Pythagoras, The golden verses of Pythagoras, Vol. 1 Philosophia Perennis Chapter 10: Bliss Beyond All Duality, Question 5

The fifth question

Question 5

CAN YOU PLEASE SPEAK UPON WHAT IT MEANS AND HOW TO BE TOTALLY YOURSELF? MY MIND IS FIGURING OUT EXAMPLES AND SITUATIONS, BUT I DON'T KNOW.

Deva Madir,

YOU HAVE NOT LISTENED TO ME ATTENTIVELY To be oneself, to be totally yourself, needs no know-how. You are it already! It is not a question of knowing the means and the ways and the methods. It is not a question of becoming -- being is already the case!

But your mind has become so habituated to desiring, becoming, goals, future, that when I say, "Be yourself," you immediately transform it in your mind into something else. You start asking, "How to be oneself?"

I am not saying that you have to BECOME yourself: you are ALREADY it! It is not a question of 'how'. Don't ask how to become because that will lead you astray from yourself. Drop all becoming, let becoming cease. Live the moment as you are: live it as you are. Don't judge, don't evaluate. Just live the moment AS YOU ARE. If you are sad, then live the moment as sadness. And don't say that sadness is bad. The moment you say sadness is bad, you have created a contradiction. Now you are again trying NOT to be sad.

Don't condemn any state that happens to you. Live it -- in such total acceptance that there is no desire to be somebody else, something else. And out of that acceptance, GREAT understanding arises -- it is a by-product. In that understanding, many things simply disappear -- not that you have to make them disappear.

Sadness WILL disappear, anger WILL disappear, greed WILL disappear -- but it is not that you have to make them disappear. It is just by accepting yourself as you are that understanding arises -- a by-product of acceptance. And in understanding. in the light of understanding, many things simply disappear. And many things that you had never known before start appearing.

Joy appears. And it is the same energy that used to become sadness. But because now, through understanding, sadness cannot happen, the energy is available to become joy; it can move to a higher realm. The same energy that was anger becomes compassion. And the same energy that was greed and lust and possessiveness and jealousy now becomes love and sharing.

But these things HAPPEN. You are not to DO them -- if you do them you have not understood me at all.

I have to use words, the same words that you use. But I have to use them with new meanings. And listen to the meaning very carefully, and listen to the new association. Otherwise I will say one thing, you will understand another thing.

A girl rushed into a police station, her clothes torn and dishevelled. "Help me, help me! " she said. "I have been graped!"

"Graped?" said the police officer. "Surely you mean raped?"

"No, graped -- there was a whole bunch of them."

Either I have to use words like 'graped'... but then you will not understand. I have to use words that you have been using but you have been using with a particular meaning. I have to change the meaning. I have to give new colour to old words. I have to go on giving them new shape, new significance.

Please, when I use words remember with what significance I am using them. The significance is more important; the word is only a carrier -- the carrier of a new significance. That's why you have to listen VERY attentively. Otherwise it is not very difficult: you can listen to my words, attention is not needed -- but that is not listening, that is only hearing. You can hear me very easily, but to listen you will have to be very alert, aware, attentive. You will have to be TOTALLY with me.

I am not saying, "Become yourself." I am saying, "Drop becoming, and you ARE yourself." What else can you be?

Madir, you say: CAN YOU PLEASE SPEAK UPON WHAT IT MEANS AND HOW TO BE TOTALLY YOURSELF?

You ARE totally yourself, you just don't accept it. You go on rejecting. Drop rejections -- because whenever you reject anything that rejected part in you becomes sour, bitter, becomes a wound. And those wounds are the problem -- those are rejected parts of your being. You have denied them expression; they are boiling to express themselves. And they go on accumulating inside you and they are driving you mad.

You go on keeping a face on the surface -- deep down you are mad. Allow them, they are also part of you, an essential part of you. That allowing is of tremendous importance.

That's why, in this commune, I have arranged for many psychotherapies. They will be misunderstood by the masses, BOUND to be misunderstood -- because in a psychotherapeutic situation you have to bring all the denied parts to the surface.

If somebody has been denying his anger, it has to be allowed in a psychotherapeutic situation. Only then can psychotherapy be of any help -- can it be therapeutic, can it heal you. It has to open all your wounds: much pus starts flowing.

If you watch the encounter group you will feel sick. You will feel sick because you will see such animality coming out; you could never have imagined that human beings can be such animals. But that animality is within you too, just repressed. By repression you cannot dissolve it.

In the encounter group -- that is the meaning of the word 'encounter' -- you have to encounter yourself in your totality. You have to bring out all that is repressed; you have to bring out all -- without any evaluation about what is good, what is bad. And suddenly you see great animals roaring inside you. They are violent, and you have been taught to be non-violent. Your non-violence has repressed your violence.

Great rage, for NO reason at all, will arise. You will start beating the wall; you may start beating yourself. And you will say, "What am I doing? I have never done it before. From where is it coming?" But it is coming in great surges, in great waves. And the whole process is to let it be.

And when all the parts have been expressed -- your sex, your anger, your greed, your jealousy, your rage -- when all parts have been expressed, a great calmness arises, the silence that follows the storm.

This cannot be understood by the masses. In fact they are very much on their guard. They don't want to understand either -- because to understand means they will have to look within, and they will find the same things inside themselves.

But if you go on keeping these things inside yourself, you will remain always in a kind of disease. This is what your society has given to you -- your society has made you a very ill person. This whole society is pathological. And whenever a pathology is social you never become aware of it, because everybody else is suffering from the same thing.

To be total means: think of yourself as if you are the first man -- you are Adam or you are Eve -- and you have not yet met any priest and you have not yet met any puritan. You have not yet met any Morarji Desai. Nobody has told you how to be, what to be. Think of yourself as the first man or the first woman, and accept -- because there is no other way of transcendence than acceptance.

Buddha called it 'suchness' -- TATHATA. Accept it: if God has given you these things, there must be a meaning in them. They must be seeds of some unknown flowers -- they have to be used. In the soil of acceptance those seeds fall, disappear, and great trees of understanding arise, and millions of flowers of ecstasy, of joy, of celebration.

You say, Madir: MY MIND IS FIGURING OUT EXAMPLES AND SITUATIONS, BUT I DON'T KNOW.

What examples? What situations? If your mind is figuring out from the very beginning, that means you are planning how to be. And any planning is against acceptance.

You are not to plan, you are not to figure it out. You have just to uncover yourself. You have to face yourself in your nudity.

We have become so much afraid of nudity. Spiritual nudity, physical nudity, psychological nudity -- we have become so much afraid of nudity that we are hiding. Physical nudity through clothes, psychological nudity through words, theories, scriptures, and spiritual nudity through ideals, great ideals -- God, nirvana, enlightenment. And we go on hiding and hiding and hiding....

Come out of your hiding-places, come out of these caves. Come into the open sun, in the wind, in the rain. You are beautiful as you are. You are perfect as you are. God never makes imperfect beings -- he cannot. Out of perfection, only perfection is born.

This is what I teach to you: total acceptance.

Pythagoras

VOL. 1, PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS

Chapter-10

Bliss Beyond All Duality