A Taste of the Other Shore

 This Perfect and Beautiful Everything

It is not that thoughts have to slip back into the mind. It is that the mind itself has to fall back into emptiness.

When the mind stops - which it has to do - and you stay with or in the phenomenon of a silent mind, you have only taken the first step. The second step is when the mind, the whole operation of interpretation of reality, falls back into nothingness. Thought and mind are really one and the same. A mind that is still is extremely different from a mind that is busy, and a mind that is busy is extremely different from a mind that is manic.

Meher Baba, a great Indian Guru from earlier this century who spent most of his working life in total silence - he used to write on a blackboard, communicate non-verbally; he had tens of thousands of disciples, also Westerners; he died in the sixties some time - he said, “Mind moving is man. Mind moving fast is mad. Mind moving slow is Saint. Mind stopped is God.”

So here we have a tremendous range of descriptions, according to how the mind is operating: full speed, moderate speed, slowly or still. I’m saying that the mind becoming still is beautiful, but the mind and the function of the mind, which is thinking, are really the same. The whole phenomenon of mind has to move back into nothingness. And then you are free of your history. Mind is something. And no something adds anything whatsoever to Nothing.

I have to say that again, because it’s a tough one: No something whatsoever, of any kind, adds anything to nothingness. Nothingness is not changed by a phenomenon that comes from it, neither by the emerging nor by the returning. It is of no consequence to Nothing whether phenomena arise or not.

Nothingness is utter, universal, complete, total. And no thing that emerges from nothingness can be a cause of anything. No phenomenon that exists in the universe - that is to say nothing that has a quality, a shape, a size, a name, can be given a name; mind can be given a name - no phenomenon can be the cause of anything. All phenomena are already effects. They are the effect of a movement out of nothingness. They cannot themselves be prime causes. Only that which comes directly out of nothingness can be a prime cause.

The nature of that nothingness is pure energy, pure power, and at the same time pure tranquillity. But something comes out of it and we make it a basis of our lives. The ego comes out of it. The ego is a phenomenon, so is a soap bubble, so is the mind. These are all phenomena, coming out of nothingness. Then, upon such phenomena we base our lives.

We turn the effect into a cause. The phenomenon of ego is the effect of the application of energies of a life, through the years of your infancy and childhood, on that nothingness that you actually are. Then the phenomenon of a personality, an ego, an identity, arises. Then, like a goblin sitting on a toadstool, we sit on our ego and proceed to see, and feel, and judge, and know. The goblin becomes the cause of your life. But a goblin is not primal, it is pure fantasy. All goblins are phantasmagorical, and all egos and all minds are equally phantasmagorical.

Only emptiness has any ultimate reality. But that emptiness is totally charged with energy, with potentiality; it needs nothing, wants nothing, demands nothing, is sufficient unto itself. And when one reunites with it, one becomes a law unto oneself. All else is just stuff and cannot touch you as deeply as your roots in the All.

A Lord of the Universe, a Mushpa, is a law unto himself. That doesn’t mean anarchy - though it might. It doesn’t mean anything that you can say - except that such a person comes from something which is behind him, and is not reacting or responding to what is in front of him. All man-made laws, all human interactional laws, customs, traditions, habits, expectations - all these are in front of you. The true law is behind you, moving through you. You are neither there nor absent. You are a basis for existence, playing life on this Earth.

When you taste that, you know that everything is perfect. Nothing can be more perfect than that. And even if you lose it, if you have had it for long enough to really savour it, experience it deeply, you will always know that everything is alright.

There are many books around these days about NDE’s. An NDE is a ‘near death experience’: experiences of people whose hearts have stopped, who have been in deep crisis, who in fact have become medically dead and then have been resuscitated. One of the common responses to such an experience, shared by almost all those who report from these twilight lands, is that they lose their fear of death. They become more relaxed; that terror of it all ending is no longer with them, because they trust that what they saw is what will happen when they actually die. And they discovered that not only is it nothing to fear, but it’s absolutely beautiful.

Now, what I’m saying is not the same thing as that but it’s parallel. Once you’ve experienced being deeply in the nothingness from which all comes, and seeing that that’s absolutely perfect and the only thing that is primarily true, then no matter what happens to you in your life - what events, what tragedies, what difficulties, what hurts - you know that in fact everything is absolutely perfect and beautiful.

But all the pluses and minuses, positives and negatives, the preferences, are not important ultimately. Nothing matters ultimately. That is not a statement of indifference, that is a statement of understanding. You can say nothing matters with indifference - you don’t care. You can be fed up, you can be in despair, and you will say nothing matters. But I’m not saying it in that way.

I’m saying that through understanding one comes to see that nothing matters, it’s just passing by. It has a beginning, it has an end. It is a wave on the ocean of nothingness - maybe a great wave, maybe a gigantic wave, maybe a cataclysmic wave, but still it will return to the ocean of nothingness that you know of and have united with.

This is the only journey worth travelling: to realize that this is so, what I have told you this evening; not to hear it, not to believe it, not to trust it - though these will help - but to realize it. Then your life is supported by reality. And only then will it be supported by reality, only then. Anything less, and your position is always in jeopardy, your standpoint will be washed away.

So go on to the end, even if you have to take a rest on the way. Go on to the end until everything disappears, all phenomena disappear, until there is just the beat of the universal energy - and you are it. Then the phenomena are there, but they are just mirages. Only then will you be ultimately content, relaxed, at home.

As long as the mind is there, active or passive, moving or still, you cannot have quietness, peace, simplicity, because the thoughts make life complicated; you can get many beautiful things but you are still, in a way, on a cushion on the ocean of nothingness. The mind is like a cushion. A very rare, very intense, very pregnant energy is the mind. What thoughts have come out of the mind in human reality, great geniuses, great inspirations, great words, great discoveries - all have come out of this subtle, intense, pregnant energy that is mind.

Beautiful - but it is a cushion on nothingness. The ocean of nothingness is an isness, is pure isness; it is what they call in the East tathata: suchness, the pure suchness of existence. No need for thoughts; just isness, power, life, existence. Nothing less will do.

Talk given in "Tuning In" in Energy Workd, France, 07.04.1995.