THE WHOLE
QUESTION: How can I understand the Whole? How can I understand that which you want to communicate?
A woman came to see me and immediately told me how crazy she was. I had to stop her after 10 minutes of listening to her crazy stories about her craziness.
“How do you know that you are crazy?” I asked.
“My mother told me and my father, everybody, even a judge,” she said.
“A judge?” I was surprised.
“Yes. The police would put me in jail after I would scream and insult people from my balcony, naked, throwing eggs on them and threatening to kill them.” She was proud of her ‘achievement.’
“Is there any person in your life who thinks that you are sane?” I asked her,
“No! Even when dogs bark at me, I know they think I am crazy.”
“OK! I am the only person in the entire world who is going to tell you that you are not crazy”
She started panicking, “Oh, no! This cannot happen. I don’t want you to say that. I came to see you so you can help me to heal my craziness.”
“I just did.” I said.
In meditation, effort is not essential, but understanding is. By understanding through meditation, you live a natural life. One thing has to be clear here. You can’t understand life, only the one who is not living, your mind, and through that understanding you live your life naturally. That understanding doesn’t come from the mind, but from the heart, as a natural and spontaneous act of living. Proper understanding is not through thoughts, but through act of the heart. Proper understanding comes from witnessing.
In living your life, proper understanding comes very naturally. You are in the knowingness of One Self. You are aware that you are alive, right where you are now, through your feelings.
You cannot know something that is beyond the body, you can only be in knowingness, accepting that divine fact and living your life. That is all. That is the proper understanding.
You can’t try to be natural because by trying to be natural, unnaturalness becomes your natural life. You can only BE natural by living a natural life. You can only be aware. Do you understand? That is the only miracle in life. That is the Wholeness. Nature is the greatest miracle, and if you are natural, you live a life full of miracles; just delighting in ordinary things, in eating, walking, sleeping, and breathing.
To be natural is to be the Whole, and to be the Whole is to be holy, so that implies that life is a holy phenomenon. The whole of life is a celebration of natural miracles. Every moment of Now is a holy moment, every day is a holiday. Then it makes no difference where you are, you are always Now living and celebrating your life as a holy moment, as a holiday by living it with awareness. You relax into nature, and as a consequence you relax into your natural consciousness. That is the proper understanding, relaxing in your natural consciousness and nature relaxing in you.
Our social and religious conditioning from the very beginning, doesn’t allow us to be natural. Our conditioning tells us that we have to go above the nature, that to be natural is to be animal. There is nothing superior to nature. Nobody has ever succeeded in transcending nature. All that can be succeeded is in destroying the nature. Can you see the truth of it in this world that we live in? You can’t transcend nature, you can only transcend unnaturalness. You can’t transcend the truth, only untruth. You can’t transcend knowingness, only your ignorance. In that transcendence you fulfill your nature, you become holy, you become the Whole.
The whole idea of transcending nature comes from the ego. For example, royal bloodlines have to be somehow different from ordinary human bloodlines. Royal families don’t believe in common humanity; their ego prevents them from seeing nature. That was one of the reasons why royal families around the world would not allow ‘ordinary humans’ to be married into their ‘royal family.’ To be natural is to be free. If you believe in a royal family, you are not free. These people are just as human as you; there is nothing royal about them. Actually, nature is royal and if you are natural, you are living a royal life.
Once I received an email from a man who wanted to know what meditation was, before he could join one of my meditation retreats. I replied, “Meditation is to be natural.” He replied back, “What is the purpose of being natural?” This is unfortunate. He thought that in order to be himself, he would need to have a purpose. What nonsense. Purposes have taken a firm hold of us that even to live, our life has to be turned into a purpose. My mother use to say to me and my sister, “I live only for you.” That was her purpose to live and her manipulative way to control us through guilt. If we did not behave according to her expectations, we would kill her in a subtle way because she sacrificed her life for us. We had to be obedient in order to deserve the right to live and be loved by her.
The whole idea of sacrifice for the liberation of others is enforced by religions and their leaders, particularly by Christian ones. They have conditioned some people to believe that you have to sacrifice yourself for the liberation of others. Jesus was an example of self-sacrifice, so Christians have to follow that ‘noble way’ if they want a place in paradise. This is a double ego point. You have to sacrifice your life for others, and in that act of slaughtering yourself, you liberate yourself. What nonsense: God will not take you into his kingdom if you are not obedient to him, and if you don’t destroy yourself in that process.
The whole idea of slavery is to conform to the mind, so if you want to be liberated, you will have to be a conformist. In that way, you become obedient to social norms, codes and demands; living according to social values.
Look around. Society consists of people who are unconscious. What real values can come from unconsciousness? People follow the lives of Hollywood entertainers, and they call them ‘Stars.’ They have sacrificed everything natural in themselves at the altar of unnaturalness. Hollywood stars have become contemporary saints; people worship them, and they emulate their lives.
Their Hollywood saintliness is just cultivated characters marked by notable or conspicuous traits. The meaning of the word ‘character’ means, ”The personality or part which an actor recreates convincingly.” Look at the saints of the contemporary spiritual and religious world and their characters. Their world is nothing else than good acting, a short literary sketch.
A real religious or spiritual man has no religious or spiritual character because he can’t have it, because the character is the mind’s device of unnatural, irreligious and non-spiritual, it is just a structure. The mind develops a character because the mind is afraid of your natural awareness. The mind develops morality because the mind is afraid of inner immorality. With the mind, you can’t be a good person if you don’t repress the bad person. And when you repress the bad person, that personality creates a bad character that goes deeper into your being inconspicuously. That is where the inner conflict is, a kind of civil war. You can’t relax because you are afraid that bad character might come any moment, so you have to be in constant repression, day in, day out, year in, year out. Nothing can be solved by repressing, it can only increase the repression and conflict, increase your attachment to your ego.
Recently someone asked me, “What is the relationship between consciousness and ego?” There is no relationship. Consciousness is, mind is not. If the mind thinks itself to be the Whole, it creates the ego, imagining itself to be the Whole. If the consciousness becomes aware of the mind, then it realizes that there is no mind. That is the right understanding. If the consciousness concludes, “I am conscious,” then there is no consciousness, just a thought, just an ego playing another trick on you. The mind is thinking about the Whole. No mind is the Whole.
To understand the Whole, you have to be out of your mind, but when you are out, you understand that there is no-thing to understand.
Do not think and you have the right understanding of the Whole.
Ivan Rados, Transcripts - A collection of Spontaneous Discourses on The Middle Point, Tantra, Yoga, Yantra, Mantra, Zen..., to disciples and friends in Port Coquitlam, Toronto, Vancouver, and Los Angeles.