Chapter title: None

‌Chapter title: None‌

14 January 1981 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8101145 ShortTitle: POND14 Audio:

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

Meditation is a full stop on the mind. Ordinarily the mind goes on and on, you don't know how to put it off. There is a way to put it off. That's what meditation is all about. Once you have learned, it is a very simple process, just like putting the light on and off. Then the same mind which is ordinarily a torture becomes immensely useful. Then you can use it but you are the master.

Right now the master is absolutely in the hands of the servant. The mind goes on manipulating you; you have no power over it. You cannot even say to it 'Shut up!' It does not listen at all. One feels absolutely impotent with the mind.

And all misery consists only in this incapacity, in this impotence. Slowly slowly one becomes aware that 'it is beyond my capacity,' one becomes compromised to the situation. One surrenders to the mind. And surrendering to the mind is surrendering, to a machine. It is the most humiliating phenomenon. One is not really a man if he cannot put a stop on his mind. And it is not difficult either; one just has to learn the knack of it. The name of that knack is awareness.

One has to become more and more aware of all the processes of the mind -- the memory, the imagination, the fantasy, the thoughts. One has simply to be aware. The traffic goes by and you are silently watching it, without any judgement. In

that state of non-judgmental awareness, one learns the knack, because one day suddenly, watching it, it stops. The more you become watchful, the less the mind is there.

When you are one hundred percent watchful the mind becomes absolutely empty. And to watch that 1/08/07

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emptiness is the beginning of ecstasy. You are freed, you have become a master for the first time.

This is the beginning of the kingdom of god.

When you become absolutely silent in mediation, a subtle humming sound is heard within one's own being. It does not come from the outside; it comes from one's own innermost core.

In the East we have called it 'omkar' the sound aum comes closest to it -- it is just approximate, remember, not exact. But if you go into an empty temple and you just chant 'Aum, aum, aum...' and you go on chanting, and then you stop suddenly, because the temple is empty it goes on resounding. That resounding comes very close to the innermost sound. And once this soundless sound, as it is called, this inner melody of your being is heard, bliss explodes, your whole life becomes harmonious. Then suddenly everything fits, then it is no more a problem. Life for the first time is not a problem, not a riddle to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

But the sound is so subtle that unless your mind is completely empty you cannot hear it. The mind makes so much noise you cannot hear the still, small voice within yourself -- hence meditation is the door to reach to the inner music. And the person who has heard the inner music becomes capable of hearing the celestial music of the spheres. He has learned the first lesson; now he can hear it all around, in the stars, in the trees, in the wind passing through the pine trees, in the sound of the running water.

Even when there is no sound it is there. The Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping. It is their way of saying that it is not an ordinary sound which is created by clapping two hands. It is not a clash. It is unstruck. When you play on the sitar you have to strike, by your strokes you create the sound. There is a fight between you and the strings. You have to pull the strings to a certain tension and then relax them. This is called the struck sound. But the inner sound is unstruck, 'anahat'. Nobody is playing there and nobody is there. It is utter silence. Even you are not there, at least not as you know yourself. A very new awareness is there which has nothing to do with you. It is so new, it is not a continuity with you; it is discontinuous with you, it is beyond you. But that awareness is not dry, it is full of music.

That music has to be heard. Hearing it one's life becomes sheer beauty, bliss, benediction.

Meditation makes everything sacred. Its very touch is magical, It makes everything golden. Without meditation our songs are ordinary, superficial, they don't have any depth.

The moment a song arises out of your silence, when the poetry is born out of silence, when the dance comes spontaneously, for no reason at all, and comes so irresistibly that one has to dance -- one is possessed by it, one has to sing -- one is possessed by it -- then it is kirtan. When you are not the singer, but something above you, beyond you, starts flowing through you, when you are just a hollow bamboo and suddenly the bamboo is transformed into a flute, some unknown lips start singing a song -- then it is kirtan.

What is known ordinarily in the temples as kirtan is not kirtan, because there is no meditation in the first place. People are just singing the same way as they sing other songs. The words may be religious, but only the words are religious -- the state of the mind is the same. Whether you are singing a song from a film or you are singing a song from a sacred book makes no difference.

The real difference happens only when your state of consciousness is different. Then even the song from an ordinary film becomes sacred. Then whatsoever you say has a certain poetry in it. In fact the man of meditation is so transformed by his meditativeness, that his silence starts radiating through each of his acts.

His words, his acts -- all are full of his silence. Then whatsoever he is doing is

sacred. He may be doing an ordinary thing cleaning the floor or cooking food or taking a bath -- but there is a subtle difference, a tremendous difference, a difference that really makes a difference, because his being is in a totally different space. It is coming out of such depth, of such innocence, of such virginity that it is bound to be sacred. But meditation comes first.

That's where I see these Hare Krishna people doing just idiotic things, sheer stupidity. You can go on repeating 'Hare Krishna, Hare Rama' for lives together. It will do only one thing; repeating one thing again and again destroys intelligence. It is a very useful method for making people idiotic -- hence in the Hare Krishna movement you will find all categories of idiots together.

In the first place, they are idiots to become interested in it; in the second place, if they are not already, they will become idiots, because the whole process is such. And what they think is kirtan is not kirtan at all, because there is no meditativeness in it. It is parrot-like.

You can teach a parrot and he will repeat. You can tell him to repeat sentences from the Bible and he will repeat. In the same way that the pope goes on repeating, the parrot will repeat, but the repetition of the 1/08/07

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parrot does not make him holy. You know perfectly well that it is just a parrot; there is nothing in it. He is repeating mechanically.

I also love kirtan, but it has to come out of your meditation, it has to come of its own accord. meditation has to function as a foundation. It is not vice versa, that by doing kirtan or sacred singing meditation can be created -- no. But by meditation everything becomes sacred -- even singing, even walking.

If meditativeness gives a new touch to everything that you are doing. It transforms you and through you the whole world around you. And once the foundation is there, the temple starts rising by itself. You don't need to put it together.

You have just to prepare yourself so that meditation is there, awareness is there, silence is there -- then everything else follows. Everything else is a consequence. Meditation is the key that unlocks all the doors.

Gautam Buddha has used the word 'mahasukh', the great bliss, to describe the ultimate experience. What we know in our life is the small bliss, momentary bliss, only fragments, glimpses from a very far away place, as if you have seen the Himalayas from thousands of miles away. Yes, on a cloudless day when the sun has risen, you can see the glistening, virgin peaks of the Himalayas from thousands of miles away.

Exactly like that, what we know in life are small glimpses of a far away land and they are bound to be momentary, because we are not in that space ourselves. Just accidentally a window opens, accidentally the clouds are not there, accidentally the sun is there, accidentally we are looking in that direction... It is all accidental; hence for a moment if all the combinations are there you feel just as if a dewdrop is slipping inside you.

But then there is despair. In the wake of it there is great despair because soon it is lost; that combination is not going to remain forever. We are surrounded by shifting sands. Everything is changing. The window will not remain in the same place; it is moving. The clouds are moving, the Himalayas are moving --

everything is in movement. So it is only a rare opportunity to find a little bit of bliss; hence Buddha calls it the small bliss, experienced by everybody once in a while.

In fact George Gurdjieff used to say -- and when a man like Gurdjieff says something it is meaningful.

He used to say 'My observation is that a person has such glimpses not more than seven times in a life -- that is the maximum. Not necessarily seven times -- that is the maximum. One may have such a glimpse only one time or two times, or not at all. It all depends on thousands of things.

Sometimes looking at a sunset, sometimes seeing a bird on the wing, sometimes a distant call of a cuckoo, sometimes is beautiful face, sometimes a child laughing -- and suddenly it is there; but as suddenly as it comes, it goes. And in the wake of it you fall into a deeper darkness than you were in before. This is not worth having.

But it also has a significance, because it gives you the taste, the desire, the longing, that if it is possible once then maybe there is some way to have it forever. That's what meditation is; not to depend on accidental combinations of thousands of things but to create a certain space within you which makes it absolutely inevitable that bliss is yours. Then it is no more a far away land; it is something within you.

And because it is part of you, even if you want to lose it you cannot lose it. That is called 'mahasukh', the great bliss. It comes only through meditation. There has never been any other way, there is none and there is never going to be another way.

In life what we know as peace is not real peace; at the most, it is absence of turmoil, absence of noise. It is the absence of something, not the presence of something. It is negative. When you go to the mountains you have a certain peace. It is the absence of the market-place, nothing else. Come back and you will be the same all peace will have gone. The people who live in the monasteries thing they are living in peace; they are just befooling themselves and nobody else. They should come back to the marketplace and see; all their peace will be gone.

Their peace is very arbitrary, dependent on certain conditions. And any peace that is dependent on certain conditions is not yours. It may be there, it may not be there -- and because it is dependent on certain conditions you have to live in those conditions. You become a slave of those conditions. Only slaves are living in the monasteries. Many have escaped to the Himalayas and to the caves but they are all slaves, slaves in the sense that now they think they are peaceful.

Let them come back into the world, let them live in the world, let them relate with people and they will know whether that peace was true or not. I don't trust that peace; I trust the peace that is attained here and now, not through escape, not by changing outer conditions but by changing your inner awareness. That's 1/08/07

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what I call meditation: changing your inner awareness, changing, your inner world; not changing the circumstances but changing your consciousness.

Once your consciousness is changed, once inner noise is dropped, then wherever you are there is peace.

Peace surrounds you, it becomes almost tangible. You become luminous with it. It can be felt by sensitive people. A sensitive person just passing by your side will suddenly feel the breeze, will suddenly become aware that something special is there, some grace, something, invisible -- but still it touches the heart.

Meditation brings true peace and true peace is always infinite. And true peace is always independent.

True peace is yours, authentically yours; hence nobody can take it away. You cannot be distracted from it, you cannot be diverted anywhere else. There is no way. Even If you are thrown in hell you will live in peace, because you carry your paradise within yourself.

That's the meaning of Jesus when he insists again and again that the kingdom of god is within you.

Two words have to be very clearly understood one is information and the other is transformation.

Information makes a man knowledgeable, but deep down he remains ignorant. In fact he becomes more ignorant than he was before, because at least before he was innocent; ignorant but innocent too. Now he has lost his innocence also. He is knowledgeable. It is not a gain, it is a very great loss.

Ignorance is beautiful if it contains innocence in it, far more beautiful than knowledge, because knowledge is ignorance devoid of innocence. But there is a third state also; wisdom. That never comes through information. It comes through transformation.

Information means collecting -- from books, from people, from all over the world, facts, fictions, hypotheses, superstitions, all kinds of rubbish. But you can arrange that rubbish in such a systematic way, in such a logical way that it seems very significant, very profound. Stupidity can also be very profound. If it is scholarly, it is profound.

Stupidity can also be very logical. There is no intrinsic impossibility in being an idiot and a philosopher; one can be both together. In fact, in the Middle Ages there used to be a word, 'foolosopher'... And many philosophers are really 'foolosophers' -- utterly foolish but very pretentious. Because of their knowledge they an exhibit that they know, and deep down they also know that they don't know, but they don' t want to accept it -- even to themselves. even in their privacy they don' t want to accept it.

Hence the man who has become very much informed becomes very very lost, very far away from the truth. From ignorance there are two ways: one is towards information, which will destroy innocence and protect ignorance; another is towards transformation, which will destroy ignorance and protect innocence.

And transformation comes through meditation.

One simply has to become utterly silent, watchful, choicelessly aware; then ignorance disappears, just as darkness disappears when you bring a candle into a room. But the innocence remains. In fact it not only remains, it is multiplied.

Information makes a foolosopher and transformation makes a wise man, a Buddha, a Socrates, a Jesus.

But the only way to attain to transformation, innocence, wisdom, is meditation.

My whole emphasis is on meditation. A single word, but it can open all the mysteries of existence.

Nothing else is needed. It is more than enough.

The only thing we can offer to existence is is singing heart, a dancing, being. What people are offering is nothing but misery. Existence gives us so much, existence is not miserly at all. It goes on giving in abundance -- to the worthy, to the unworthy. It makes no distinctions. It simply goes on giving to whosoever is ready to take it. It knocks on every door, just to give gifts to you. Light and love and life, all are gifts; not that we deserve them, not that we have earned them -- we may not be worthy at all -- but existence is overflowing. It has so much that it has to give. It cannot resist the temptation to give. It gives out of its abundance.

Something is needed from our side too, just as a thankfulness, as gratitude. And what can we give to existence? Just a few songs, a few dances, a little

celebration, a festivity -- that's what sannyas is all about.

My whole effort here is to make you a little more to make you just a little more rejoicing, to make you aware of all the gifts that the whole has given to you so that gratitude can arise in you. And out of that gratitude is the offering of songs. Then one bows down to existence, just in simple gratefulness, and offers oneself, whatsoever one has got -- a few flowers of one's being. These flowers are what I mean by songs a little bit of creativity, whatsoever you can create.

A sannyas has to live in such a way that when he leaves the world, he leaves it a little more beautiful 1/08/07

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than he had found it -- that's enough! You have proved that you were religious! You have proved that you were not accidental. You have proved that you have contributed something to existence, that you have not been futile and in vain, that your being here has been of significance. That very feeling that 'I have contributed a little bit to the beauty of the world, to the grace of the existence,' that 'I have added a little more light into the dark night of the soul,' and one feels fulfilled, immensely contented. Nothing more is needed, no other religion.

Creativity is religion. Creativity is prayer. But creativity can come only out of meditativeness.

The Old Pond ... Plop

Chapter #15

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