“When your senses are unable to see… even then you are a witness. And to perceive the inner witness the senses are not needed.”
In order to listen to yourself there is no need to turn your ears inwards; all that is needed is that the ears stop hearing the outer. Once the contact with the network of soundwaves is broken, once the ears are indifferent to the outer and the energy that was moving out stops, then the same energy will be able to hear the sound of the inner on its own. To hear this sound ears are not needed at all. All that is meant by reversing the senses is that the senses do not move outwards, their energy does not move outwards. […]
Bayazid, a Sufi mystic, used to tell a story that his master gave a pigeon each to three young men and asked them to kill it at a place where no one could see it. One of the youths came back within five minutes after killing the pigeon. He had just walked to a nearby street which was empty, with nobody around, strangled it by its neck and came back.
The second youth came back after three days. He had made a deeper search for a place where nobody could see him killing the pigeon. So he found a deep cave, went in and closed the entrance behind him with a rock. Now there was no way for anybody to walk in, even accidentally. There was a deep darkness inside the cave; even if somebody happened to enter, he wouldn’t be able to see anything. There he strangled the pigeon by its neck.
The third youth returned after three months with a live pigeon.
The master asked him, “Couldn’t you find any place, even in three months, where there was nobody?”
The youth replied, “It is not possible to find such a place even in three lifetimes. For three months I tried hard. I went into the deepest caves, it was dark – but even there I was present, the pigeon was present, and we two would be witnessing the killing. Even if I closed the eyes of the pigeon, I, the murderer, would be seeing it, no matter how dark the place was.”
Bayazid said, “Out of the three, only you will be able to discover yourself. The other two do not have any thirst for the inner search yet.”
He sent the two young men back and said to the third one, “You have at least this much awareness – that when even your senses are unable to see, when there is no light at all, even then you are a witness. And to perceive the inner witness the senses are not needed.”
Osho, The Message Beyond Words – A Dialogue with the Lord of Death, Discourses on the Kathopanishad, Ch 9 (excerpt, translated from Hindi)
Featured image by Vivek Doshi on Unsplash
Series compiled by Shanti
All excerpts of this series can be found in: 1001 Tales
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