over
the world—living in different parts of
the planet.
They have their language,
their literature, their music, their
dance, their dress and their
eating habits.
What is wrong in this?
Their beliefs, their
customs, their manners, their forms of prayer,
and their concept of God,
take them as they are.
Why should they bother you?
Take them as they are.
Come to your own country.
The people—accept them as
they are.
The southerner, the
northerner, the Polish, the Irish, the Indian,
the Mexican—
accept them as they are.
There is no use being
frustrated.
Accommodate your employer,
or employees or co-workers.
Remember, as you have a
mind, each of them has his or her own mind.
That makes a difference
between you two.
Take the person as the
person is.
Change the person if you
can, and if you are convinced
that such a change is
beneficial for both.
Accept your neighbor.
If you cannot stand your
neighbor, seek other neighbors—
leave the neighborhood.
But let that neighbor not
have handle on your mind,
to make you regretful and
angry.
Accommodate the person as
the person is.
Let the person be not in a
position to hurt you.
Accommodate.
All people struggle with
their minds, with their fears, anxieties,
insecurities, complexes.
Accommodate.
Accept your father and
mother as they are.
If you think they have not
understood you, communicate.
If you think you have
failed, accept.
Accept them as they are, and
do whatever is to be done.
Accept your partner in life.
It is this person with whom
you share your life.
Take the person as the
person is, at all levels.
If you think a change would
be better, for both, do what you
can to make the change,
but first accept.
If you say, “Unless you
change I cannot accept,”
there is reaction.
If you accept, and work for
change,
there is love, there is
understanding, there is care, there is
concern.
And there is something done.
Accept your own body—
its height, its weight, its
looks, its color, its sex, its illness, its
inabilities, inadequacies,
its strength, and virtues.
Accept the body as it is.
If you can cure the illness,
do.
If you can reduce your
weight, and if you want to, do.
But do not reject it just
because it has a weight problem.
When you reject, you react.
When you accept, you act.
Accept with love, with
understanding.
Now accept your mind—
Its moods and its movements,
its prejudices—accept them.
Only then can you change.
Accept the limitation of
knowledge, and work for what you
want to know further.
And last, but not the least,
accept your memories.
Let there not be a memory
which compels you to
escape from it,
by singing or driving or
going on a spree of buying—
hundreds of diversions all
to escape from the skeletons of
your memory.
Memory does not harm. Every
experience leaves an impression
meant for use.
Be objective toward
memories. No piece of memory is going to
frighten you or make you
regret what happened.
There is no use in
regretting.
There can be learning from
what you have gone through;
you can be wiser for what
has happened.
Bring up those memories that
haunt you.
Look at them as left-overs
of a dead past.
Let there be not a single
piece of memory that you are afraid
to face.
Now you are yourself.
You are a simple, conscious
being,
a person who is endowed with
memories, mind, sense organs,
body,
all to see the world, to
experience, to make your life in this
world, to interact with
situations, people.
This is all that is there—
to act, to know, to think,
to see, to hear.
You are simple person.
This is meditation.
Be yourself.
Know more about yourself.
Even without Self-knowledge
you can be so simple and
relatively free;
and when you turn your
attention to learning about yourself,
the words of the teaching
ring true all over.
It is the meditator that
counts in the meditation.
