Chapter title:
10 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Archive code: 8002105 ShortTitle: WITHME10 Audio:
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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]
In my vision virtue has nothing to do with morality. A virtuous man is beyond the moral and immoral. A virtuous man is not calculative. He acts spontaneously, not out of certain principles. The moral man acts out of certain principles given by tradition, by scriptures, given by others. The moral man is an imitator, he is 1/08/07
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pseudo. He is trying hard to be a saint. But you can never be a saint by trying too hard, because the very strain creates tension in your being. And a tense saint is not a saint at all.
Relaxation, a total let-go, is a must. the real saint does not strive to be something, he simply relaxes, he accepts himself, whatsoever he is. He rejoices in it, and in that very rejoicing he becomes a saint.
Virtue means spontaneity. We have been told what to do and what not to do, we have not been told how to remain natural. A thousand and one things have been imposed upon us.
My work here is to help you to find your nature, that which you brought with you into the world. All that has been given by others has to be put aside. Only that which you brought with you at birth has to be helped, nourished, taken care of, so that you can be spontaneous again like a child, so that you can act out of the moment. That is true responsibility: the capacity to respond to the moment, not according to some set formula, not according to some ready-made ideology. It is the way of the stupid person to act out of ready-made ideologies.
The wise person acts out of awareness. He is fully alert in the moment, he makes himself available to the moment, he responds to the moment. And something transpires between him and existence -- and that is beautiful, that is virtue.
Love is the message of god. We all bring the message to the world but we forget it on the way. The way is long, falling and falling and falling from the heavenly abode and reaching the earth -- it is such a long journey. Then one forgets everything. One forgets why one has come at all, from where. what is one's purpose in life? Everything becomes a confusion and a chaos.
The function of the master is to remind you that you have a purpose to fulfil. Everybody comes with a destiny, everybody comes to attain to some meaning and to contribute some beauty to the world.
Love is the most essential message that everybody brings in his own way. It has to be delivered in different ways. somebody will deliver it through music, and somebody through a dance, and somebody through singing, and so on, so forth. But the essential message is love, because love is the bridge between god and man. It is through moving more and more into love that one comes closer and closer to god. When one has become love itself one has come back home.
Man can only have any contact with god through meditation, there is no other way, because it is only in meditation that you melt, that you merge into the whole. And god is not a person. God simply symbolises the whole, the totality, the totality of all: the stars, the sun, the moon, the people, the animals, the trees, the earth, and all that is. God is only a symbol, a very loving symbol and very significant too. But it is not a person, it is only a presence. When you are silent,
in deep meditation, you start feeling a presence surrounding you and surrounding the trees and the mountains and the stars and the people... a subtle aura of light, a subtle aura of aliveness. The whole existence is bubbling with life, radiating joy. It is a continuum of celebration. It is a dance that never begins and never ends, a song that goes on and on and on.
The moment you start feeling it, there is nothing else to do but to be grateful, to bow down to the infinity of existence, to the mystery of existence and to the great gift that it has given to you. That you are --
this is the gift, the most precious gift. That you are alive, that you can see the stars and the sun and the moon, that you can hear music, that you can touch people and feel the warmth, that you can love and be loved.…
Life is such a great opportunity but we are so ungrateful. Our ungratefulness arises out of a certain state.
That state is what is known as mind.
Mind is ungrateful, ungenerous. It is very reluctant to say yes to anything, to give thanks for anything. It lives on the negative. It is very efficient at saying no, it is very efficient at condemning, complaining, but it cannot praise. It is absolutely impotent as far as praise is concerned.
Praise arises in you only when you have put the mind aside and you start functioning from the heart.
That is meditation. Moving from the head to the heart is meditation. and then god is felt, the presence becomes almost tangible. And one cannot avoid it, one has to consecrate oneself to that presence, one has to surrender to that presence, one has to be overwhelmed, possessed, taken away.
Meditation needs great work. It is arduous, it is an uphill task. To remain non- meditative is easy in a way. You have not to do anything about it, you are already non-meditative, everybody is born non-meditative. But to become meditative really needs great courage, great determination, great patience, because to go beyond the mind is the most complicated phenomenon. We don't know anything except the 1/08/07
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mind. Even when we think about going beyond it, it is the mind that is thinking. Even when we try to go beyond it, it is the mind that is trying to go beyond itself. and how can the mind go beyond itself -- that is the complexity. It is like pulling yourself up by your shoestrings. You cannot pull yourself up by your shoestrings.
But there are methods, devices, which can be of immense help. They are all indirect. Meditation cannot be forced. anything forced will be nothing but a product of the mind. Mind is very coercive. Mind is nazi, it is fascist, it is violent. So meditation can come only when you slip out of the mind without any coercion, naturally, spontaneously.
An the device, the greatest device ever used is witnessing. Just watch your thoughts. Whenever you have time just close your eyes and see thoughts and desires and memories moving on the screen of the mind. Be totally unconcerned. Don't judge that this is right and that is wrong. If you judge you have already jumped in. If you say 'This is right,' you have already chosen something, and the moment you choose you become identified with it, you have become attached to it. You would not like it to go, you would like to keep it for yourself. And when you say that something is bad you are pushing it away, you are avoiding it, you don't want it any more. You don't want it even to be there on the screen; hence you have started fighting, struggling, and you have forgotten witnessing in all this.
Just to be a witness: one sits on the bank of a river and watches the river flow by. There is nothing to judge, nothing really to say, but only to see.
And if one is patient enough, slowly slowly the traffic becomes thin. Less and less do thoughts come on the screen and sometimes for moments there is nothing on the screen and you are facing an empty screen.
Those are the most precious moments of life, those intervals when thoughts are not there, you are simply there. The seer is there with nothing to see.
Those are the moments of purity, innocence, those are the moments which can be called divine. They are no more human. You have transcended humanity in those
moments. Slowly slowly those moments become bigger and bigger, and one day it becomes such a simple process that whenever you want to you can go into that interval, into that thoughtlessness.
Fully aware yet thoughtless -- that is meditation. And that is the only thing that can liberate you from all kinds of bondages, that can bring peace to you, and bliss and god and truth.
Grace is never human, it is always divine. It is the beyond penetrating the gross planes of existence. It is matter penetrated by spirit. When matter becomes penetrated by the spirit it becomes luminous. That luminosity is grace, that aura is grace. Grace belongs to the beyond, to the eternal.
The mind lives in time, in the temporal. The mind knows nothing of grace. It is ugly to the very core, it is mean, it can't be otherwise. a mind generous? -- that is an impossibility. A mind gracious? -- that is no possible in the nature of things.
When the mind gives space for the beyond to penetrate, when a ray comes from the sun, from the very source of light and stirs your heart and stirs your dormant energies into dynamic forces, grace arises. You become utterly beautiful. It is a beauty that is not of the earth, a beauty that belongs to heaven -- the beauty of paradise.
Earthly beauty is a very momentary phenomenon: one day it is there, the next day gone. It is a soap bubble. it looks beautiful in the sunrays, and if the sunrays are penetrating the soap bubble it can have a little rainbow around it, it can look very colourful. But a soap bubble is a soap bubble after all, and soon it will be gone. You can't catch hold of it. So is the case with physical beauty.
Grace is divine beauty. Once achieved it is yours forever, it abides, it becomes your very nature.
It is only through meditation that one becomes graceful, there is no other way, because meditation is the only way through which we can transcend mind, through which we can put the mind aside. it is the strategy, the technique, of putting the mind aside, of turning the mind off. Once you have learned how to turn the mind off, something of immense splendour starts descending on you from all directions. You become suffused with god. That's grace.
Meditation means become aware that 'I am not the mind.' We are identified with
the mind, we don't think of ourselves as separate from it. We are separate, but we are so close to the mind that slowly slowly we forget the separation and we start functioning as if we are minds. That creates suffering, because nothing happens to us, everything happens to the mind. Happiness, unhappiness, success, failure, birth, death --
everything happens to the mind, nothing happens to us. We are always beyond happening.
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So when we become identified with the mind, if there is success we are too excited. If there is failure we are so down. If death is coming closer we are so frightened, so miserable. If suddenly money arrives unexpectedly there is great euphoria. But all these things are happening to the mind and you are getting affected unnecessarily.
Meditation means creating a distance between you and the mind so that you are no more affected by it.
things will go on happening but you will remain simply a watcher. And to be just a watcher is a great freedom. To be just a watcher and nothing else makes one enlightened. When the watching has settled so deeply that nothing disturbs it, nothing distracts you from it, then you have achieved that which is worth achieving. You are victorious, you have become a master of yourself.
Then life has a totally different beauty, a totally different grace. It has a divine aura around it. It is sheer bliss, pure peace, a tremendous light which is inexhaustible. Then you may not have anything in the world but you are a king or a queen, because the kingdom of god is yours!
Mind is a hoarder of bitterness. It collects sounds, hurts, insults. It goes on sulking over them for years.
Psychologists are very aware of the fact that something said when you were only four years old may have hurt you so much that it is still there like a wound, still oozing pus. You don't allow it to be healed.
You go on fingering the wound so you make it hurt again and again, again and again you create it, never giving it an opportunity to be healed by itself. If we look at our mind, it is nothing but wounds and wounds.
Hence life becomes a hell; we collect only thorns.
A man may have been loving to you for years, he may have been compassionate, kind and everything, and he says just one thing which hurts you, and years of love and friendship disappear. That one thing becomes important, weighs more than all that he has done. You will forget all his love and his friendship and all his sacrifices for you. You will remember that one thing -- and you would like to take revenge.
This is the way of the mind. Mind functions in a very ugly way. It has no grace. Go beyond the mind and you go beyond all bitterness. And the more you surpass the mind, the more your life becomes sweet, as sweet as honey.
Meditation is sweet, mind is bitter. Move from mind to meditation. Surpass mind. don't be controlled and dominated by the mind; be a master. Then mind is perfectly good, then you can use it. Once you know what meditation is, once you know how you can be without the mind, you can use the mind and mind cannot use you. That is the moment when the gestalt changes inside, when the rebellion happens, when the fragrance is released.
Meditation is a sword. It cuts off your head completely. It cuts your mind entirely. As far as mind is concerned, meditation is a death, the death of the mind. But as far as you are concerned, it is a birth; you are born. So the sword has a double function. So on the one hand the sword kills the false, on the other hand it gives birth to the true, to the real.
By meditation I mean awareness.
In the West meditation has a different connotation. At the most, at the best, it means contemplation. In the East it is totally different. It does not mean contemplation at all. It is not concentration, it is not contemplation -- because it is not thinking at all.
Concentration is thinking in a focussed, centred way, thinking on a particular object, not going astray here and there, remaining with one object for a long period. and contemplation means that the object is not concrete but abstract; for example, love or truth or god. so you cannot concentrate as you can concentrate on the flame of a lamp, but you can contemplate. You can go on moving in a subtle way around the abstract subject but you don't go away from it, you remain close by. You look at all the sides, all the aspects of it; all the aspects of love, all the possibilities of love, all the meanings of love. You remain in that climate of love.
that is contemplation.
But meditation is going out of the mind, it is transcending the mind, it is becoming a witness to the mind. One simply watches whatsoever goes on in the mind. One is neither for nor against. One has no evaluation. One does not want to stop it either, one does not want to remain with a certain object or certain idea. One is not interested. One is cool, aloof, unconcerned, as if one is standing by the side of the road and the traffic is going by. In just the same way you are sitting by the side of the road and the traffic of the mind goes by and you are absolutely unconcerned.
That unconcernedness is meditation. and in that unconcernedness sooner or later mind disappears, because mind can exist only through your co-operation. If you are cold, unconcerned, aloof, your 1/08/07
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co-operation has disappeared. You are no more nourishing the mind, you are no more supporting it. It has lost all its support. It may continue for a time out of the past momentum, but sooner or later the momentum is lost and the mind stops.
That stopping of the mind is meditation. And that is really a sword, it cuts off the mind completely, it makes you headless. But it gives birth to a new heart, to a new being, to a new soul.
That's the whole process of sannyas. Sannyas is a sword. it is a death and a
resurrection.
Meditation means a state of no-mind. It is the art of slipping out of the mind.
We are encaged in the mind, we are constantly surrounded by memories, thoughts, desires. It is a crowd, a big crowd. Although you feel suffocated you know nothing about how to get of this crowd, because wherever you go the crowd follows you. It is within you so you cannot escape from it. Even in your dreams it is there, even sleep is not a way to escape from it.
In sleep you escape from the world; you escape from your wife, your husband, your children, your office, your boss; you escape from everything -- but you cannot escape from your mind. the mind continues, in fact it becomes louder than ever. It occupies your sleep totally, so totally that it looks as if your dreams are real.
Meditation is nothing but the simple art of slipping out of the mind, just like the snake slips out of its old skin. It is a simple phenomenon. It looks difficult in the beginning because we have forgotten it. For centuries we have not been in contact with the art, but once you learn the knack of it, it is very simple.
It is like swimming: one who does not know it thinks it is very difficult, obviously. He feels so afraid of the deep waters and the danger. How can he believe that swimming is a very simple phenomenon? It is very simple, so simple that a Japanese scientist has been able to teach six-month-old kids how to swim. And he is now trying to teach three-month-old kids how to swim, and he hopes that he will succeed.
I perfectly agree with him, he will succeed, because the child in the mother's womb remains swimming in liquid for nine months. the liquid in which the child swims in the mother's womb is exactly the same as sea water. It is sea water, all the chemicals are in the same proportion. So if he can survive that for nine months and does not drown or anything... it seems that it will be possible to teach three-month-old kids to swim. it is a simple art.
Meditation is also as simple as that.
Terry has two meanings One comes from Latin; the Latin root means soft, tender, smooth. Meditation can grow only if you are soft, tender, feminine. Meditation is a feminine phenomenon, it is not masculine.
You cannot conquer it, you cannot be aggressive about it. You have to be very very open, receptive, like a womb. You have to be vulnerable, available to existence in deep trust, in love, so that existence can start taking possession of you. That's what meditation is in its ultimate sense. The individual disappears and the universal remains. The ego is found no more, you are one with the whole.
And the second meaning comes from Irish; in Irish it means like a tall tower. Meditation is like a tall tower too. It is the highest peak. There is nothing taller than that, nothing higher than that. It reaches to the very sky, it penetrates the beyond.
We are not minds. We are neither the body nor the mind, we are a third phenomenon: we are the witness of it all. We are the watchers of both the body and the mind. When you are hungry you are not hungry, the body is hungry; you are only a watcher. But you become identified with the body, then you say 'I am hungry.' In fact you should say 'I am watching that the body is hungry', then you are literally stating the truth.
When you say 'I am angry', again you are making the same mistake. It is the mind which is full of anger, you are the watcher. You should say 'I can see that the mind is full of anger, that the mind is full of lust, that the mind is full of greed, that the mind is in a turmoil or at peace -- but I am always the watcher.'
To know this watcher is to be free, liberated from all limitations. The whole process of meditation can be reduced to the single word 'watch'. That's why Jesus uses the word so much. Again and again he says: Watch, be watchful, be alert.
Slowly slowly get out of all identifications so that you can be a pure consciousness. The purity of consciousness, that innocence, brings god to you. It becomes the merger, the melting with the whole.
One in that innocence can we know. Mind knows nothing. It is full of garbage, full of knowledge but knows nothing. The witness has no knowledge but knows. Its knowing is of a totally different category, of a different plane. It sees. It is not like information, it is not borrowed. It is one's own. And when you see the 1/08/07
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truth it liberates. Only your own truth can liberate you.
God has no form, hence he cannot manifest in all forms. If he had a particular form then the whole manifestation would be impossible.
God is not separate from his creation. He is one with it, he is the very living spirit of it all. In the trees he is green, in the roses he is red, in the rock he is a rock. All these forms are his. It is possible only because he has no form of his own. He is very liquid, very flexible. Hence this multi-dimensional existence is possible.
He is you in you, he is me in me, and yet he is not confined to any form. He takes all forms but remains beyond the forms.
One comes to know this as one goes deeper into meditation. The deeper you go, the farther away you are from your own body. The body has form, a fixed form, and when you go far into meditation, you know you are not the body, so that form disappears. It is no more yours. It is the form of the house you are abiding in.
Go a little deeper still and the mind is also left very very far behind. and all the forms of the mind --
memory, thought, imagination -- they also start disappearing into the distance. Now you know you are not the mind either. You are only a pure witness, a seer, or rather, only the capacity to see, a seeing, a consciousness. and then you suddenly become aware that consciousness has no form, it is formless.
Knowing one's consciousness, one comes to know that this is going to be the case with the whole too. If my consciousness is formless then the consciousness that permeates the whole existence is bound to be formless. Hence I say that although god is indefinable, if one persists, insists on defining him, then this definition comes closest to the truth, that he is formlessness. and this is the goal of all meditators to attain, an experience of their own formlessness.
The day it is achieved one becomes a Buddha, a Christ. Then one is no more a
mortal. One becomes immortal, one becomes a god.
The rock represents strength, stability, eternity. It defies changes, it defies time, it persists. It has a deep perseverance. Everything else goes on changing but the rock remains the same. the trees change, people change -- people come and go, children are born and old men die -- but the rock remains the same. It is the most stable thing in ordinary existence. It represents something of god, the eternity of god. It is not accidental that the first images of god were made of rock, just to symbolise the fact that god is unchanging, that god is beyond time.
Everything else is a flux. don't make your house on sands because then you will suffer, you will fall into darkness. don't try to make your signature on water, because even before you are finished it will have disappeared. So is the case with time.
Time means change; and one has to go beyond time to know that which is always the same, that which abides. Only in that can we have real shelter, only in god is our security.
Meditation is a way to go beyond time... because time is part of the mind. When you move away from the mind you move away from time. the moment mind stops, the clock stops, time disappears. Hours can pass and you will not feel that anything has passed. When one is really in meditation time leaves no trace --
as if nothing has changed, nothing has passed. Everything else outside has changed, but because you are in a state of no-time you cannot see any change. When you come back to the mind of course you will see the changes, but now you know a deep centre within yourself which is always beyond time. And you can always move there to rest, to relax, to be rejuvenated.
That point is beyond death too. In India we have the same word for death and time, because time leads to death. Time is basically death, it is not life. To know life one has to know that which is not time. And once you have tasted something of timelessness within yourself, you know that you are not going to die. the fear, the anxiety, the trembling disappears. Then life starts again with a new vigour, with a new ecstasy and euphoria. That is true birth.
Monika is a beautiful word. It has two meanings; one comes from Greek, the other from Latin. Although the sources are very different they seem to be two aspects of the same coin.
The first meaning that comes from the Greek root is alone, aloneness. Remember, it does not mean loneliness. Loneliness is a negative state. You are missing the other, you are miserable, you are empty.
aloneness has nothing to do with the other. You are rejoicing in your being, you are happy being alone; it is a positive state. You are full of your own presence, so full that nothing else is needed, nobody else is needed, just to be is sheer joy. That is aloneness.
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And the other meaning comes from Latin; it is wisdom. Wisdom arises only out of aloneness, there is not other way for it to arise. Only a man who is capable of being alone becomes wise. Being alone is the whole process of meditation. And the ultimate result, the end result, is wisdom.
Discretion is a by-product of meditation. as you become more and more silent you become capable of seeing what is right and what is wrong. If you are not silent then you have to depend on others. They tell you -- the priests, the politicians, the parents -- what is right and what is wrong. And of course nobody else can decide it for you. Any decision imposed on you by others cripples your freedom, destroys your integrity.
You may have a respectable life following others but you cannot have a true life, you cannot live authentically, sincerely. When you have your own insight into right and wrong then it is a totally different matter. Then there is no struggle against the wrong and no effort to do the right. It happens naturally because you know it is right. If you know then it is natural, if others tell you what is right then it is imposed, unnatural. and to be unnatural is to lose all grace, all beauty.
My effort here is to help you attain your own insight into things, your own awareness, so that you need not depend on anybody else. Dependence is bad; it is a form of slavery, it is against our intrinsic being. Our intrinsic being can bloom only in freedom.
There is one sky outside, there is another inside -- and unless we are acquainted with the sky inside our acquaintance with the sky outside is very superficial.
Only by knowing the inner space do we know the outer. the inner is the foundation. The outer is just a flowering, the inner has the roots. The outer depends on the inner. The outer is just a circumference, the inner is the centre. And just as the outer sky is vast, infinite, so is the inner, but more vast, more infinite.
Meditation is the only way to be acquainted with it. Meditation is nothing but the process of turning in.
We are looking outside, we have become focussed. We have to learn to look in. We have to relax. Our muscles have become tense, have become rigid; they have to be made flexible. Our necks are paralysed because for lives we have been looking outside; hence we have lost he capacity to turn in. Otherwise it is a simple process. Meditation is not anything difficult, it is very simple. Even a child can do it. A child can do it more easily than a grown-up person because the grown-up person becomes more fixated on the outside, he becomes more obsessed with the outside.
By becoming a sannyasin you are taking a decisive step in your life. The most significant step that one can take is to decide that 'Now I will explore into my inner being, who I am.' And that begins a great journey, a great pilgrimage towards the ultimate.
(To a ten-year-old)
Vinod... is one of the most beautiful names. It means laughter! Learn to laugh.… and don't be a miser in it.
Laughter is your meditation. Laugh for any reason... or for no reason.
Just the other day I was reading the autobiography of a famous author. He writes about his small son, his three-year-old son, who got into the habit of saying to everybody and anybody 'Shut up!' He loved it so much that he became a nuisance. The teachers from the school complained that he would suddenly start shouting 'Shut up!' And the family started becoming embarrassed because to invite anybody home was dangerous. He might come any time and for no reason at all simply shout at the person 'Shut up!'
So one day the father called him and told him, 'You enjoy it, we know, but it is creating embarrassing situations for us. So please learn one thing: whenever the urge arises in you to say 'Shut up!', say to yourself
'Shut up!' inside... no need to tell anybody. So your urge will be fulfilled and there will be no problem.'
So for two or three days the father and the mother watched: the boy would sit somewhere and suddenly would start gigging. so they became puzzled about what was happening. They asked 'Now what new thing have you started?'
He said, 'This is so beautiful! When the urge arises in me to say 'Shut up,' and I say 'shut up!' nobody is annoyed and nobody is irritated and nobody becomes angry at me. I start giggling because I am deceiving everybody. Nobody knows what I am doing!'
So learn to giggle and deceive everybody. Don't be worried about what they are thinking. right?
It is meditation that is the ultimate experience of life. It crowns you, there is nothing higher than it. It is 1/08/07
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through meditation that Jesus becomes a Christ and Siddhartha Gautama becomes a Buddha. It is through meditation that people have known their inner kingdom, the inexhaustible treasures of their being. They have come to know their truth, their consciousness, their bliss, satchidanand. But it all happens through meditation. There is no other way for it to happen, there is no alternative to meditation.
Meditation means becoming silent, still, thoughtless but fully aware. Meditation can be reduced to a small definition: no mind and all awareness.
Right now there is no awareness and all mind. Right now one hundred per cent is mind and zero per cent is awareness. We have to change the whole phenomenon:
we have to bring awareness to one hundred per cent and mind to zero per cent. then one becomes an emperor. Then you know that this whole existence is yours, that all the stars are yours. Then there is no need to possess anything, it is already yours. There is no need to desire anything, it is already given to you. The whole existence is given to you as a gift; but we have not been able to recognise it yet. We have no yet been able to see what has been given to us: the life, the love, the joy. We are concerned about small, mundane things and wasting our time, life, energy.
Meditation brings into focus the reality of who you are and what your really possess. Knowing it, all misery, all anxiety disappears. Knowing it, one is freed from all darkness, one becomes light itself. That is the crowning process.
Meditation opens the door of all the mysteries. Meditation makes you aware that you are not a mortal, you are immortal. It makes you aware that you are not separate from the whole, that you are part of it... not only part of it but that you are the whole. Meditation is the highest peak; hence we call Jesus the crowned one or Buddha the crowned one.
Their crown is not the ordinary crown of ordinary kings. Their kingdom is not of the ordinary, their kingdom is of the sacred, of the inner, of the divine. and that's what is meant by being initiated into sannyas.
Now the search for your real being, for your authentic being begins.
And by meditation I mean a state of no-mind, a state of no-thought, of pure awareness, of a mirror reflecting nothing, just an empty mirror. The empty mirror is exactly the right symbol for meditation. One can become an empty mirror if by watching one's thoughts, one slowly slowly drops them. In fact the more efficient you become in watching your thoughts, the more and more they disappear of their own accord.
One day it happens that there is no thought inside you, there is utter silence: no ripples, no waves in your consciousness, nothing is reflected and you are fully alert, no asleep either. That is the day when one becomes the crowned one.
Let that be the goal from now onwards. That is the target. It has to be fulfilled in this life, and it can be fulfilled. It is our birthright, we just have not claimed it.
Meditation is the technique of inner conquest -- and that is the real challenge.
Those who have any guts should accept the inner challenge. It is easy to reach the moon, it is easy to reach Everest; it is far more difficult to reach your own centre. But the moment you reach it all ecstasy is yours, and forever and forever.
You attain to a bliss which cannot be taken away from you.
Jesus calls it the kingdom of god. The moment you enter into it you are a king, it is your kingdom; you are a god.
It has two meanings because it can either be derived from Latin roots or from Teutonic roots. Through Latin it means a queen, through the Teutonic it means pure, purified, purity. Both are beautiful.
It is through an inner process of purity that one really becomes a king or a queen. We are born to be kings and queens. It is really very sad to see the earth full of beggars; poor beggars, rich beggars, but all beggars. They have money, they have palaces, but their souls are still begging, they are still asking for more. to ask for more is to be a beggar. To be contented with whatsoever is available is to be a king or a queen. But before one can attain to that contentment one has to pass through a process of purification, because the society contaminates us. It does not only contaminate the air, the water, the rivers, the lakes, the ocean; it contaminates more than that; it contaminates the mind -- and its contamination of the mind is far more dangerous because we are very close to the mind. and the mind affects the soul, the mind starts being reflected in the soul. The soul has to live through the mind, it has to use the mind as a vehicle. Although the soul can never be contaminated, because of its deep association with the mind it almost becomes contaminated. By the process of purification I mean one has to drop all that one has learned, because truth can never be learned. So whatsoever you have learned is untrue. One has to drop all the scriptures, because 1/08/07
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truth can never be expressed in words, and whatsoever is expressed in words is no more true. to be really purified one has to get rid of all kinds of ideologies. They are poisonous, they destroy your innocence. And it is only in innocence that one comes across god.
Purity means innocence, the innocence of a child, the innocence of a flower, the innocence of the dewdrops in the early sun -- that freshness.
Purity does not mean that one has to become a saint, and one has to eat this and not eat that, and one has to sleep at a certain hour, and do certain rituals and has to do five prayers every day, five times. Those are all rituals. They don't make you pure, in fact they are the causes of your impurity.
Your saints, the so-called saints are the most impure people in the world. Of course from the outside they seem to be utterly sacred, but deep down they are boiling because their whole process of life is repressive, and nobody becomes pure by repressing. It is repression that makes you impure. To be pure means to drop all repressive methods, all taboos. Come out of all that nonsense that society has imposed upon you. Purity means a process of de-hypnotisation.
The society has hypnotised you in a certain way. Every society does that; the society depends on hypnosis. The church, the temple, the religious education -- these are all methods of hypnotising people, of conditioning their minds, of destroying their capacity to discover truth. Giving them ready-made conclusions destroys their greatest joy of life. They will never be able to discover the truth on their own, and unless you discover the truth on your own it cannot liberate you. Somebody else's truth is never your truth, can never be your truth. Somebody else's truth is a lie for you. Somebody else's truth is going to create a bondage for you. It is only your truth that liberates.
So getting rid of all this rubbish that the society goes on pouring into every psyche is what I call meditation. Meditation is a process of de-hypnosis, of unconditioning the mind and leaving a person in a state of pure innocence.
When one can function from a state of not-knowing, god is closest. when one can unlearn all that one knows and can say 'I know nothing' -- not only say it but feel in every fibre of one's being 'I know nothing,'
-- one has become a child again. Now one's eyes will again see the wonder that surrounds us, the splendour that is all over the place. That wonder, that splendour, is the first indication of god's presence. there is no other proof, and there is no need for any other proof. This existence is proof enough, but our eyes are so full of knowledge that we have lost all contact with existence.
Our eyes have to be cleaned again.
Meditation takes you into a virgin territory, into the unknown, into absolute purity. Only meditation is capable of becoming a boat to the further shore. and meditation is the only phenomenon which cannot be contaminated by words. Virginity is intrinsic to it, purity is its very soul. You cannot make it impure, that is impossible.
By meditation I mean a state of no-mind. Mind is always corrupt because mind is cunning. We call it cleverness... it is nothing but cunningness, a good name for cunningness. Mind is very political, diplomatic, tricky, always trying to deceive -
- not only others, but you too. It is a double-edged sword, it cuts both ways: it deceives people, it deceives you. It is deception incarnate.
Until we get out of the mind we don't know what being virgin means. When I use the word 'virgin' I am not using it in any sexual sense, I am using it in its highest spiritual meaning. A real virgin is one who is deep in meditation, utterly still and silent; not even a single thought passes by. When there is no thought, no traffic of thoughts, then you are pure. Thoughts are like dust; they gather on the mirror of the mind.
When the mind is without dust it becomes no-mind. and no-mind is virgin. And god can be experienced only in profound purity. Even if a slight impurity remains in you, that means that a little part of your being remains dark, ugly, unconscious, and that will be the hindrance between you and god.
Total purity is needed to create the bridge.
Meditation is the art of discovering the light within, the art of digging inwards, the art of penetrating your own soul. It is one of the most difficult arts int he world because it hurts to go in. All your interests are on the outside, and when you go in many interests have to be sacrificed. All your life is extrovert, and when you go in you have to find time, space for the inward journey.
It also hurts because when you dig inside you have to throw much garbage out of your being; and there are layers and layers of garbage inside. It has been accumulating for many lives. It has almost become part of you, it clings to you, and you have to cut it out and throw it away from you. It feels as if you are cutting 1/08/07
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your own limbs, hence it hurts.
It also hurts because as you start digging into your own being you don't suddenly come to the kingdom of god. It is like digging a well: first you come across rocks, all kinds of rubbish that has gathered; the earth is very hard and there seems to be no hope of any water anywhere, you don't see any signs... But you go on dipping. Slowly slowly softer layers are found, then muddy waters. If you go on digging then one day you will stumble upon the sources of fresh water streams, but it is a long process.
Meditation is the only way, remember it, the only way to know oneself, to discover oneself, to know the truth of life. In short meditation simply means becoming aware of your body-mind complex, becoming unattached, unidentified with the body-mind complex, becoming a witness.
When you have achieved that point of witnessing, with no attachment and no identification, you have learned the art. then you have the right means to enter into yourself. Then nobody can hinder you, no power can hinder you from knowing your own inner being. Without knowing it, life is meaningless. The moment you know it life becomes tremendously significant. It is all splendour, all music.
Meditation is the only force that can turn evil away. It attracts the good like a magnet and it repels evil.
Meditation is like a it candle: it dispels darkness. Evil is nothing but darkness, it has no positive existence.
It's exactly like darkness, darkness also has no positive existence. It is only absence of light, not presence of something, so you cannot do anything directly with darkness. If you want to bring darkness into the room you have to turn the light off; you cannot go out and gather darkness in a bucket and bring it in.
You cannot invite darkness in. And if you want to remove the darkness you cannot push it away either, you cannot fight with it. You will be tired, exhausted, and the darkness will remain wherever it is.
Nothing can be done directly with darkness because it has no positive existence. If you want to do anything with darkness you will have to go via light, you will have to do something to light. If you don't want darkness put the light on, if you want darkness turn the light off.
That is exactly the case with meditation: meditation is inner light. If you put it on it dispels darkness, evil. Evil has no existence of its own. god has existence, the devil is only an absence of god. so you cannot meet the devil anywhere. He does not exist, he is only a shadow phenomenon. When you forget about god he is very much there, but it is because you have forgotten god. The moment you remember god the devil is nowhere to be found.
Go deep into meditation. And by meditation I mean awareness, watchfulness, witnessing.
It is only through meditation that the inner light begins. Otherwise man lives in darkness. Meditation enkindles something that is latent in all of us, but needs to be provoked.
We are looking outwards. Our backs are at our inner source; hence it is being neglected, ignored. and to ignore one's inner being is the only ignorance. To know it is the only knowledge. All other knowledge is worthless. It may help you in the world but it can't help you in eternity. And this life is a small phenomenon, the real life is a totally different affair.
This is only a soap bubble. Seventy years or eighty years are nothing compared to eternity -- just nothing. Even a soap bubble exists longer. To pay too much attention to this life and not to pay attention at all to the inner is foolish. But that's what millions of people go on doing; hence the world is full of stupidity, full of darkness, full of ugliness, full of suffering.
The moment one turns in... The very turning of the attention enkindles a light inside which is simply waiting for you to look at. Your attention begins a light inside you which knows no end. Once it has started it goes on spreading. First it fills you, then it starts spreading outside you, and ultimately it fills the whole universe.
The man who attains to that state where his inner light becomes as vast as the universe itself is called the enlightened one, the awakened one, the Christ, the Buddha.
Brigitte in Celtic mythology is the goddess of wisdom and song. That is a very strange combination.
Ordinarily wise people are not singing people, and th singers are not thought to be wise. Humanity has lived according to the sad people, the non-singing people. Sad people have been dominant up to now; they have been the saints. and the more sad a person is, the longer is face, the wiser people think he is. But real wisdom is really a song of the heart.
So your name has a tremendously significant message: Become wise but not serious. Your dance has to remain intact. don't lose cheerfulness, because a wisdom without cheerfulness is not worth anything, and a cheerfulness without wisdom is also worthless. Both together create a great synthesis.
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Another meaning of brigitte is the bridge. If you can manage to be wise and to be celebrating, then the bridge i made between man and god. Meditation is the bridge between man and god, between the visible and the invisible, between the known and the unknown, between the material and the spiritual.
Go deep into meditation. and be meditation I mean silence, awareness, witnessing. You can meditate any time of the day, you can meditate working, walking, doing things. Meditation is not something separate from life; it should not be separate, otherwise it remains a little artificial. Meditation should be spread all over life. You should walk in meditation, you should sit in meditation; that means silently, fully aware.
Slowly slowly it becomes your very flavour, then the bridge is created.
And through meditation comes wisdom -- not through studying books, not through scriptures. Through scriptures one can become knowledgeable but no wise. and knowledgeable people are sad, they are bound to be sad because all their knowledge is borrowed. There can be no song in it.
Wisdom arises out of meditation. Our *ot silence something hidden in you starts blooming. That is wisdom. And whenever some flower blooms it releases fragrance. That is your song.
We are not aware of who we are. We are not aware of the source from which we come, why we come at all in the first place. what is our purpose? Why have we been sent into the world? There must be some message to be delivered, some work to be done. something has to happen through you. Nobody is accidental, everybody is on a mission -- unaware of course, oblivious to the mission.
We are not aware, but that does not make any difference to the truth. Whether the truth is known or not known, it remains the truth; just not knowing it makes no difference. Everybody is here on a certain mission, a certain purpose has to be fulfilled. Somebody has to sing a song, somebody has to dance a dance.
Unless you have done that for which you have been sent you will not feel fulfilled, you will not feel contented. That's why there is so much misery.
The root cause of misery is that we are doing something for which we are not meant. The person who was meant to be a singer has become a priest, the person who was sent to be a dancer has become a governor. Everybody is in somebody else's place. Everything is topsy-turvy, it is a chaos. Without meditation you will never know what exactly your work here is. As you enter into meditation, as thoughts go farther and farther away from you, as you create a distance between you and your mind, as you become more centred and settled, peaceful, at ease with yourself, a clarity arises. You can see clearly that this is the thing that you have to do.
It is so absolutely clear that there is no doubt about it, no question about it. In fact one is surprised how one has remained unaware of such a simple fact for so long. And once it is known your life goes through a radical change. Then you start doing that for which you are meant. Then the rose becomes the rose, the lotus become *sthe lotus.
Right now the rose is trying to be the lotus, the lotus is trying to be the rose. The rose can neither be a rose nor can the lotus be a lotus. Everybody is trying to be somebody else -- and you can never be somebody else, you can only be your own self.
Meditation is simply the method of discovering your source, your goal, your
purpose, your meaning, your significance. and once you have started doing that, that is worship, that is prayer, that is really being religious. That is sannyas.
Meditation is a process of rebirth, a process of spiritual rebirth. The body is born through the parents, but not the spirit; the spirit needs another birth. One has to go through the womb of meditation. Nobody else can do it for you, it has to be absolutely a self-discovery.
The Buddhas can only point the way, the masters can only give you hints. Then it is for you to travel. It is a long pilgrimage. It is because we have gone so far away from ourselves that coming back home is a long journey. And we have forgotten where our home is. We have forgotten the route.
Even if we come back home we will not be able to recognise immediately that this is our home. Hence the master is needed -- first to create a great thirst in you so that the seeking starts, then to give you certain hints. I call them hints because they are not very definite, and they cannot be very definite. By their very nature they are vague, because the journey is a very mysterious journey. It is not something like a superhighway; it is going zig zag into a jungle, no path exists. As you move, by your movement you create the path. and you have not gone to your inner centre for so long that thick jungle has grown all around it.
Then finally the master is needed when you have reached home to tell you that this is it, to help you recognise it, to help you remember it.
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Dhyan means meditation. Jules means youthful, youthfulness.
This is the literal meaning of Jules. There is also a symbolic meaning: the youthful heart. It is significant.
Mind is always old. By its very nature it cannot be young, because mind simply means the past, and how can the past be young? It is not only old, it is dead too.
It is just a corpse which we are carrying.
Mind is purely a memory system, a biocomputer, and memory by its very nature has to be old; otherwise how can it be called memory? Something has happened, something has been experienced, something has been learned, observed. It has been recorded -- that record is the mind.
The heart is always young just as the mind is always old, because the heart lives in the present; it knows nothing of the past and nothing of the future either, because future is only an extension of the past; it is modified past. It cannot be otherwise. Whatsoever you desire in the future is projected by the mind, it is projected out of its experiences. Of course it is modified. All that was bad, sad, has been dropped and all that was beautiful, good, has been magnified, but it is nothing new.
The past is old and the future is the child of the past. Only the present is always new, young, fresh, alive.
And meditation is a simple process of shifting your energy from the head to the heart, from logic to love. A sannyasin has to become less and less of a head and more and more of a heart, and finally, the head has to be completely chopped off.
One has to behead oneself, then only the heart functions in its totality. And the functioning of the heart in its totality is bliss, is truth, is life eternal.
Table of Contents
Chapter title: None Chapter title: Truth Chapter title: Bliss
Chapter title: Consciousness Chapter title: Prayer Chapter title: Music Chapter title: Man's Nature Chapter title: Love