For man there are only two possibilities of existing in the world: one is through the mind and the other is through meditation. Through the mind there is misery, anxiety, anguish, death; through meditation there is bliss, benediction, immortality, godliness. And the choice is always yours.
Man always stands on the crossroad. Each moment is a crossroad. You can turn towards the mind or you can turn towards meditation. And means living in the past. Mind is an accumulation of all the experiences, memories, which have passed. They are no more in existence; only traces are left on your memory film. Memory is exactly a recording mechanism. It is very talented and has infinite capacity, almost infinite. One simple memory system can record all the information contained in all the libraries of the world. But memory means that which is no more.
Because we live in the past we project a future. The future is a by-product of the past. The future also does not exist; it is another non-existential thing just like the past. At least the past has been — the future has yet to be. And whatsoever you can conceive of the future is just a reflection of your past, a modified past.
You would like all the pleasures that you lived through in the past, magnified, on a bigger scale, and you would like to drop all the miseries that you had to go through in the past. Your future is a selected past: that which you like you project and that which you don’t like you reject. But the problem is that in life everything is intertwined with everything else. You cannot choose the nice part and reject the bitter part — that is impossible. They are one parcel, they come together.
If you choose anything from the past thinking that it was beautiful, you have also chosen the ugly. Whether you like it or not is not the question; it will come inevitably — just as days are with nights. You cannot choose the day and drop the night; the night and day are two aspects of the same phenomenon. You cannot choose one aspect of the coin. You can hide the other, but it is there, and sooner or later you will have to give it its due. And if you want your pleasures to be on a bigger scale, your misery will grow in the same proportion. That is the dilemma man goes on living, suffering, hoping that some miracle will happen and he will be able to choose only the roses without the thorns. But they come together!
But there is a totally different way of life, a different style — and that is to live in the present. That’s what I call meditation. Meditation is an opening into the present, dropping the whole past without any choice. If you can drop the whole past, future disappears. Then there is no future, future evaporates, and all that is left is the existential moment. This moment is all there is: now, here. And then life starts moving in a different dimension, altogether different; then you are on an adventure, because you have never know the present. It is the most unknown phenomenon in life.
It seems strange that the only thing that is existential is the most unknown. And the non-existential is very much known; you go on brooding about the past and the future. Mind is a brooding about the non-existential; meditation is living the existential. And the moment your whole being is herenow, god is. God is existence, another name for existence, and the present is a door into his temple the only door. There are no other doors.
To be a sannyasin means to live your life moment-to-moment, without any expectation because all expectations come from the past. And when there are no expectations, there are no frustrations either. Living moment-to-moment means living a life always fresh, young, alive. The past makes you old, dull, dead, the more it gathers on you — and it is gathering every moment. It is like dust gathering on a mirror: soon you cannot see anything in the mirror.
That’s how we are live — like blind persons because we cannot see a anything, we cannot feel anything, we cannot experience anything. All beautiful things have become mere words; love, god, bliss are just words. People use them but they know that they don’t mean anything. Meaning can come only through experience, and the only experience possible is of the present.
But always remember: once you have lived the moment it is past. Then drop it; howsoever beautiful it was, don’t cling to it. When it is no more, it is no more. That’s what Jesus means when he says ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’
The past is dead. Go on dying to the past — and every moment die to the past so that every moment you are born anew. That’s the way of sannyas. Then you know what a gift life, what a splendour, what a joy to be… Just to be is enough, more than enough! It is such a benediction that we cannot repay existence in any way; we can only feel grateful.
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