By following these sutras your mind will come to the state that is an absolute necessity for realizing peace and truth. Along with these three sutras, I wish to explain to you the two kinds of meditation we will begin to do from tomorrow morning.
The first meditation is for the morning. During this meditation you must hold your spine erect, close your eyes and keep your neck straight. Your lips should be closed and your tongue should touch the palate. Breathe slowly but deeply. Keep your attention near the navel. Remain aware of the tremor you feel at the navel because of the breathing. This is all you have to do. This experiment calms the mind and empties thoughts completely. From this emptiness one ultimately enters within oneself.
The second meditation is for the night. Spread your body on the floor comfortably and let all your limbs relax completely. Close your eyes and for about two minutes suggest to yourself that the body is relaxing. Gradually the body will become relaxed. Then for two minutes suggest that your breathing is becoming quiet and your breathing will become quiet. Finally, for another two minutes suggest that thoughts are coming to a halt. This determined suggestion leads to complete relaxation, tranquility and emptiness. When the mind has become perfectly calm, be totally awake in your inner being and be a witness to this peace. This witnessing will lead you to your self.
You must do these two meditations. As a matter of fact they are really artificial devices and you are not to get stuck to them. With their help, the mind’s restlessness dissolves. And just as we no longer need a ladder after climbing, one day we will have to give up these devices as well.
Meditation attains perfection the day it becomes unnecessary. This very state is samadhi, enlightenment.
Now the night is well advanced and the sky is filled with stars. The trees and the valleys have gone to sleep. We will also go to sleep now. How quiet and silent it all is! We will also merge into this silence. In deep sleep, in dreamless sleep we go to the very place where the divine dwells. This is the spontaneous, nonconscious samadhi that nature has bestowed upon us. Through meditation we also reach the same place, but then we are conscious and aware. This is the only difference. And it is a great difference indeed. In the former we go to sleep, in the latter we become awakened.
Let us now go into sleep with the hope that going into awakening will also become possible. When hope is accompanied by determination and endeavor it certainly becomes fulfilled.
May existence guide us along the path. This is my only prayer.
Chapter: 3
Thought Birth Control
Conscious soul,
I am delighted to see you. You have gathered in this solitary place in your search to attain godliness, to find the truth, to know your own self, your being. But may I ask you a question: Is what you are seeking separate from you? You can search for someone who is separate from you, but how can you seek that which you yourself are? Your own self cannot be sought in the way in which everything else is sought, because in this case there is no difference between the one who is seeking and the one who is being sought. You can seek out the world but you cannot seek out your self. He who goes out in search of his self goes farther away from his self. It is necessary to understand this truthfully – then the search may even be possible.
If you want to find the material things of the world you have to look outside yourself. But if you want to find your self you have to drop all seeking and be composed, unruffled, unanxious. That which you are can only be found in total calm and emptiness. Remember that a search is also an anxiousness, a tension, a lust, a desire. But the self – the soul – cannot be realized through desire. This is the difficulty. Desire means that one wants to become something or to attain something, while the soul is that which is already attained. The soul is what I, myself, am. Desire and the soul are two opposite directions. They are opposite dimensions.
Hence, understand it well that the soul can be attained but it cannot become an object of desire. There cannot be any desire as such for the soul. All desire is worldly; no desire is spiritual. It is desire and lust that make up the world. Whether this desire be for money or for meditation, for worldly position or for godliness, for worldly pleasures or for liberation, it makes no difference. All desires are desires, and desire is a bondage.
I don’t ask you to desire the soul. I only ask you to understand the nature of desire. The understanding of desire frees one from desire because it reveals its painful nature. The understanding of pain is freedom from pain because having understood it, no one can desire it. And in the moment when there is no desire, when the mind is not perturbed by lust and you are not searching for anything, then at that very moment, at that calm and tranquil moment you experience your real authentic being. The soul manifests itself when desire disappears.
Hence, my friends, I would ask you not to desire the soul but to understand desire itself and be freed from it. Then you will know and will realize the soul.
What is religion? Religion, dharma, has nothing to do with thoughts or with thinking. It has to do with no-thinking. Thinking is philosophy. It gives you conclusions but does not bring any solution. Dharma is solution. Logic is the doorway to thought while enlightenment is the doorway to solution.
Enlightenment is a contentless consciousness. The mind is empty but watchful, alert. In that peaceful state the door to truth opens. It is only in emptiness that truth is realized, and as a result one’s whole life is transformed.
We reach this state of emptiness, this enlightenment, through meditation. But what is generally understood as meditation is not really meditation. That too is a process of thinking. Maybe the thoughts relate to the soul or to the divine but they are still thoughts. It makes no difference what the thoughts are about. In fact thought by its very nature pertains to the other, to the outer. It relates to what is not the self. There can be no thought about the self because for thought to exist, two are needed. That is why thought does not take you beyond duality. If one is to move into and know non-duality – the self – then meditation is the way, not thinking.
Thought and meditation go in totally opposite directions. One is outward going; the other, inward going. Thought is the way to know the other; meditation, the way to know the self. But generally thought, contemplation, has been taken for meditation. This is a very serious and widespread mistake and I want to caution you against this fundamental error.
Meditation means to be in non-doing. Meditation is not a doing but a state of being. It is a state of being in one’s own self.
In action we come into contact with the outside world; in no-action, with ourselves. When we are not doing anything we become aware of what we are. Otherwise, remaining involved in all sorts of doings we never get to meet ourselves. We don’t even remember that we exist. Our busyness is very deep. Perhaps our bodies may get to rest but our minds never do. Awake, we think; asleep, we dream. Engrossed in these constant preoccupations and doings, we simply forget ourselves. We lose ourselves amidst the crowd of our own activity. How strange this is – but this is our reality. We have become lost, not in the crowds of other people, but in our own thoughts, in our own dreams, in our own preoccupations and activities. We have become lost in ourselves. Meditation is the way to extricate ourselves from this self-created crowd, from this mental wanderlust.
By its nature, meditation cannot be an activity. It is not a busyness, it is the term for an unoccupied mind. This is what I teach. It looks rather odd to say that I teach non-doing, but this is what I teach. We have gathered here to practice non-doing. The language of man is very poor and very limited, designed to express action only; that is why it is never able to express the soul. How can what is tailored for speech express silence? The word meditation suggests that it is some sort of a doing but it is by no means a doing of any kind. It would be wrong to say “I was doing meditation”; it would be correct to say “I was in meditation.” It is just like love. One can be “in” love, one