If doubt becomes total, one is freed of doubt. If thinking becomes total, one is freed of thinking as well. In truth, whatsoever becomes complete, from that there is liberation. Only the incomplete binds. The half binds. The whole never binds. But doubt never becomes complete, and neither does thought. Even those who doubt, do not doubt totally. Those who appear to be doubters still carry beliefs within, they still have their devotions, their blindnesses. And those who think do not think wholly; they accept many things unexamined. The doubter does not doubt doubt itself; the thinker accepts thought without having examined thought. If someone doubts totally, at the end doubt will be turned upon doubt itself, and the question will arise: Why should I even doubt? What can doubt give me? And if someone brings thinking to its utmost, at the end the question will arise: Can that which I do not know be known through thought? And even if thought knows something, will it be truth?
Yesterday morning I hinted at a few things in this regard.
The process of thought brings you, on the road to the divine temple, only to a certain limit. The one who stops in thought gets lost in philosophy, in systems, but never reaches religion. The one who stops in belief gets lost in superstitions. The one who stops in thought gets lost in philosophies and ideologies. But the one who goes beyond thought reaches where the temple of religion is. It is helpful to understand a little more about thought, so that we can understand what it means to rise beyond it.
First: no thought is ever original. There is no such thing as an original thought. All thoughts are stale, accidental. Thoughts too are learned. Through thinking we can only rearrange what we already know. That which we do not know, the unknown, cannot be grasped by thought. In fact, that which is not known cannot even be thought. How will you think what is unknown? What is known can be thought about; you can take sides for or against it. But that which is unknown—how will it become the subject of your thought? How will you think it? How will you contemplate it? How will you reflect upon it? The unknown lies outside thought, and Paramatma is the unknown. Hence, through thought no one has ever known Paramatma.
Second: thoughts are borrowed—bartered, gathered from a thousand streams that rush toward our mind. Within, a certain arrangement, a certain harmony among these thoughts settles in. It may appear utterly new, but it will still be nothing but a composite of many old elements. Someone says, I have conceived a new thought: a golden horse with wings, flying in the sky. Surely a golden, winged, sky-flying horse has never existed. It looks original. But it is not original at all. We know horses. We know gold. We know wings. We have seen flight. By combining these four, we create a flying golden horse. Nothing new is there—only four old things torn and twisted together. Thoughts only appear new. The truly new is no-thought. There is no original thought; the original is thought-free insight. Thought is stale, borrowed, secondhand. It comes from others. And the reach of thought goes no deeper than memory; it does not penetrate our life-force. It touches the screen of memory and goes no farther.
A friend of mine, a doctor, fell from a train. His memory was injured. He forgot all that he knew. All his medical training was gone. Not only that—he forgot even his name. He forgot his father. Two days later I went to see him. We had studied, played, fought together since childhood. He had forgotten me too. He looked at me as no stranger has ever looked and said, Who are you? How did you come here? He asked those around him, Who is this man? There was no recognition in his eyes. That thread of memory was broken—the tape of his remembrance snapped; or the connection was lost. He was there—his consciousness, his prana, everything—but memory was not. With memory gone, thought too was gone. The depth of our thinking is exactly the depth of our memory. Thought does not enter the depths of life. It does not reach being. It reaches only to the functional apparatus called memory that surrounds our life-force. Beyond that it has no access. However much we think, thought does not go deeper than memory. And what has memory to do with truth?
What has memory to do with truth? Truth resides very deep; memory is only on the surface. Like waves upon the ocean’s surface—what relation have waves with the ocean’s depths? Waves do not even know what the depths are. They are above, raised and erased by gusts of wind. Memory too is on the surface of consciousness, created by the buffeting winds of outer events—happenings, experiences, heard words, learned knowledge. On that uppermost layer of consciousness, memory is formed in reaction to the outer winds. This memory knows nothing of who is in the depths. It cannot connect with that deep ocean. Memory connects with the outer world, not with the inner self.
So if one is stuck in thought, one is stuck in memory. And one cannot go deeper. Our being is deeper. Then understand also: what is thought but a joining of words? If truth were contained in words, all would have attained truth. A man studies, listens, understands, thinks—and says within: Brahman alone is truth. He learns the phrase: Brahman is truth, the world is maya. He repeats it again and again. Memory becomes strong. It begins to appear to him that the world is unreal and Brahman is the real. But this is not experience, not truth. It is a feeling produced by repetition, an illusion born of reiterating words. Repeat any word intensely, and its illusion is created.
How then to know truth? How to enter the divine temple? Thought brings you to the door. Those who stop at thought do not go far. They go a little and stop. Thought is not enough. One must move further—and to move further, thought must be dropped. One climbs steps—placing the foot on one step; to set it on the next, the previous must be left. Just moments ago you stood on it; now it must be released. To grasp the higher rung, the lower must be let go. The foot that stands on the step of thought must be lifted. The step that follows is called dhyana. Dhyana means thoughtlessness. Dhyana means the total silence of consciousness—total silence, where there are no words, no thoughts, no logic; only seeing is, only pure beholding, the sheer experience of looking.
Dhyana means: entry into no-thought. But under the name of meditation so many things circulate which are not meditation. First let us see what meditation is not; then what it is will be easy to understand.
Dhyana is the third sutra. Dhyana takes you beyond the limit where thought leaves you at the threshold of the divine temple. Thought leaves you at the door; dhyana takes you in. To see what dhyana is not is necessary, because many pseudo-meditations are in vogue. First, under the name of meditation, concentration is taught—which is not meditation. Ordinarily people think becoming concentrated is meditation. But one-pointedness is still a state of thought, not of meditation. If you concentrate upon a single thought, it is not meditation. It is simply another state of thought—one wavering, the other focused. Whether you concentrate on Rama, on Krishna, on Christ, on Allah, on Om, or on any one word or idea, it still remains thinking circling around a chosen object. Where thought is present, meditation is not.
Yes, concentration has consequences. If only one thought remains in the mind, the mind quickly slips into trance, into sleep, into hypnosis—into unconsciousness. Mind craves the ever-new. Its nature is restlessness. Change delights it. When something remains unchanged, it becomes bored, uneasy, and falls asleep to escape.
You saw a film today. Tomorrow you must see the same film again—today it felt fine; tomorrow, all right. The day after, forced again—you will say, please, I do not wish to go. And if a law is passed that you must see it all your life, you will go mad or rebel. Repetition bores the mind; it grows weary. In that weariness, it chooses to sleep, to forget what is fixed. A mother lulls her child: Royal son, go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep—and the child sleeps. She thinks it is because of sweet music. No—the child is bored, crowded by monotony. Repeat the same word, the same monotonous tone, and sleep is born.
People do not doze in religious discourses without cause. The same things heard a thousand times. Again the same. There is nothing new to hear. Some doctors even suggest that those who cannot sleep should go to religious gatherings; when tranquilizers fail, stories of Rama and Krishna still work, because they have been heard so often that nothing remains but to sleep.
The mind wakes to the new and sleeps before the repeated. Holding it to a single repeated object sends it to drowsiness, then to sleep, then to hypnosis. The science of hypnosis says: repeat anything intensely and you can induce unconsciousness. Repetition is a drug for sleep.
For thousands of years, repetition and concentration have been mistaken for meditation. But repetition and concentration are hypnotic sleep, not meditation. In the West, Mahesh Yogi and others have popularized such practices; but these are only methods for trance. They have nothing to do with meditation. Their effect in the West has a simple reason: the West is sleepless—tense, anxious, stressed. People are stretched tight from morning to night; even at night sleep does not come. They need a tranquilizer. Mantra-japa helps sleep; but sleep is not meditation.
So first grasp it well: concentration is not meditation. Concentration means the repetition of one thought. Dhyana means no-thought—not the repetition of thought.
Understand through a small image. A child plays in a room with a hundred boxes. He jumps from one box to another, to a third, to a fourth, to a fifth. The boxes change; the child keeps jumping. This is play. Now remove ninety-nine boxes; one box remains. The child still jumps, but now upon a single box—jumping continues. Then remove even that last box; there is nothing left to jump upon. The child sits down. Jumping is no longer possible. Mind has three states. First, a restless mind: from one thought to another. Second, a concentrated mind: held to one thought, yet still jumping upon it. Third, dhyana: when even that one is removed and there remains no object at all. The mind sits, becomes quiet, silent.
The first state is restlessness. The second is concentration. The third is meditation. Dhyana is the state in which no object remains in consciousness—no subject, no thought, no word—total silence. Concentration is merely a fixed state of thought.
A river rushing—that is restless mind. A river stopped, frozen into a lake—that is concentration. No river at all, evaporated in the sun, leaving only the empty bed of sand—that is meditation. Unless one distinguishes concentration from meditation, one cannot understand what meditation is. Most people mistake concentration for meditation and waste their time inducing drowsiness and sleep. There is a certain pleasure in sleep; life is full of pain and trouble, and to forget is tempting.
A man drinks—and for a while he is outside the tangle. While he is in the wine, there is no sorrow, no worry, no trouble—no sick wife, no child needing medicine, no hunt for a job. From soma to lysergic acid, from the rishis of the Vedas to the newest seers of America like Aldous Huxley, humanity has searched for new tricks of oblivion. Why do we call drinking bad? Because it makes you forget life; it does not transform life. Forgetfulness changes nothing; meanwhile time is lost that could have been used to transform suffering.
One forgets for three hours in a cinema. Another forgets by bhajans and kirtan. Someone forgets by drumming and dancing wildly. One forgets in the twist, one in jazz, one in the corner repeating Rama-Rama. Another takes alcohol; another mescaline, marijuana, opium, bhang, charas, ganja. These are all efforts to forget. They may differ in quality—good or bad—but essentially they are attempts to evade the pain, the darkness. Forgetting does not remove darkness, does not shatter ignorance. When you return, the pain and the ignorance are still waiting.
Meditation is not forgetfulness. Meditation is the effort to know the truth of life—not to forget it. It is not forgetfulness; it is total remembering, total awareness of the truth of life. Therefore concentration and meditation are opposites. If you are practicing concentration, you are only trying to fall asleep. You will not enter meditation, truth, or the divine temple by that path.
Many go into intoxication and think they have reached the temple. That is why thousands of so-called saints smoke ganja and opium. They believe this too is a short cut to the same. No intoxication leads anywhere. One must arrive awake, filled with awareness. Awareness is needed, not unconsciousness. Thus meditation is not concentration.
Then what is meditation? Meditation is awareness. It is becoming fully aware of all the objects of mind. There are countless thoughts in the mind—and we are asleep.
One day Buddha was speaking. A man in front was shaking his big toe. Buddha stopped speaking and asked him, My friend, why is your toe moving? The moment Buddha asked, the toe stopped. If it were you, and your toe was moving, and Buddha said so—it would stop at once. The man said, I do not know; it was just moving. Buddha said, Strange. It is your toe and you do not know? Is it your toe or someone else’s? Are you conscious or unconscious?
A man sits on a chair shaking his legs; he does not know why. Another keeps changing posture again and again; he does not know why. Buddha asks, Is this toe yours or another’s? He says, Mine. Then Buddha says, If it is yours and you do not know, and it moves without your knowing—why did it stop when I asked? He answers, As soon as I became aware, it stopped. While I was unaware, it continued.
Just as the toe moves, legs move, and all the leaves and branches of life move, so the mind moves totally unaware. We have hardly ever peeped within to see what goes on there. If you sit quietly with paper and pen for ten minutes and honestly write whatever arises in the mind, it will be hard to show even to your closest friend; he will say, Let us go to a doctor—your mind is unwell. We carry a deranged mind within. What all goes on there! The difference between a madman and us? Only that we manage to repress what moves within; it does not spill out at once. Sometimes it does spill—at the wrong time. We call it anger: a slip, and that which was moving within burst out. Normally we keep it held.
Every person carries his madness, restrained. The one who manages we call normal; the poor one who cannot, we call mad. The difference is of degree. Any of us can go mad any moment if a little push comes and the contained floods out.
This mind we carry—ever weaving endless thought-nets—have we ever watched it awake, or do we always keep our back to it? Those who have investigated the mind say: it is hard to find a person who has not committed suicide a thousand times within, who has not murdered many times within. It is hard to find anyone who has not, in some corner of the mind’s darkness, desired every possible crime. All crimes, all sins, all insanities exist in seed-form within everyone. Their waves keep moving. But we never watch them awake. We keep our back turned. We are afraid they might become visible.
Perhaps that is why we keep ourselves busy for twenty-four hours—lest the inner be seen. If it appears, we may tremble: Is this madness within me the one I celebrate as myself? Is this the I whose ego I proclaim? Because of this fear we remain outside, never going in.
As if a house were filled with snakes and scorpions and the owner locked the door and sat outside—knowing what is within, he refuses to speak of it. If someone reminds him, he says, All is well inside—let us speak of something else. For as soon as the inner is evoked, all the snakes and scorpions begin to stir in the mind. He asks for a device to forget: Tell me how to dissolve in devotion, how to surrender, how to be free of the world. He does not have the courage to see the darkness within. He does not know that unless he gathers courage to see, those snakes and scorpions will never depart. They were born from his not-seeing. If I enter there with full awareness, they will vanish as darkness vanishes before a lamp.
All the sickness, the poison of our mind, has arisen from our non-presence. We are absent. Everyone is absent from the one place that is crucial—the place we never visit. There is no proxy for us there. It remains dark because we never go. We roam everywhere but one place: the place that I am. Meditation means going there. Meditation means awakening to what is in the mind. Meditation means being aware of whatever is there—good or bad, dirty or insane. But only one who is free of suppression toward the mind can be filled with awareness. Hence, in the process of meditation, no suppression—the first sutra. Because the one who has suppressed will be afraid to go in; he has piled up filth there. We have all suppressed—anger, sex, greed. So much has accumulated that even mustering courage seems hard. We do not wish to go there.
But remember: to reach the door of the divine temple, you will have to pass through yourself. No one reaches God without going through oneself. From wherever you start, there is only one passage—the I am. I myself am the door, and through this door one must pass. And this is precisely the door we fear—because of suppression. We have hidden everything there and refuse to look.
Meditation means: not suppression, but awakening. Whatever is in the mind, do not push it down into the unconscious, do not drive it into darkness where it will not be seen. As when someone builds a cellar under the house and throws all the rubbish there—even murders and thefts. The cellar fills up. He tells no one that it exists, for there he has done too many dark deeds. He himself is afraid to go there.
We have divided our mind into two rooms. The small upper room—the drawing room—where we receive guests and speak fine words. The most false part of the house is the drawing room. Curtains and furniture are for show, to deceive those who come from outside. But they too are not deceived, for their drawing rooms are the same. The real house begins behind. There we ourselves fear to go.
Call one part conscious—the tiniest slice, one out of ten if the mind were divided. The other nine are dark—the unconscious, where the real man lives, ferocious, primitive, the one who has been for thousands of years. No culture, no civility there. That is the real. We spend our lives trying to remain in the drawing room, utterly false. Then we never reach truth. Those nine parts must also be known. There is no escape from them. People flee from these nine parts through alcohol—and also through mantra-japa. Through prayer and worship—and through mescaline and LSD. Through cinema, music, dance. Man runs away from the very compartments he lacks the courage to see.
But a seeker must see. Must know. Must enter. He must go into his whole mind where he has never gone. Meditation means: a conscious entry into the unconscious. It means I will uncover whatever is within and encounter it; I will see what it is. For this it is essential that I do not suppress. Essential that I take no judgment about any tendency of the mind. The moment I judge, I will hide what I call bad and present what I call good. Division begins again. The one who would meditate must not decide in advance: this is bad, this is good. He must only know what is. Whatever is, I will know it. Whether sin or virtue, I will not judge. Without judgment, I will go in and see what is.
A great wonder happens. The person who does not pre-judge—bad or good, sin or virtue, to do or not to do, to be or not to be—whose mind is not divided, his mind becomes indivisible, one. And the one who, with utter impartiality, gathers the courage to witness the mind in its totality—such a person’s life starts to undergo a revolution of which we know nothing. As soon as impartial witnessing begins, all that looked heavy yesterday begins to depart, like shadows. This impartial witnessing—without choice, without judgment—the courage to see whatever is in the mind, is the mark of the meditator. Meditation means: I will know and see whatsoever is within me, without condemnation and without justification. Only this much—that I will stand face to face before all the layers of my mind.
But we are of a strange disposition: we cannot stand before anything without taking sides. Even beside a rose we cannot remain without saying beautiful. We cannot simply stand, saying nothing, for a few moments. Whether the rose be beautiful or not, we must decide. We cannot look at the moon without judging. The face of a woman, or of a handsome youth—immediately the desire arises to possess. Our habit is instant partisanship. We do not remain impartial even for a moment.
Meditation means: impartial, staying with what is—no hurried decision. For the moment you decide, meditation departs and thought begins. Know this: the moment you judge, thought has entered, attention is finished. If I say, The rose is beautiful, thought has begun; the rose is gone, the seeing is broken, meditation ends. If I do not say the rose is beautiful, if I do not say I have seen such a rose before, if I do not say I will pluck it for my buttonhole—if I say nothing, the rose is there and I am here, and between us no thought—then the meeting between the rose and me happens in meditation. In the same way, stand before all the flowers and thorns within your mind. See them. In this direction practice is needed—outside and inside. Our habit is to put a word instantly on whatever happens. And that word stands at the door; vision ends, meditation dissolves.
Meditation means: wordless, thoughtless, witnessing—the thoughtless witness. No thought, only witnessing. Practice this outside—passing a flower, beside your wife, with your child, when your husband is in front, when a stranger passes on the road, when you see a star in the sky. Be silent; see what is—and watch what happens when there is only seeing. Then practice inside—when thoughts move, when anger moves, when sex moves. See what smoke is rising within; silently recognize it. Recognition is possible only by total seeing, allowing nothing to come in between. Practice outside and inside. Then there will be freedom from thought, and the capacity to know what is will deepen. A new door will open, of which we have had no taste—a rare possibility of beauty, a breeze of truth unknown to us. Flowers will bloom that we have never known, fragrances for which we have no name, the unknown entering us.
Only through meditation does the unknown enter. Thought is only the repetition of the known. When we stand before a flower and recognize—seen before, known—we are referring to old flowers and old thoughts. This very flower has never been seen before. Even God must be seeing it for the first time. To see this flower, all other flowers must vanish, all words must depart; I must stand face to face with it. As with the flower, so with oneself—before all the states of mind. Stand directly, see whatever is, neither frightened nor flattered. Much that seems bad may appear, but it seems bad only because of our notions. Much virtue, much love may appear; do not be flattered. The moment you are flattered or repulsed, the mind wavers, meditation dissolves, thought begins. Let there be no ripple of thought. Like a mirror, utterly clean of dust—walk toward seeing yourself. This process is called meditation. Meditation is self-observation. Meditation is witnessing toward oneself. Meditation is becoming a witness unto one’s own being.
Swami Ram went to America. People there were puzzled, for he always spoke in the third person. He would not say, I went somewhere and people abused me. He would say, Today it was delightful—Ram went somewhere and people abused Ram. People asked, About whom are you speaking? Ram means you, does it not? Ram said, Where am I in this? I stood aside and watched that Ram was abused. Ram became restless, Ram was full of anger. I stood aside and laughed—Good, Ram is caught today. What will he do? And I watched what Ram did.
People found it hard to understand. Have you ever dared to stand aside and see what your mind does—what this Ram does—when abuses are hurled? Have you ever become the third? If not, you cannot know meditation.
Meditation means becoming the third. We are always two. You come and abuse me—there are two people: you who abuse, and I who reply. But there is also someone else within me who sees that abuse was given, received, and returned. That third is also within you. Four are present—but for each, three exist. The abuser, the abused, and the watcher who sees both. That third must be cultivated—then meditation flowers. Meditation is the third becoming clear.
Experiment a little and you will be amazed. The leg is hurt, pain is there. Look—is there two, or three? There is pain; there is one to whom pain happens; and there is one more who sees both—the pain and the sufferer. That third, the witness, will manifest gradually as you remain a witness.
Alexander came to India. On returning, he remembered a promise to bring back a sannyasin. He asked in a village; there was one. He sent two soldiers with naked swords: Come with us—great Alexander will honor you in Greece. The sannyasin laughed and said, A madman calls himself great. They said, Do you know whom you call mad? You will be in trouble. It is an order—come. The sannyasin replied, Perhaps you do not know what sannyas means—it means one who obeys no one. We obey no orders. They said, Do you not know Alexander will have your head cut off? He said, Tell Alexander a sannyasin knows his head is already separate—how can it be severed now?
Alexander came himself. He said, You are not afraid? Do you see this sword? The sannyasin said, Afraid? I am watching the one who is afraid and the one who frightens. As for me—I have nothing to do with either. I see both.
Who knows if Alexander understood. He said, Best that you come, or I will finish you. The sannyasin said, Finish me—what joy it will be. You will see the head fall, and I too will see the head fall. We both will see it fall.
This inner seer—this is meditation. This capacity to see—this is meditation. To stand and watch whatever is happening—this is meditation.
The third sutra is: meditation. Watch life. Watch the mind. Watch whatsoever is happening. Become a seer. Do not fight, do not judge, do not choose—just watch.
But we find even watching a play difficult. We go to the theater and forget that we are only spectators, that on the screen there is only a play of light and shadow—no one is there. A tragic scene occurs, and in the hall people wipe their tears, hiding from one another. Darkness helps. If films were shown in bright light, the pleasure would be less; we would fear being seen wiping our tears—tears for a screen, for lines of light. There is no one there.
Vidyasagar once went to a play in Calcutta. He became so excited. On stage a villain pursued a woman, harassing her. In the dark forest he seized her and was about to rape her when Vidyasagar forgot himself, leapt onto the stage, took off his shoe and began to beat the actor. The actor showed more intelligence than Vidyasagar; shoe in hand, he bowed to the audience and said, I have never received a greater award for acting. A wise man like Vidyasagar took it for truth. I will keep this shoe as my greatest prize. Vidyasagar too realized his mistake—he had forgotten it was a play.
We cannot remain witnesses even there—then how will we in life? We take drama for life. The meditator must come to see life as drama. Someone insults you—what is it really? Sounds, vibrations striking eardrums. Someone throws a shoe that hits your head—what is it? Some atoms pressing upon other atoms—what else? Even if someone cuts off your head—the sword passes through, because there was space; parts separate because they are distinct—what else?
In the practice of meditation one keeps inquiring—what is it? One remains awake. Then slowly something wondrous happens; doors of wonder open. As witnessing grows, a unique peace descends, a stillness, a void. Space appears in between—inner sky. Things begin to be seen as they are. The drama becomes drama. And when the drama is known as drama, the possibility arises of that which is truth descending. As long as the false is taken as true, truth remains false for us. When the false is known as false, then the unveiling of the real begins. Dhyana is entry into the doorway—but not yet merging with the divine.
Dhyana is entry at the door. I may enter your house, but that is not yet entering you. Complete entry into the divine temple happens only when one becomes one with the divine.
So the third sutra is: dhyana, witnessing. Through it the door will open; you will reach within. Yet a distance remains—God is other, you are other. You are in the temple, but still He is He and you are you. Truth is seen, but it remains the other. This distance too must dissolve—only then can truth be lived in its totality. Not only known, but lived. Not only seen, but become. Full entry into Paramatma is not possible without becoming Paramatma oneself. One must rise even beyond meditation.
Tomorrow, with the fourth sutra, we will move beyond meditation—Samadhi.
I am grateful for your silent listening, and I bow to the Paramatma dwelling within all. Please accept my pranam.
Osho's Commentary
If doubt becomes total, one is freed of doubt. If thinking becomes total, one is freed of thinking as well. In truth, whatsoever becomes complete, from that there is liberation. Only the incomplete binds. The half binds. The whole never binds. But doubt never becomes complete, and neither does thought. Even those who doubt, do not doubt totally. Those who appear to be doubters still carry beliefs within, they still have their devotions, their blindnesses. And those who think do not think wholly; they accept many things unexamined. The doubter does not doubt doubt itself; the thinker accepts thought without having examined thought. If someone doubts totally, at the end doubt will be turned upon doubt itself, and the question will arise: Why should I even doubt? What can doubt give me? And if someone brings thinking to its utmost, at the end the question will arise: Can that which I do not know be known through thought? And even if thought knows something, will it be truth?
Yesterday morning I hinted at a few things in this regard.
The process of thought brings you, on the road to the divine temple, only to a certain limit. The one who stops in thought gets lost in philosophy, in systems, but never reaches religion. The one who stops in belief gets lost in superstitions. The one who stops in thought gets lost in philosophies and ideologies. But the one who goes beyond thought reaches where the temple of religion is. It is helpful to understand a little more about thought, so that we can understand what it means to rise beyond it.
First: no thought is ever original. There is no such thing as an original thought. All thoughts are stale, accidental. Thoughts too are learned. Through thinking we can only rearrange what we already know. That which we do not know, the unknown, cannot be grasped by thought. In fact, that which is not known cannot even be thought. How will you think what is unknown? What is known can be thought about; you can take sides for or against it. But that which is unknown—how will it become the subject of your thought? How will you think it? How will you contemplate it? How will you reflect upon it? The unknown lies outside thought, and Paramatma is the unknown. Hence, through thought no one has ever known Paramatma.
Second: thoughts are borrowed—bartered, gathered from a thousand streams that rush toward our mind. Within, a certain arrangement, a certain harmony among these thoughts settles in. It may appear utterly new, but it will still be nothing but a composite of many old elements. Someone says, I have conceived a new thought: a golden horse with wings, flying in the sky. Surely a golden, winged, sky-flying horse has never existed. It looks original. But it is not original at all. We know horses. We know gold. We know wings. We have seen flight. By combining these four, we create a flying golden horse. Nothing new is there—only four old things torn and twisted together. Thoughts only appear new. The truly new is no-thought. There is no original thought; the original is thought-free insight. Thought is stale, borrowed, secondhand. It comes from others. And the reach of thought goes no deeper than memory; it does not penetrate our life-force. It touches the screen of memory and goes no farther.
A friend of mine, a doctor, fell from a train. His memory was injured. He forgot all that he knew. All his medical training was gone. Not only that—he forgot even his name. He forgot his father. Two days later I went to see him. We had studied, played, fought together since childhood. He had forgotten me too. He looked at me as no stranger has ever looked and said, Who are you? How did you come here? He asked those around him, Who is this man? There was no recognition in his eyes. That thread of memory was broken—the tape of his remembrance snapped; or the connection was lost. He was there—his consciousness, his prana, everything—but memory was not. With memory gone, thought too was gone. The depth of our thinking is exactly the depth of our memory. Thought does not enter the depths of life. It does not reach being. It reaches only to the functional apparatus called memory that surrounds our life-force. Beyond that it has no access. However much we think, thought does not go deeper than memory. And what has memory to do with truth?
What has memory to do with truth? Truth resides very deep; memory is only on the surface. Like waves upon the ocean’s surface—what relation have waves with the ocean’s depths? Waves do not even know what the depths are. They are above, raised and erased by gusts of wind. Memory too is on the surface of consciousness, created by the buffeting winds of outer events—happenings, experiences, heard words, learned knowledge. On that uppermost layer of consciousness, memory is formed in reaction to the outer winds. This memory knows nothing of who is in the depths. It cannot connect with that deep ocean. Memory connects with the outer world, not with the inner self.
So if one is stuck in thought, one is stuck in memory. And one cannot go deeper. Our being is deeper. Then understand also: what is thought but a joining of words? If truth were contained in words, all would have attained truth. A man studies, listens, understands, thinks—and says within: Brahman alone is truth. He learns the phrase: Brahman is truth, the world is maya. He repeats it again and again. Memory becomes strong. It begins to appear to him that the world is unreal and Brahman is the real. But this is not experience, not truth. It is a feeling produced by repetition, an illusion born of reiterating words. Repeat any word intensely, and its illusion is created.
How then to know truth? How to enter the divine temple? Thought brings you to the door. Those who stop at thought do not go far. They go a little and stop. Thought is not enough. One must move further—and to move further, thought must be dropped. One climbs steps—placing the foot on one step; to set it on the next, the previous must be left. Just moments ago you stood on it; now it must be released. To grasp the higher rung, the lower must be let go. The foot that stands on the step of thought must be lifted. The step that follows is called dhyana. Dhyana means thoughtlessness. Dhyana means the total silence of consciousness—total silence, where there are no words, no thoughts, no logic; only seeing is, only pure beholding, the sheer experience of looking.
Dhyana means: entry into no-thought. But under the name of meditation so many things circulate which are not meditation. First let us see what meditation is not; then what it is will be easy to understand.
Dhyana is the third sutra. Dhyana takes you beyond the limit where thought leaves you at the threshold of the divine temple. Thought leaves you at the door; dhyana takes you in. To see what dhyana is not is necessary, because many pseudo-meditations are in vogue. First, under the name of meditation, concentration is taught—which is not meditation. Ordinarily people think becoming concentrated is meditation. But one-pointedness is still a state of thought, not of meditation. If you concentrate upon a single thought, it is not meditation. It is simply another state of thought—one wavering, the other focused. Whether you concentrate on Rama, on Krishna, on Christ, on Allah, on Om, or on any one word or idea, it still remains thinking circling around a chosen object. Where thought is present, meditation is not.
Yes, concentration has consequences. If only one thought remains in the mind, the mind quickly slips into trance, into sleep, into hypnosis—into unconsciousness. Mind craves the ever-new. Its nature is restlessness. Change delights it. When something remains unchanged, it becomes bored, uneasy, and falls asleep to escape.
You saw a film today. Tomorrow you must see the same film again—today it felt fine; tomorrow, all right. The day after, forced again—you will say, please, I do not wish to go. And if a law is passed that you must see it all your life, you will go mad or rebel. Repetition bores the mind; it grows weary. In that weariness, it chooses to sleep, to forget what is fixed. A mother lulls her child: Royal son, go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep—and the child sleeps. She thinks it is because of sweet music. No—the child is bored, crowded by monotony. Repeat the same word, the same monotonous tone, and sleep is born.
People do not doze in religious discourses without cause. The same things heard a thousand times. Again the same. There is nothing new to hear. Some doctors even suggest that those who cannot sleep should go to religious gatherings; when tranquilizers fail, stories of Rama and Krishna still work, because they have been heard so often that nothing remains but to sleep.
The mind wakes to the new and sleeps before the repeated. Holding it to a single repeated object sends it to drowsiness, then to sleep, then to hypnosis. The science of hypnosis says: repeat anything intensely and you can induce unconsciousness. Repetition is a drug for sleep.
For thousands of years, repetition and concentration have been mistaken for meditation. But repetition and concentration are hypnotic sleep, not meditation. In the West, Mahesh Yogi and others have popularized such practices; but these are only methods for trance. They have nothing to do with meditation. Their effect in the West has a simple reason: the West is sleepless—tense, anxious, stressed. People are stretched tight from morning to night; even at night sleep does not come. They need a tranquilizer. Mantra-japa helps sleep; but sleep is not meditation.
So first grasp it well: concentration is not meditation. Concentration means the repetition of one thought. Dhyana means no-thought—not the repetition of thought.
Understand through a small image. A child plays in a room with a hundred boxes. He jumps from one box to another, to a third, to a fourth, to a fifth. The boxes change; the child keeps jumping. This is play. Now remove ninety-nine boxes; one box remains. The child still jumps, but now upon a single box—jumping continues. Then remove even that last box; there is nothing left to jump upon. The child sits down. Jumping is no longer possible. Mind has three states. First, a restless mind: from one thought to another. Second, a concentrated mind: held to one thought, yet still jumping upon it. Third, dhyana: when even that one is removed and there remains no object at all. The mind sits, becomes quiet, silent.
The first state is restlessness. The second is concentration. The third is meditation. Dhyana is the state in which no object remains in consciousness—no subject, no thought, no word—total silence. Concentration is merely a fixed state of thought.
A river rushing—that is restless mind. A river stopped, frozen into a lake—that is concentration. No river at all, evaporated in the sun, leaving only the empty bed of sand—that is meditation. Unless one distinguishes concentration from meditation, one cannot understand what meditation is. Most people mistake concentration for meditation and waste their time inducing drowsiness and sleep. There is a certain pleasure in sleep; life is full of pain and trouble, and to forget is tempting.
A man drinks—and for a while he is outside the tangle. While he is in the wine, there is no sorrow, no worry, no trouble—no sick wife, no child needing medicine, no hunt for a job. From soma to lysergic acid, from the rishis of the Vedas to the newest seers of America like Aldous Huxley, humanity has searched for new tricks of oblivion. Why do we call drinking bad? Because it makes you forget life; it does not transform life. Forgetfulness changes nothing; meanwhile time is lost that could have been used to transform suffering.
One forgets for three hours in a cinema. Another forgets by bhajans and kirtan. Someone forgets by drumming and dancing wildly. One forgets in the twist, one in jazz, one in the corner repeating Rama-Rama. Another takes alcohol; another mescaline, marijuana, opium, bhang, charas, ganja. These are all efforts to forget. They may differ in quality—good or bad—but essentially they are attempts to evade the pain, the darkness. Forgetting does not remove darkness, does not shatter ignorance. When you return, the pain and the ignorance are still waiting.
Meditation is not forgetfulness. Meditation is the effort to know the truth of life—not to forget it. It is not forgetfulness; it is total remembering, total awareness of the truth of life. Therefore concentration and meditation are opposites. If you are practicing concentration, you are only trying to fall asleep. You will not enter meditation, truth, or the divine temple by that path.
Many go into intoxication and think they have reached the temple. That is why thousands of so-called saints smoke ganja and opium. They believe this too is a short cut to the same. No intoxication leads anywhere. One must arrive awake, filled with awareness. Awareness is needed, not unconsciousness. Thus meditation is not concentration.
Then what is meditation? Meditation is awareness. It is becoming fully aware of all the objects of mind. There are countless thoughts in the mind—and we are asleep.
One day Buddha was speaking. A man in front was shaking his big toe. Buddha stopped speaking and asked him, My friend, why is your toe moving? The moment Buddha asked, the toe stopped. If it were you, and your toe was moving, and Buddha said so—it would stop at once. The man said, I do not know; it was just moving. Buddha said, Strange. It is your toe and you do not know? Is it your toe or someone else’s? Are you conscious or unconscious?
A man sits on a chair shaking his legs; he does not know why. Another keeps changing posture again and again; he does not know why. Buddha asks, Is this toe yours or another’s? He says, Mine. Then Buddha says, If it is yours and you do not know, and it moves without your knowing—why did it stop when I asked? He answers, As soon as I became aware, it stopped. While I was unaware, it continued.
Just as the toe moves, legs move, and all the leaves and branches of life move, so the mind moves totally unaware. We have hardly ever peeped within to see what goes on there. If you sit quietly with paper and pen for ten minutes and honestly write whatever arises in the mind, it will be hard to show even to your closest friend; he will say, Let us go to a doctor—your mind is unwell. We carry a deranged mind within. What all goes on there! The difference between a madman and us? Only that we manage to repress what moves within; it does not spill out at once. Sometimes it does spill—at the wrong time. We call it anger: a slip, and that which was moving within burst out. Normally we keep it held.
Every person carries his madness, restrained. The one who manages we call normal; the poor one who cannot, we call mad. The difference is of degree. Any of us can go mad any moment if a little push comes and the contained floods out.
This mind we carry—ever weaving endless thought-nets—have we ever watched it awake, or do we always keep our back to it? Those who have investigated the mind say: it is hard to find a person who has not committed suicide a thousand times within, who has not murdered many times within. It is hard to find anyone who has not, in some corner of the mind’s darkness, desired every possible crime. All crimes, all sins, all insanities exist in seed-form within everyone. Their waves keep moving. But we never watch them awake. We keep our back turned. We are afraid they might become visible.
Perhaps that is why we keep ourselves busy for twenty-four hours—lest the inner be seen. If it appears, we may tremble: Is this madness within me the one I celebrate as myself? Is this the I whose ego I proclaim? Because of this fear we remain outside, never going in.
As if a house were filled with snakes and scorpions and the owner locked the door and sat outside—knowing what is within, he refuses to speak of it. If someone reminds him, he says, All is well inside—let us speak of something else. For as soon as the inner is evoked, all the snakes and scorpions begin to stir in the mind. He asks for a device to forget: Tell me how to dissolve in devotion, how to surrender, how to be free of the world. He does not have the courage to see the darkness within. He does not know that unless he gathers courage to see, those snakes and scorpions will never depart. They were born from his not-seeing. If I enter there with full awareness, they will vanish as darkness vanishes before a lamp.
All the sickness, the poison of our mind, has arisen from our non-presence. We are absent. Everyone is absent from the one place that is crucial—the place we never visit. There is no proxy for us there. It remains dark because we never go. We roam everywhere but one place: the place that I am. Meditation means going there. Meditation means awakening to what is in the mind. Meditation means being aware of whatever is there—good or bad, dirty or insane. But only one who is free of suppression toward the mind can be filled with awareness. Hence, in the process of meditation, no suppression—the first sutra. Because the one who has suppressed will be afraid to go in; he has piled up filth there. We have all suppressed—anger, sex, greed. So much has accumulated that even mustering courage seems hard. We do not wish to go there.
But remember: to reach the door of the divine temple, you will have to pass through yourself. No one reaches God without going through oneself. From wherever you start, there is only one passage—the I am. I myself am the door, and through this door one must pass. And this is precisely the door we fear—because of suppression. We have hidden everything there and refuse to look.
Meditation means: not suppression, but awakening. Whatever is in the mind, do not push it down into the unconscious, do not drive it into darkness where it will not be seen. As when someone builds a cellar under the house and throws all the rubbish there—even murders and thefts. The cellar fills up. He tells no one that it exists, for there he has done too many dark deeds. He himself is afraid to go there.
We have divided our mind into two rooms. The small upper room—the drawing room—where we receive guests and speak fine words. The most false part of the house is the drawing room. Curtains and furniture are for show, to deceive those who come from outside. But they too are not deceived, for their drawing rooms are the same. The real house begins behind. There we ourselves fear to go.
Call one part conscious—the tiniest slice, one out of ten if the mind were divided. The other nine are dark—the unconscious, where the real man lives, ferocious, primitive, the one who has been for thousands of years. No culture, no civility there. That is the real. We spend our lives trying to remain in the drawing room, utterly false. Then we never reach truth. Those nine parts must also be known. There is no escape from them. People flee from these nine parts through alcohol—and also through mantra-japa. Through prayer and worship—and through mescaline and LSD. Through cinema, music, dance. Man runs away from the very compartments he lacks the courage to see.
But a seeker must see. Must know. Must enter. He must go into his whole mind where he has never gone. Meditation means: a conscious entry into the unconscious. It means I will uncover whatever is within and encounter it; I will see what it is. For this it is essential that I do not suppress. Essential that I take no judgment about any tendency of the mind. The moment I judge, I will hide what I call bad and present what I call good. Division begins again. The one who would meditate must not decide in advance: this is bad, this is good. He must only know what is. Whatever is, I will know it. Whether sin or virtue, I will not judge. Without judgment, I will go in and see what is.
A great wonder happens. The person who does not pre-judge—bad or good, sin or virtue, to do or not to do, to be or not to be—whose mind is not divided, his mind becomes indivisible, one. And the one who, with utter impartiality, gathers the courage to witness the mind in its totality—such a person’s life starts to undergo a revolution of which we know nothing. As soon as impartial witnessing begins, all that looked heavy yesterday begins to depart, like shadows. This impartial witnessing—without choice, without judgment—the courage to see whatever is in the mind, is the mark of the meditator. Meditation means: I will know and see whatsoever is within me, without condemnation and without justification. Only this much—that I will stand face to face before all the layers of my mind.
But we are of a strange disposition: we cannot stand before anything without taking sides. Even beside a rose we cannot remain without saying beautiful. We cannot simply stand, saying nothing, for a few moments. Whether the rose be beautiful or not, we must decide. We cannot look at the moon without judging. The face of a woman, or of a handsome youth—immediately the desire arises to possess. Our habit is instant partisanship. We do not remain impartial even for a moment.
Meditation means: impartial, staying with what is—no hurried decision. For the moment you decide, meditation departs and thought begins. Know this: the moment you judge, thought has entered, attention is finished. If I say, The rose is beautiful, thought has begun; the rose is gone, the seeing is broken, meditation ends. If I do not say the rose is beautiful, if I do not say I have seen such a rose before, if I do not say I will pluck it for my buttonhole—if I say nothing, the rose is there and I am here, and between us no thought—then the meeting between the rose and me happens in meditation. In the same way, stand before all the flowers and thorns within your mind. See them. In this direction practice is needed—outside and inside. Our habit is to put a word instantly on whatever happens. And that word stands at the door; vision ends, meditation dissolves.
Meditation means: wordless, thoughtless, witnessing—the thoughtless witness. No thought, only witnessing. Practice this outside—passing a flower, beside your wife, with your child, when your husband is in front, when a stranger passes on the road, when you see a star in the sky. Be silent; see what is—and watch what happens when there is only seeing. Then practice inside—when thoughts move, when anger moves, when sex moves. See what smoke is rising within; silently recognize it. Recognition is possible only by total seeing, allowing nothing to come in between. Practice outside and inside. Then there will be freedom from thought, and the capacity to know what is will deepen. A new door will open, of which we have had no taste—a rare possibility of beauty, a breeze of truth unknown to us. Flowers will bloom that we have never known, fragrances for which we have no name, the unknown entering us.
Only through meditation does the unknown enter. Thought is only the repetition of the known. When we stand before a flower and recognize—seen before, known—we are referring to old flowers and old thoughts. This very flower has never been seen before. Even God must be seeing it for the first time. To see this flower, all other flowers must vanish, all words must depart; I must stand face to face with it. As with the flower, so with oneself—before all the states of mind. Stand directly, see whatever is, neither frightened nor flattered. Much that seems bad may appear, but it seems bad only because of our notions. Much virtue, much love may appear; do not be flattered. The moment you are flattered or repulsed, the mind wavers, meditation dissolves, thought begins. Let there be no ripple of thought. Like a mirror, utterly clean of dust—walk toward seeing yourself. This process is called meditation. Meditation is self-observation. Meditation is witnessing toward oneself. Meditation is becoming a witness unto one’s own being.
Swami Ram went to America. People there were puzzled, for he always spoke in the third person. He would not say, I went somewhere and people abused me. He would say, Today it was delightful—Ram went somewhere and people abused Ram. People asked, About whom are you speaking? Ram means you, does it not? Ram said, Where am I in this? I stood aside and watched that Ram was abused. Ram became restless, Ram was full of anger. I stood aside and laughed—Good, Ram is caught today. What will he do? And I watched what Ram did.
People found it hard to understand. Have you ever dared to stand aside and see what your mind does—what this Ram does—when abuses are hurled? Have you ever become the third? If not, you cannot know meditation.
Meditation means becoming the third. We are always two. You come and abuse me—there are two people: you who abuse, and I who reply. But there is also someone else within me who sees that abuse was given, received, and returned. That third is also within you. Four are present—but for each, three exist. The abuser, the abused, and the watcher who sees both. That third must be cultivated—then meditation flowers. Meditation is the third becoming clear.
Experiment a little and you will be amazed. The leg is hurt, pain is there. Look—is there two, or three? There is pain; there is one to whom pain happens; and there is one more who sees both—the pain and the sufferer. That third, the witness, will manifest gradually as you remain a witness.
Alexander came to India. On returning, he remembered a promise to bring back a sannyasin. He asked in a village; there was one. He sent two soldiers with naked swords: Come with us—great Alexander will honor you in Greece. The sannyasin laughed and said, A madman calls himself great. They said, Do you know whom you call mad? You will be in trouble. It is an order—come. The sannyasin replied, Perhaps you do not know what sannyas means—it means one who obeys no one. We obey no orders. They said, Do you not know Alexander will have your head cut off? He said, Tell Alexander a sannyasin knows his head is already separate—how can it be severed now?
Alexander came himself. He said, You are not afraid? Do you see this sword? The sannyasin said, Afraid? I am watching the one who is afraid and the one who frightens. As for me—I have nothing to do with either. I see both.
Who knows if Alexander understood. He said, Best that you come, or I will finish you. The sannyasin said, Finish me—what joy it will be. You will see the head fall, and I too will see the head fall. We both will see it fall.
This inner seer—this is meditation. This capacity to see—this is meditation. To stand and watch whatever is happening—this is meditation.
The third sutra is: meditation. Watch life. Watch the mind. Watch whatsoever is happening. Become a seer. Do not fight, do not judge, do not choose—just watch.
But we find even watching a play difficult. We go to the theater and forget that we are only spectators, that on the screen there is only a play of light and shadow—no one is there. A tragic scene occurs, and in the hall people wipe their tears, hiding from one another. Darkness helps. If films were shown in bright light, the pleasure would be less; we would fear being seen wiping our tears—tears for a screen, for lines of light. There is no one there.
Vidyasagar once went to a play in Calcutta. He became so excited. On stage a villain pursued a woman, harassing her. In the dark forest he seized her and was about to rape her when Vidyasagar forgot himself, leapt onto the stage, took off his shoe and began to beat the actor. The actor showed more intelligence than Vidyasagar; shoe in hand, he bowed to the audience and said, I have never received a greater award for acting. A wise man like Vidyasagar took it for truth. I will keep this shoe as my greatest prize. Vidyasagar too realized his mistake—he had forgotten it was a play.
We cannot remain witnesses even there—then how will we in life? We take drama for life. The meditator must come to see life as drama. Someone insults you—what is it really? Sounds, vibrations striking eardrums. Someone throws a shoe that hits your head—what is it? Some atoms pressing upon other atoms—what else? Even if someone cuts off your head—the sword passes through, because there was space; parts separate because they are distinct—what else?
In the practice of meditation one keeps inquiring—what is it? One remains awake. Then slowly something wondrous happens; doors of wonder open. As witnessing grows, a unique peace descends, a stillness, a void. Space appears in between—inner sky. Things begin to be seen as they are. The drama becomes drama. And when the drama is known as drama, the possibility arises of that which is truth descending. As long as the false is taken as true, truth remains false for us. When the false is known as false, then the unveiling of the real begins. Dhyana is entry into the doorway—but not yet merging with the divine.
Dhyana is entry at the door. I may enter your house, but that is not yet entering you. Complete entry into the divine temple happens only when one becomes one with the divine.
So the third sutra is: dhyana, witnessing. Through it the door will open; you will reach within. Yet a distance remains—God is other, you are other. You are in the temple, but still He is He and you are you. Truth is seen, but it remains the other. This distance too must dissolve—only then can truth be lived in its totality. Not only known, but lived. Not only seen, but become. Full entry into Paramatma is not possible without becoming Paramatma oneself. One must rise even beyond meditation.
Tomorrow, with the fourth sutra, we will move beyond meditation—Samadhi.
I am grateful for your silent listening, and I bow to the Paramatma dwelling within all. Please accept my pranam.