Here is the sphere of change, change, change. Through change consume change.
- Everything you can know is change — the Himalayas are still growing, the wall is a fast-moving flux of electrons, a fan spinning fast looks stationary. The only exception is the knower, but the knower can never become an object of knowledge. Self-knowledge is therefore a negative process: go on eliminating all objects until only pure knowing remains with nothing left to know — that is what meditation is.
- Escape is as futile as clinging: the two wrong responses are to cling to the changing or to flee and eliminate it. Tantra is against both — ‘Where will you escape? Everywhere there is change.’ The second half of the sutra adds the distinctive move: a third option, neither cling nor escape, but move WITH change, live it out, consume it through itself.
- Concrete instruction — the river: float without swimming, without direction, without resistance. Let the river take you entirely. When you flow with total non-conflict, suddenly you discover you are NOT the river. In fighting you forget this; in going limp you remember it. Don’t cling, don’t choose, don’t create any struggle — the river’s direction becomes your direction.
- No need to change anything — not the world (the revolutionary’s mistake: the world is already changing; he will burn out and the wheel will keep turning), not even yourself (the lesser mystic’s mistake). Tantra says: know that everything is changing, float in it, relax. With no effort directed toward a future goal, there is no tension. You are here, this moment is all.
- The revealing mechanism: when you are relaxed and making no effort, the constant change around you becomes the background and the contrast. Through that contrast the unmoving center suddenly stands out — visible. As long as you are fighting or escaping, your energy is directed outward toward change; you cannot look at the center. Relaxation IS the technique.
- Q&A clarification (Q3) — the deep application: this technique is specifically FOR man as he is, including his attachments and anxieties. Even if there is attachment, do not fight it — be attached AND simultaneously be a witness. Frustration will come — be frustrated AND be a witness. Through attachment, attachment is consumed; through frustration, frustration is consumed. Practical instruction: when miserable, close the door and be TOTALLY miserable. Do not analyze how it arose, do not think about consequences, make no effort to change it. Just be with the misery in its full intensity, without doing anything. Try to sustain it as long as you can — you will start laughing, because the center which cannot be miserable will suddenly rise above and you will see both at once: ‘I am miserable and I am not miserable’ — the same-unsame. The misery dissolves like clouds, without any act of yours. This is what ‘through change consume change’ means: through misery, misery is consumed; through anger, anger; through sex, sex. The secret is non-doing — pure witnessing presence, no manipulation.
- Q&A clarification (Q4) — floating needs no peaceful surroundings: the objection is that modern city stress makes let-go impossible. But the driver stays the same though the cart became a car — the tension is your own reaction, not the environment, so escaping to a quiet village fails (within days you are bored and restless again). Don’t rearrange the outer; drop the reactive attitude and relax totally — then even traffic noise fits into a harmonious whole and becomes music. The cause is always within you.