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and tapped the monkey sharply on the elbow
making him suddenly relax his hold on the fruit.
The monkey was now free –
but he was captured.
The hunter had used the cherry and the bottle
and he still had them.
This monkey-way of thinking is the mind-way also!
And in the end when death, the hunter, comes,
everyone is found caught in his own bottle.
Remember, before the hunter comes
make sure your hand is out of the bottle!
334. Love.
A life without meditation
is like a winter landscape with the sun hidden,
the flowers frozen and the wind whispering
through the withered leaves.
And everyone knows it
because everyone lives it that way,
though no one needs to live it that way.
But why is this so?
This is so because life’s needs require an occupied mind
and meditation means being unoccupied.
We train ourselves to be occupied
and then forget that one needs to be unoccupied sometimes
to know the ecstasy of sheer existence.
One is to be totally vacant inside
because only then is one a host to the divine guest.
335. Love.
Meditation is beyond knowledge.
You can be it but you cannot know it.
All knowledge is superficial.
It is never anything else
but an acquaintance from outside.
It is always about
but never the thing itself;
When the Chinese emperor Wu
came to meet Bodhidharma
he asked the master:
What is the holy, ultimate truth?
Bodhidharma laughed and replied:
Nothing holy, sir,
and it is emptiness itself.
Of course Wu was taken aback, but he asked again:
Then who is the one who at present
stands confronting me?
Bodhidharma simply said:
I don’t know.
Do you see the beauty of it?
And the truth?
And the innocence?
And the holiness?
And the fullness?
And how absolutely ultimate it is?
336. Love.
It is very easy to progress from one illusion to another
because no foundational transformation is needed.
There is no shaking of the foundations
because you remain the same.
So the real problem is not to change the objects of desire
from the worldly to the other-worldly
but to transform oneself;
not to change the seeking
but to change the seeker –
otherwise the problem remains as it is,
it just takes new shapes.
But how to change the seeker?
First find out where it is and what it is,
and then you will come to know a hidden secret:
the seeker exists only while it is not sought,
and when someone goes out to search for it –
it is never found.
It exists only in ignorance and in darkness;
in awareness it is not.
This realization of no-self is the jump.
Jump into the unknown.
Jump into the truth.
337. Love.
Whatever I say is nothing new,
nor is it anything old.
Or it is both –
the oldest and the newest.
And to know it you need not listen to me.
Listen to the birds in the morning
or to the flowers and grass blades in the sun
and you will hear it,
and if you do not know how to listen to them
then you will not know from me either.
So the real thing is not what you listen to
but how you listen,
because the message is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
Now I will tell you the art of listening:
walk about until exhausted or dance or
do vigorous breathing
and then, dropping to the ground, listen;
or repeat your own name loudly until exhausted
and then suddenly stop and listen;
or at the point of sleep
when sleep has not yet come
and external wakefulness vanishes,
suddenly be alert and listen.
And then you will hear me.
338. Love.
That which is never lost cannot be found,
and to search for it is absurd.
But the moment this absurdity is understood
all seeking stops by itself
and that which is never lost is found!
That is why I say:
Seek and you will not find,
because the very seeking is the barrier.
The search itself is the hindrance
because it creates the seeker, the ego,
the illusion that I am.
And I am not.
Do not seek and you will find it:
the I-am-not-ness.
This nothingness is the gate.
The Gateless gate.
Riko once asked Nansen
to explain to him the old problem of the goose