The vertical line opens a door to eternity

Question 1:

Vadan, the question seems to be simple but the answer is very complex. And the complexity becomes multidimensional, because the answer can come only from your own experience, not from outside. Just as the question is arising in you, the answer has to also be part of your interiority. But I will go into a little detail, to explain what I mean when I say that the moment is rare when eternity penetrates time.

Time is that in which we live - it is horizontal. It is from A to B to C to D; it is in a line. Eternity is vertical. It is not from A to B and from B to C. It is from A to more A to still more A. It goes on upwards. The moment is rare because it happens only when meditation has reached ripening, maturity, when you have touched your innermost core.

Then suddenly you become aware that you are a crossroad. One line goes horizontal; in other words, mediocre, ordinary, meaningless and leading finally to death. The horizontal line is continuously moving towards the graveyard. I have told you the story, significant in many ways:

A great king in his dreams saw a shadow and became afraid even in the dream. And he asked, "What do you want?"

The shadow said, "I have not come to ask for anything. I have come just to inform you that this evening at the right place, when the sun is setting, you will breathe your last breath. Ordinarily I don't come to inform people, but you are a great emperor; it is just to pay respect to you."

The emperor became so afraid that he woke up, perspiring, could not think what to do. The only thing he could think of was to call all the wise men, astrologers, prophets and to find out the meaning of the dream. Dream analysis is thought to have originated with Sigmund Freud - that is not true. It originated with this emperor, one thousand years ago.

In the middle of the night, all the prophets of his capital, all the wise men, all those who were concerned in some way with the future - dream readers... they were told the story. The story was simple. They had brought their scriptures and they started arguing with each other: "This cannot be the meaning," or, "This is bound to be the meaning."

They wasted time; the sun started rising. The king had an old servant whom he treated just as a father - because his father had died very early. He was too young, and his father had given the guardianship to this servant and told him, "Take care that he becomes my successor and does not lose the kingdom."

And the servant managed. Now he was very old, but he was not treated as a servant. He was almost as respected as a father. He came close to the emperor and said, "I want to say two things to you. You have always listened to me. I am not a prophet and I am not an astrologer and I don't know what all this nonsense is that's going on. The scriptures are being consulted. One thing is certain, that once the sun has risen, the sunset is not very far away.

"And these people, the so-called knowledgeable people, have never come to any conclusion in centuries. Just in one day... they will quarrel, argue, destroy each other's arguments, but you cannot hope that they will come to a consensus, a conclusion.

"Let them have their discussions. My suggestion is, you have the best horse in the world" - those were the days of horses. "You take the horse and escape from this palace as fast as possible. This much is certain, that you should not be here; you should be far away."

It was logical, rational, although very simple. The king left the great intelligent and wise people arguing - they did not even notice that the emperor had left. And he certainly had a horse worth an empire. He was very proud of the horse; there was no other horse known of that strength. And there was such a love between the horse and the emperor, such a deep affinity, a kind of synchronicity.

The king said to the horse, "It seems my death is coming. That shadow was nothing but death. You have to take me as far away from this palace as you can manage."

The horse nodded his head. And he fulfilled his promise. By the evening, as the sun was setting, they were hundreds of miles away from their kingdom. They had entered into another kingdom in disguise. The king was very happy; he got down from his horse. He was tying the horse to a tree - because neither had he eaten anything nor the horse. So he said to the horse, "Thank you my friend. Now I will make arrangements for your food, for my food. We are so far away, there is no fear.

But you proved the stories that were told about you. You became almost like a cloud, with such a speed."

And as he was tying the horse to the tree, the dark shadow appeared and said to the emperor, "I was afraid that you might not be able to make it, but your horse is great. I also thank him. This is the place and this is the time. And I was worried - you were so far away, how could I manage to bring you? The horse served destiny."

It is a strange story, but it shows that wherever you are going horizontally, with whatever speed, you will end up in some graveyard. It is strange that every moment our graves are coming closer to us - even if you don't move, your grave is moving towards you. The horizontal line of time is, in other words, the mortality of man.

But if you can reach to the center of your being, the silences of your innermost center, you can see two roads: one horizontal, another vertical.

You will be surprised to know that the Christian cross is not Christian at all. It is an ancient, Eastern, Aryan symbol, the swastika. That's why Adolf Hitler, who was thinking that he was of the purest Aryan blood, chose the swastika as his symbol. A swastika is nothing but two lines crossing. In India, without knowing why, at the beginning of every year, business people will write in their books, begin their new books with a swastika. The Christian cross is simply a part of the swastika. But it also represents the same thing: the vertical, the horizontal. Christ's hands are horizontal; his head and his being are pointing in a different direction.

In a moment of meditation, you suddenly see that you can move in two directions - either horizontal or vertical. The vertical consists of silences, blissfulness, ecstasies; the horizontal consists of hands, work, the world.

Once a man has known himself as a crossroad, he cannot be disinterested, he cannot be unintrigued about the vertical. The horizontal he knows, but the vertical opens a door to eternity, where death does not exist; where one simply becomes more and more part of the cosmic whole; where one loses all bondages, even the bondage of the body.

Gautam Buddha used to say, "Birth is pain, life is pain, death is pain." What he was saying was, to move on the horizontal line, you are continuously miserable, in pain. Your life cannot be a life of dance, of joy. If this is all, then suicide is the only solution.

That's the conclusion the contemporary, Western philosophy of existentialism - of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and others - has come to, that life is meaningless. On the horizontal plane it is, because it is simply agony and pain and disease and sickness and oldness.

And you are encaged in a small body while your consciousness is as vast as the whole universe.

Once the vertical is discovered, one starts moving on the vertical line. That vertical line does not mean you have to renounce the world. But it certainly means that you are no more of the world, that the world becomes ephemeral, loses importance. It does not mean that you have to renounce the world and escape to the mountains and the monasteries. It simply means that you start - wherever you are - living an inner life which was not possible before.

Before you were an extrovert; now, suddenly you become introvert. As far as the body is concerned, you can manage very easily, if the remembrance is there that you are not the body. But the body can be used in many ways to help you to move on the vertical line. The penetration of the vertical line, just a ray of light coming into your darkness of horizontal life, is the beginning of enlightenment.

You will look the same, but you will not be the same. Those who have a clarity of seeing, to them you will not look the same either. And at least for yourself, you will never look the same. And you can never be the same. You will be in the world, but the world will not be in you.

Ambitions, desires, jealousies will start evaporating. No effort will be needed to drop them, just your movement on the vertical line and they start disappearing - because they cannot exist on the vertical line. They can exist only in the darkness of the horizontal, where everybody is in competition, everybody is full of lust, full of will to power, a great desire to dominate, to become somebody special.

On the vertical line all these stupidities simply disappear. You become so light, so weightless, just like a lotus flower: it is in the water, but the water does not touch it. You remain in the world, but the world has no longer any impact on you. On the contrary, you start influencing the world - not with conscious effort, but just by your sheer being, your presence, your grace, your beauty. As it grows inside it starts spreading around you.

It will touch people who have an open heart and it will make people afraid who have lived with a closed heart - all windows, all doors closed. They will not come in contact with such a person.

And to convince themselves why they are not coming in contact with such a person, they will find a thousand and one excuses, a thousand and one lies. But the basic fact is that they are afraid to be exposed.

The man who is moving vertically becomes almost a mirror. If you come close to him, you will see your real face - you will see your ugliness, you will see your continuous ambitiousness, you will see your begging bowl.

Perhaps another story will help you.

A man, early in the morning, a beggar with a begging bowl, entered the king's garden. The king used to come for a morning walk; otherwise it was impossible to meet the king - particularly for the beggar, the whole bureaucracy would prevent him. So he had chosen a time when there was no bureaucracy, and when the king wanted to be alone, in silence with nature, to drink as much beauty and aliveness as nature was showering. The beggar encountered him there.

The king said, "This is not the time... I don't see anybody."

The beggar said, "I am a beggar. Your bureaucracy is too long, and for a beggar it is impossible to see you. I insist that you give me an audience."

The king just thought to get rid of him. He said, "What do you want? Just say and you will get it.

Don't disturb my morning silence."

The beggar said, "Think twice before you offer to give me something."

The king said, "You seem to be a strange man. In the first place, you entered without any permission into the garden, insisting that you have to have an audience with the king. And now I am saying that whatever you want, just say it. Don't disturb my peace and don't disturb my silence."

The beggar laughed. He said, "A peace that is disturbed is not peace. And a silence that is disturbed is just a dream, not a reality."

Now the king looked at the beggar. He was saying something of tremendous importance. The king thought, "He does not seem to be an ordinary beggar, that is certain." And the beggar said again, "I want you to think it over, because what I want is just for you to fill my begging bowl with anything and I will go. But it has to be full."

The king laughed. He said, "You are a madman. Do you think your begging bowl cannot be filled?"

He called his treasurer and told him, "Fill his begging bowl with diamonds, precious stones."

The treasurer had no idea what had happened. Nobody fills beggars' bowls with diamonds. And the beggar reminded the treasurer, "Remember, unless the begging bowl is full, I am not going to move from here." It was a challenge between a beggar and a king.

And then there followed a very strange story. As diamonds were poured into his begging bowl, the moment they were poured in they would disappear. The emperor was in a very embarrassed state. But he said, "Whatever happens, even if my whole treasury is gone, I cannot be defeated by a beggar. I have defeated great emperors." And the whole treasury disappeared. The rumor reached the capital, and thousands of people gathered to see what was happening. And they had never seen the king in such a trembling, nervous breakdown.

And finally, when nothing was left in the treasury and the begging bowl was still as empty as it was before, he fell to the feet of the beggar and said, "You will have to forgive me, I did not understand.

I have never thought about these things. I did my best, but now... I don't have anything else to offer you. And I will think that you have forgiven me if you can tell me the secret of your begging bowl. It is a strange begging bowl - just a few diamonds would have filled it. It has taken the whole treasury."

The beggar laughed and he said, "You need not be worried. This is not a begging bowl. I found a human skull and out of the human skull I made this begging bowl. It has not forgotten its old habit.

Have you looked into your own begging bowl, your own head? Give it anything and it will ask for more and more and more. It knows only one language: more. It is always empty, it is always a beggar."

On the horizontal line, only beggars exist, because they are all rushing for more, and because the more cannot be fulfilled - not that you cannot get to a position you want, but the moment you get it, there are higher positions. For a moment maybe a flicker of happiness, and the next moment, again the same despair and the same race for more. You cannot fulfill the idea of more. It is intrinsically unfulfillable. And this is the horizontal line, the line of more and more and more.

What is the vertical line? Of being less and less and less, to the point of utter emptiness, to the point of being nobody. Just a signature - not even on sand, but on water. You have not even made it and it has disappeared. The man of the vertical line is the authentic sannyasin, who is immensely happy in being nobody, immensely happy with his inner purity of emptiness, because only emptiness can be pure; who is absolutely contented with his nakedness, because only nothingness can be in tune with the universe.

Once this tuning with the universe happens, you are no more in a sense. In the old sense, you are no more. But you are for the first time the whole universe. Even the faraway stars are within you; your nothingness can contain them. The flowers and the sun and the moon... and the whole music of existence. You are no more an ego, your "I" has disappeared. But that does not mean that you have disappeared. On the contrary, the moment your "I" has disappeared, you have appeared.

It is such a great ecstasy to be without the feeling of "I," without the feeling of any ego, without asking for anything more. What more can you ask? You have nothingness. In this nothingness you have become, without conquering, the whole universe. Then the singing birds are not only singing outside you. They appear outside because this body creates the barrier.

On the vertical line you become more and more consciousness and less and less body. The whole identification with the body disappears. In nothingness, these birds will be within you; these flowers, these trees and this beautiful morning will be within you. In fact, then there is no without. Everything has become your vision. And you cannot have a richer life than when everything has become your within. When the sun and the moon and the stars and the whole infinity of time and space is within you... what more do you want?

This is exactly the meaning of enlightenment: to become so nonexistent as an ego that the whole oceanic existence becomes part of you.

Kabir, one great Indian mystic... He was uneducated but has written such tremendously significant statements - they may not be grammatical. One of his statements he corrected before he died. He had written when he was young a beautiful statement. It was, "Just a dewdrop slips from the lotus leaf in the early morning sun, shining like a pearl, into the ocean." He said, "The same has happened to me."

His words are, "I have been searching, my friend. Rather than finding myself, I got lost in the cosmos.

The dewdrop disappeared into the ocean." Just before dying, as he was closing his eyes, he asked his son, Kamal, who himself proved of the same caliber and of the same status... And sometimes one thinks that he was a man of more courage than Kabir.

Kabir was very courageous against all traditions, orthodoxy, everything. But Kamal even criticized Kabir when he found something wrong in his statements. He told Kamal, "Please change my statement, which has been praised all over, that 'My friend, I have been searching for myself, but rather than finding myself, I got lost, just as the dewdrop disappears into the ocean.' Change it."

Kamal said, "I had always suspected that there was something wrong in it." And he showed him his own writing, in which he had already corrected it. The correction - even before Kabir realized - had been done already. That's why Kabir called him Kamal: "You are a miracle." Kamal means miracle.

And the man was a miracle. He had changed the line that Kabir wanted:

"My friend, I was seeking and searching myself. Rather than finding myself I have found the whole world, the whole universe. The dewdrop has not disappeared into the ocean, but the ocean has disappeared into the dewdrop." And when the ocean disappears into the dewdrop, the dewdrop is simply losing its boundaries, nothing else.

On the vertical line, you become less and less and less and less. And one day, you are no more.

A Zen master, Rinzai, had a very absurd habit, but beautiful. Every morning, when he would wake up, before opening his eyes he would say, "Rinzai, are you still here?"

His disciples said, "What kind of nonsense is this? You ask 'Rinzai, are you still here?'"

He said, "I am waiting for the moment when the answer will be, 'No. Existence is, but Rinzai is not.'"

This is the ultimate peak human consciousness can reach. This is the ultimate benediction. And unless one reaches to this peak, one will remain wandering in dark pathways, blind, suffering, miserable. He may accumulate much knowledge, he may become a great scholar, but that does not help. Only one thing, a very simple thing, is the essence of the whole religious experience, and that is meditation.

You go inwards. It will be difficult to get out from the crowd of your thoughts, but you are not a thought. You can get out of the crowd, you can create a distance between you and your thoughts.

And as the distance grows bigger, the thoughts start falling like leaves which have died - because it is you and your identity with the thoughts that gives them nourishment. When you are not giving them nourishment, thoughts cannot exist. Have you met any thought somewhere standing by itself?

And just try to be indifferent - the word of Gautam Buddha is upeksha. Just be indifferent to the whole mind and a distance will be created. And then come to a point from where all nourishment to the thoughts is stopped. They simply disappear; they are soap bubbles.

And the moment all thoughts disappear, you will find yourself in the same situation, asking, "Rinzai are you still here?" And you will wait for that great moment, that great, rare opportunity when the answer will be, "No. Who is this guy Rinzai?"

This silence is meditation. And it is not a talent. Everybody cannot be a Picasso and everybody cannot be a Rabindranath and everybody cannot be a Michelangelo. Those are talents. But everybody can be enlightened because it is not a talent; it is your intrinsic nature, of which you are unaware. And you will remain unaware if you remain surrounded by thoughts. The awareness of your ultimate reality arises only when there is nothing to prevent it, when there is nothingness, surrounding you.

The vertical line is rare, Vadan. It is perhaps the only rare thing in existence, because it takes you on the journey of eternity and immortality. The flowers that blossom on those paths are inconceivable by the mind. And the experiences that happen are unexplainable. But in a very strange way the man himself becomes the expression. His eyes show the depths of his heart, his gestures show the grace of the vertical movement. His whole life radiates, pulsates and creates a field of energy.

Those who are prejudiced, those who are already determined and concluded... I feel sorry for them.

But those who are open, unprejudiced, have not concluded yet, they will immediately start feeling the pulsation, the radiation. And a certain synchronicity between the heart of the man of the vertical and the heart of the man who is not yet vertical... The moment the synchronicity happens, in that same moment you also start moving vertically.

These are words simply to explain things which are not explainable through words. But those who are intelligent enough, not intellectuals - those people are full of rubbish... Never get mixed up between being intellectual and intelligent. Intelligence is a pure clarity of seeing, a perceptivity. The intellectual is a computer; he is a memory.

Intelligence is not memory. Intelligence is a sharp sword which penetrates directly into reality. Once it sees it...

It is said that Mahakashyapa, himself a prince, had gone to see Gautam Buddha. But he was very simple, innocent, unprejudiced, having no belief systems, no philosophy, no theology. He simply touched the feet of Buddha, looked into the eyes of Buddha, and everything happened. Some transfer of light, something invisible, some meeting of the heart, some merging... he never asked a single question to Gautam Buddha.

Even others became aware of the fact: "All the disciples ask questions. This Mahakashyapa is strange. He simply sits under a tree; he has almost monopolized the tree. Everybody knows, 'Don't sit there, Mahakashyapa will sit there.' He sits there - if Buddha speaks, good; if Buddha does not speak, good."

Slowly, slowly older disciples approached Mahakashyapa, particularly Sariputta who was a very close disciple of Gautam Buddha. He asked Mahakashyapa, "Don't you have a question?"

Mahakashyapa said, "All my questions were answered the moment he looked into my eyes. Since the moment I touched his feet I have not been a body. I am just a consciousness and the body is my house. All identity with the body was broken in a single, split moment."

He is described in the Buddhist scriptures only once, when another king was offering Gautam Buddha a great, valuable diamond and Buddha said, "Drop it!"

Reluctantly, because it was a very valuable diamond, but before ten thousand people if you have offered it and Buddha says, "Drop it!"... He dropped it. He had also brought a very rare flower: a lotus which had blossomed out of season. It was not the time for lotuses. He offered Buddha that flower and Buddha again said, "Drop it!" He dropped it but he felt very strange, hurt: "My gifts are not being accepted."

And Buddha said, "Drop it!" Now he had nothing to drop, so he looked all around - "What to make of it? Is this man mad? I dropped the diamond, I dropped the flower... those two things were in both my hands. Now I don't have anything to drop." This is the moment where Mahakashyapa is mentioned - once only.

Ten thousand sannyasins were utterly silent - because it was a strange thing, Buddha had never done that. He had accepted... anybody who brought a flower or a gift, he would accept it. But Mahakashyapa sitting under his monopolized tree laughed loudly. He had not spoken to anybody; he had been there for four years. This was the first time he had made some kind of expression. He laughed. And this was even more hurtful.

The king said, "Why are you laughing?"

He said, "I am laughing because you are not dropping yourself. He is not concerned about your flower and about your diamond, drop yourself! And I say it with my own experience - before he said anything, I had dropped myself. He had to lean and hold me up, and our eyes met and everything happened."

Mahakashyapa is perhaps the most mysterious disciple of Gautam Buddha, but the most perceptive.

That was a rare moment, when Buddha looked into Mahakashyapa's eyes. That was the moment when eternity penetrated time, when the vertical penetrated the horizontal. And just a single moment can be such a radical change. Beautiful were those days, golden are their memories. It looks very far away and faint now.

But my effort here is to make this small island a part of eternity, where those innocent moments, those innocent experiences are still possible. Nothing is said, nothing is heard, and yet the heart starts dancing in tune with the master.

The universal and the eternal are the same, only man has become more and more drowned in darkness. In India, the seers have named this part of time kaliyuga - the age of darkness. They were certainly very perceptive.

Just a few days ago, the editor of ILLUSTRATED WEEKLY wrote an article about me in which he said a few significant things. He is not a religious person, neither does he believe in any spirituality.

But in our commune, what he saw and felt he could say was his closest experience of spirituality.

Somebody from England wrote a very angry letter to him which was published. The man said, "What has happened to you? Either you have been bribed or you have been hypnotized." Looking at his letter, it became something more important... Because if anybody says any lies about me, if anybody is against me, nobody will say to him, "You have been bribed by the enemies of Shree Rajneesh." And nobody will say or even conceive that, "You have been hypnotized by the people who are against Shree Rajneesh."

Many people have told me, "We want to come, we want to understand. But then people start saying, 'You are being hypnotized. If you are not saying anything against Shree Rajneesh then certainly you are being hypnotized.'" Just twenty-five centuries ago, do you think Mahakashyapa was hypnotized?

Do you think anybody would have said to him, "Either you have been bribed or hypnotized"? Those were days when people were not so closed and allowed some fresh breeze to pass through them.

Now everybody seems to be completely closed. Somebody is a Christian, somebody is a Hindu, somebody is a Mohammedan. Before experiencing anything they have decided what is true and what is false. Before coming in contact with a living source, they have covered themselves completely, defensively. They are afraid that if they open up, all their prejudices will look stupid and all their belief systems will fall down.

I am here in my own land, but I consider myself a foreigner. People are afraid to enter the gate of the commune. The fear is of hypnosis. And they don't understand what hypnosis is.

The fact is, they have been hypnotized from their very childhood to worship a monkey god - because no intelligent man will do that. They have been hypnotized to worship an elephant god. This is possible only through constant repetition, from the very childhood, by the whole society around them, so that it becomes a conditioning in them. Otherwise, they will also think - what are they doing?

But they never think. Thinking is one of the greatest crimes. So nobody thinks, everybody believes.

But if you want to reach to the heights of a Buddha or to the heights of a Chuang Tzu, then you will have to drop all belief systems. And you will have to drop all thoughts which have been given to you by others, which are borrowed.

A man came to Chuang Tzu one day and was arguing. Chuang Tzu said, "Wait. Just I want to know one thing: would you like to use somebody else's shoes?"

He said, "Why should I use somebody else's shoes?"

Chuang Tzu said, "You are so alert about your legs, about your feet, but you are not so aware about your head - because every thought that you have is somebody else's. It is not yours. You have heard it, you have read it, you have been told, you have gathered it from the atmosphere, and you have never thought that you don't have a single thought of your own."

In fact, there is no thought which is your own. There is only clarity, perceptivity, silence, understanding, intelligence which are your own. And with these you can be ready for eternity to enter into the world of time.

It is the greatest moment. I cannot conceive of anything more valuable or more precious. It makes you the whole universe; it takes away all your boundaries which are really an imprisonment. It makes you a bird on the wing in the open sky.

Now something serious, because we have been in a nonserious world so long....

A man goes into a bar and orders a beer. When he is served he reaches into his breast pocket and lifts out a perfectly formed little figure, four inches tall. Then he pulls out a thimble and places it on the bar. "A beer for my friend here too," he requests. "And go easy on the head."

"Is he for real?" asks the bartender. "He is," says the man.

"Can he talk?" persists the bartender. "He can," replies the man.

"Arnold," he goes on, "tell this guy about the time we were on safari and you called the witch doctor a black son-of-a-bitch."

Silverman is killed in an accident and Mendel Kravitz is sent to break the news to his wife.

"Be careful how you tell her," advises a friend. "She is a very delicate woman."

Mendel knocks on the door and Mrs. Silverman comes out. "Are you the widow of Silverman?" he asks.

"Certainly not," she replies.

"Want to bet?" asks Mendel.

An African tribe is living through a famine and having a bad time with its crops. The chief calls a meeting and says, "We will send a telegram to the Russians, telling them that we are having agricultural problems and need their help. They will send seeds, tractors and one hundred young technicians to help us.

"Then we will send a telegram to the Americans, telling them that the Russians are helping us.

And the Americans will send us seeds and tractors and one hundred technicians. When all the technicians arrive, we will eat them."

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.