The mystic is the greatest flowering of human
consciousness. His ultimate vision can be described in three beautiful words that have been used for thousands of years, and
there has not been any improvement on them. They are three words from the ancient-most sources: satyam shivam sundaram.
Satyam means the truth - not what you think about
it, but what it is; not your idea about it, but its reality. To know this truth you have to be utterly absent. Your very presence
will distort the vision - because your presence means the presence of your mind, your prejudices, your conditionings. You
are nothing else but a bundle of all that has been forced upon you by the religions, by the society, by the so-called leaders
of humanity. Your absence means the absence of all prejudices, of all borrowed knowledge: absence of the Christian, absence
of the Hindu, absence of the Mohammedan…just a pure sky, a pure being. I am using the word absence to deny all that
is not you.
But don’t misunderstand me: this absence
of you is your real presence. Only the prejudices are absent. The ego is absent, your knowledgeability is absent but your
being shows in its utter purity. You disappear as a personality and there remains only a pure presence. So on one side it
is absence of all that is false in you, and on the other side it is presence of all that is real in you. In this state you
don’t think, you simply see.
This seeing of existence is the first experience
of the mystic contained in the word satyam. Satyam means the truth: not any conception about it, but truth itself.
The second word, shivam, means virtue - all that
is good, all that is valuable, all that is the most precious in you: the ultimate good. The man who comes to experience the
truth starts living the truth immediately. There is no other alternative. His living the truth is shivam. Shivam means truth
in action, truth in your life, truth in your love, truth in your friendship, truth in your eyes and truth in your heart. Shivam
is the action of truth. Truth itself is the center of the cyclone, but if you experience the truth, the cyclone around you
becomes shivam. It becomes pure godliness.
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Individuality is not personality.
Personality is given by the society to you. Individuality
is your intrinsic nature. Personality is fake, a fraud. Individuality is your innermost buddha, your innermost enlightenment,
your innermost door to the divine.
But every master is bound to be unique in his
expressions. They are all saying the same thing, they are all indicating towards the same moon, but their fingers are different.
They are bound to be different. The finger of Buddha, the finger of Lao Tzu, the finger of Chuang Tzu, are bound to be different.
If you pay too much attention to the finger, there is every possibility you will forget the purpose. The purpose was not the
finger, the purpose was the moon.
All the differences are in the fingers, in their
expressions. The experience of truth is one, but to bring it to expression, every master has to find his own device. That’s
why even enlightened people appear to you to be speaking differently, even contradictorily - because existence does not have
one-dimensional sources, it is multidimensional. It is comprehensive of all contradictions. All contradictions melt into one
cosmos."
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John
