"Start with Love"

 

WHILE BEING CARESSED, SWEET PRINCESS, ENTER THE CARESSING AS EVERLASTING LIFE. 

    Shiva starts with love. This technique is concerned with love, because love is the nearest thing in your experience in which you are relaxed. If you cannot love, it is impossible for you to relax. If you can relax, your life will become a loving life. 

    A tense man cannot love. Why? A tense man always lives with purposes. He can earn money, but he cannot love because love is purposeless. Love is not a commodity. You cannot accumulate it; you cannot make a bank balance of it; you cannot strengthen your ego out of it. Really, love is the most absurd act, with no meaning beyond it, no purpose beyond it. It exists in itself, not for anything else.

    You earn money for something – it is a means. You build a house for someone to live in – it is a means. Love is not a means. Why do you love? For what do you love? Love is the end in itself. That is why a mind that is calculative, logical, a mind that thinks in terms of purpose, cannot love. And the mind that always thinks in terms of purpose will be tense, because purpose can only be fulfilled in the future, never here and now.

     You are building a house – you cannot live in it just now, you will have to build it first. You can live in it in the future, not now. You earn money – the bank balance will be created in the future, not now. Means you will have to use now, and ends will come in the future. 

    Love is always here; there is no future to it. That is why love is so near to meditation. That is why death is also so near to meditation – because death is also always here and now, it can never happen in the future. Can you die in the future? You can die only in the present. No one has ever died in the future. How can you die in the future? Or how can you die in the past? The past has gone, it is no more, so you cannot die in it. The future has not yet come, so how can you die in it?

    Death always occurs in the present. Death, love, meditation – they all occur in the present. So if you are afraid of death, you cannot love. If you are afraid of love, you cannot meditate. If you are afraid of meditation, your life will be useless. Useless not in the sense of any purpose, but useless in the sense that you will never be able to feel any bliss in it. It will be futile. 

    It may seem strange to connect these three: love, meditation, death. It is not! They are similar experiences. So if you can enter in one, you can enter in the remaining two.

    Shiva starts with love. He says, WHILE BEING CARESSED, SWEET PRINCESS, ENTER THE CARESSING AS EVERLASTING LIFE. What does it mean? Many things! One: while you are being loved the past has ceased, the future is not. You move in the dimension of the present. You move in THE NOW. Have you ever loved someone? If you have ever loved, then you know that the mind is no longer there. 

    That is why the so-called wise men say that lovers are blind, mindless, mad. In essence what they say is right. Lovers are blind because they have no eyes for the future, to calculate what they are going to do. They are blind; they cannot see the past. What has happened to lovers? They just move here and now without any consideration of past or future, without any consideration of consequences. That is why they are called blind. They are! They are blind for those who are calculating, and they are seers for those who are not calculating. Those who are not calculating will see love as the real eye, the real vision.

    So the first thing: in the moment of love, past and future are no more. Then, one delicate point is to be understood. When there is no past and no future, can you call this moment the present? It is the present only between the two – between the past and the future. It is relative. If there is no past and no future, what does it mean to call it the present? It is meaningless. That is why Shiva doesn’t use the word ‘present’. He says, EVERLASTING LIFE. He means eternity... enter eternity.

    We divide time into three parts – past, present, future. That division is false, absolutely false. Time is really past and future. The present is not part of time. The present is part of eternity. That which has passed is time; that which is to come is time. That which is, is not time because it never passes – it is always here. The now is always here. It is ALWAYS here! This now is eternal.

    If you move from the past, you never move into the present. From the past you always move into the future; there comes no moment which is present. From the past you always move into the future. From the present you can never move into the future. From the present you go deeper and deeper, into more present and more present. This is everlasting life.

    We may say it in this way: from past to future is time. Time means you move on a plane, on a straight line. Or we may call it horizontal. The moment you are in the present the dimension changes: you move vertically – up or down, toward the height or toward the depth. But then you never move horizontally. A Buddha, a Shiva, live in eternity, not in time.

    Jesus was asked, ”What will happen in your kingdom of God?” The man who asked him was not asking about time. He was asking about what is going to happen to his desires, about how they will be fulfilled. He was asking whether there will be life everlasting or whether there will be death; whether there be any misery, whether there will be inferior and superior men. He was asking things of this world when he asked, ”What is going to happen in your kingdom of God?” And Jesus replied – the reply is like that of a Zen monk – ”There shall be time no longer.” 

    The man who was replied to in this way may not have understood at all: ”There shall be time no longer.” Only this one thing Jesus said – ”There shall be time no longer,” because time is horizontal and the kingdom of God is vertical... it is eternal. It is always here! You have only to move away from time to enter into it. 

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