Zen- Zest,Zip,Zap and Zing (Preview)
The first question.
"DO YOU THINK THAT YOU WILL GO TO HEAVEN WHEN YOU DIE?"
Prem Pramod,
There is no heaven anywhere,
it is here.
It is always here,
it is never there.
It is always now, it is never then.
The very idea of heaven somewhere else - there, then -
is a strategy of the mind to deceive you,
to keep you ignorant
of the heaven that surrounds you every moment.
Existence knows no past, no future.
The only time existence knows is now,
and the meditator has to enter this 'nowness' of things.
This is heaven.
This very moment we are in it.
You are not aware, I am aware of it. That's the only difference:
you are asleep, I am awake.
But we exist in the same space. There is nowhere to go.
The biblical story says
God became angry with Adam and Eve
and threw them out of the Garden of Eden.
That is impossible -
yes, even for God it is impossible. They say God is omnipotent,
but there are limits to omnipotence too.
For example, he cannot make two plus two five.
He cannot throw anybody out of paradise
because only paradise exists; it is synonymous with existence itself.
So what must have happened is:
Adam and Eve after eating the fruit of knowledge became minds.
When you eat the fruit of knowledge you become a mind,
you lose your innocence, you become knowledgeable.
And knowledge drives you
out of the now to then, to there.
Mind is always somewhere else
Adam and Eve must have fallen asleep.
Metaphysically to fall asleep means to become a mind.
And to become a Buddha, awakened, to become a Christ
is to come out of the mind,
to come out of knowledge and become again innocent.
That's the whole alchemy of meditation.
I am not identified with the mind anymore,
so there is no question of any heaven anywhere else.
Religious scriptures are full.
They even give you maps --
where heaven is,
how far away, how to reach there,
what path to travel, which guide to listen to:
Christ, Mohammed, Buddha.
And they also make you very afraid
that if you don't reach heaven you will fall into hell.
Neither heaven exists nor hell exists; they are just in your
psychology.
When you are psychically attuned with existence,
when you are silent,
you are in heaven.
When you are disturbed, when you lose your silence, you are distracted
and there are ripples and ripples in the lake of your consciousness
and all the mirror-like quality of the consciousness is lost,
you are in hell
Hell simply means disharmony within you --
within you and with existence too.
The moment you are harmonious within yourself and with existence --
and they are two sides of the same coin -- immediately you are in heaven.
Heaven and hell are not geographical.
So, Pramod,
the first thing to remember is: there is no heaven, no hell for me.
They disappeared the moment I became disidentified with the mind.
Secondly:
one is never born and never dies;
both are illusions.
Certainly they appear,
but they appear only just like a snake appearing in a rope when you cannot see clearly.
Maybe night is descending,
the sun has set,
and you are on a dark path, and suddenly you become afraid of the snake.
But there is only a rope
lying there.
Bring light -- just a candle will do --
and the snake is no more found. It was never there in the first place.
Birth is as illusory as the snake seen in a rope;
and if birth is illusory, of course death is illusory.
You are never born and you never die.
You certainly enter into a body --
that is a birth --
and one day you leave the body -- that's what you call death --
but as far as you are concerned,
you were before your birth and you will be after your death.
Birth and death don't confine your life;
there have been many births and many deaths.
Births and deaths are just small episodes in the eternity of your life,
and the moment you become aware of this eternity --
another name for now,
this timelessness --
all fear, all anxiety about death immediately evaporates
just as dewdrops evaporate
in the early morning sun.
So the second thing, Pramod: I am not going to die.
Certainly, one day I will leave the body -- in fact I left it twenty-five years ago.
There is no more any connection with the body.
I am just a guest,
I don't own it.
I am no more part of it,
it is no more part of me.
We are together, and on friendly terms --
there is no antagonism,
I respect it because it gives me shelter --
but there is no bridge.
The body is there, I am here, and between the two there is a gap.
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