SINGING AND DANCING: POOR SUBSTITUTES FOR MEDITATION

Maneesha has asked:

OUR BELOVED MASTER,
OUR LOVE FOR MUSIC, POETRY, DANCE, OUR LOVE FOR LOVE ITSELF -- DOESN'T THAT SUGGEST AN URGE IN US TO DISAPPEAR?
IF THAT IS SO, WHY DOES MEDITATION, THE ART OF DISAPPEARING, NOT COME MORE NATURALLY TO US?

Maneesha, music, poetry, dance, love are only half way. You disappear for a moment, then you are back. And the moment is so small....

Just as a great dancer, Nijinsky, said, "When my dance comes to its crescendo, I am no more. Only dance is." But that happens only for a small fragment of time; then again you are back.

According to me, all these -- poetry, music, dance, love -- are poor substitutes for meditation. They are good, beautiful, but they are not meditation. And meditation does not come naturally to you, because in meditation you will have to disappear forever.

There is no coming back. That creates fear. Meditation is a death -- death of all that you are now. Of course there will be a resurrection, but that will be a totally new, fresh original being which you are not even aware is hidden in you.

It happens in poetry, in music, in dance, only for a small moment that you slip out of your personality and touch your individuality. But only because it happens for a small moment, you are not afraid; you always come back.

In meditation, once you are gone in, you are gone in. Then, even when you resurrect you are a totally different person. The old personality is nowhere to be found. You have to start your life again from ABC. You have to learn everything with fresh eyes, with a totally new heart. That's why meditation creates fear.

The UPANISHADS say that the master is a death. It is an incomplete sentence. The master is a death but also a rebirth, a resurrection. A master is nothing but meditation. A master simply gives you a meditation; he cannot do anything else. He gives you the meditation to die and to be reborn.

A meditator can play music and it will have a totally different significance. A meditator can write poetry, but then the poetry will not be only a composition of words. It will express something inexpressible. A meditator can do anything, but he will bring to it a new grace, a new beauty, a new significance.

Music, poetry, dance or love can become hindrances to meditation if you stop at them. First comes meditation, and then you can create great poetry and great music. But you will not be the creator; you will be just a hollow bamboo flute. The universe will sing songs through you, will dance dances through you. You will be only an address -- c/o you. Existence will express itself, and you will be just a hollow bamboo.

Sufism is nothing. You can find good poetry anywhere. And if you want, bring any Sufi to me and I will take away all his experience within one hour. These are abnormal people, hypnotizing themselves.

OUR BELOVED MASTER,
YOU HAVE BEEN SPEAKING ON THE EMPTY HEART OF ZEN. LAST NIGHT WE SPENT AN EVENING LISTENING TO RUMI'S EXPRESSION OF THE SUFI HEART.COULD YOU TALK OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO?

The reality is that what the Sufis call the heart is just part of their mind. The mind has many capacities: thinking, feeling, imagination, dreaming, self-hypnosis -- these are all qualities of the mind. In fact there is no heart as such; everything is being done by the mind.

We have lived with this traditional division, that imagination and feeling and emotions and sentiments are of the heart. But your heart is just a pumping system. Everything that you think or imagine or feel is confined into the mind. Your mind has seven hundred centers and they control everything.

When Zen says empty heart it simply means empty mind. To Zen, heart or mind are synonymous. The emphasis is on emptiness. A mind that is empty becomes the door to the divine that is all around -- but first it has to be empty.

From Aes Dhammo Sanantano 10:-

And I say, both will happen together. These can happen together only. In my opinion, if you have put the death out side the door, then the death will go on knocking. You will dance but the knocking of the death will be heard. The death will go on shouting and calling, because what you are doing is false. Your dance is false, you also know. The death is existing in the feet on which you are dancing; the throat with which you are singing is being ready for dyeing; the breath of the heart with which you are breathing is reducing every moment. By forgetting the death, your celebration will be simply an acting, the celebration cannot be real.

No, there cannot be any dance with a lie and false. I say to you, there should be awareness of death. Because what I have just said, the truth of death is life; if you become truly aware of the death, if you recognize the death, encounter the death – which is possible; all experiments of meditation are experiments of death.

The real celebration will start after knowing the death. Then you can dance. Then what is left except dancing? Then what else will you do. There will be no death. And when there is no death, how there can be sorrow, anguish and worry! Then there enters a new quality in the dance. Then the dance is not your, it is of the existence. Then you do not dance, rather the existence dances in you.

Abhinava Gupta is a great philosopher, particularly of art, aesthetics, but he is not an enlightened man. So when he starts saying that the experience of rasa, the experience of aesthetic beauty, is the same as the experience of ultimate reality, then he is going beyond his limits. I cannot support him there.

The experience of beauty is a very momentary flash. It does not change you; it has no radical effect on you. You remain the same person. Before the experience and after the experience you are the same person.

I respect the man for his great insight into aesthetics, but I cannot forgive him for giving a very wrong idea – for generations. Those two experiences are totally different.

All great artists are great lovers, not great spiritual people. All great musicians, great dancers, painters, poets – all are great lovers, because the experience of love is very close to the experience of their aesthetic creativity. But it can be said that although the experiences are qualitatively different, if the person who has experienced aesthetic beauty does not stop there... If he starts seeking for how this experience of joy can be not just momentary, a fleeting moment, a breeze coming in and going out by the other door, but asks, "How can I make it something that becomes part of my being so that I do not have to depend on music, on dance, on a beautiful sunrise, on a beautiful painting; so that I have not to depend on anything outside of me, so that I can be absolutely independent?", that is the qualitative difference.

The aesthetic experience is dependent on something outside you. That's why I said it is more similar to the sexual experience, because the sexual is also dependent on an outside person. But the spiritual experience is independent, and it is not momentary. It is not that suddenly it happens and then stops. No, it is not momentary. You have to prepare the ground. That preparation is called meditation. You have to make your being ready for it. And the moment you are open and vulnerable and absolutely ready – you cannot say it is happening momentarily, because before it can happen you have to fulfill certain conditions.

You have to be silent – not by the experience, but before the experience. You have to be in a state of no-thought – not by the experience, but before the experience. You have to drop the ego – not in the experience, but before the experience. You have to be absolutely prepared and ready. And the moment you are ready, it happens. It is not momentary; you deserve it. You have earned it; it is your achievement.

(The Sword And The Lotus)

Sannyas is a revolution.
It simply means that you are finished with the past, and you don't want to repeat it. You have repeated it enough, and the repetition has made you almost a robot. It does not give joy. Every morning it is the same, every evening it is the same – tomorrow will be simply another carbon copy of today.

How can you feel like rejoicing? Every day is bringing you nearer to the end. Death will come and erase you just the way people go and write their names on the beach, their signatures, and a wave comes and erases it all.

Death comes and erases you completely as if you had never been here. Do you know how many people have been here? Each person is sitting on the corpses of at least ten persons. Every inch of the earth has been a graveyard.

(The Sword And The Lotus)