Indifference to the mind is meditation

Question 1:

The disciple who can wait will find all his questions answered at the right moment.

But waiting is a great quality: it is deep patience, it is great trust.

The mind cannot wait, it is always in a hurry. It knows nothing about patience; hence it goes on piling questions upon questions without getting the answer.

It is something very delicate to understand: that it is not the answer that is significant but the right timing, your readiness to receive it; otherwise it will just go above your head.

The impatient mind is too much occupied in questioning. It forgets that questioning in itself is a meaningless activity -- the real thing is the answer, but for the answer you need a certain silence, peace, openness, receptivity. The mind is incapable of these qualities; hence, for thousands of years the mind has been asking and asking but it finds no answer.

In the world of the mind there are only questions.

And in the world of the heart there is only the answer, because the heart knows how not to ask, how to wait: let the spring come by itself; wait like a thirsty earth... the rainclouds will come; they have always been coming. There is no need to distrust, because there is not even a single exception where trust has failed, where waiting is not fulfilled, where patience is not immensely rewarded.

The functioning of the heart and the mind are totally different; not only different, but diametrically opposite. The mind creates philosophies, theologies, ideologies -- they are all questions that don't have any answer. The heart simply waits. At the right moment, the answer blossoms by itself.

The heart has no question, yet it receives the answer.

The mind has a thousand and one questions, yet it has never received any answer because it does not know how to receive.

Your mind is full of questions yet you have been observing that by and by, they are being answered. This should create in you a new insight, a new trust. A new dimension is opening: that you have just to wait, alert and awake, and if it is needed the answer will come to you.

You are also seeing that most of the questions that the mind is filled with are silly.

They are -- not most of them, all of them are silly for the simple reason that mind does not go through the discipline of asking receptively. It is more concerned with questions.

Even while the answer is being given, it has moved on to another question. Perhaps, listening to the answer, it has created ten more questions out of the answer itself.

Questions arise out of the mind just like leaves grow on the trees. And slowly slowly, they become more and more silly -- because it is very difficult to find many significant questions, and the mind is not satisfied with a small quantity of questions. It is greedy. It wants to ask everything; it wants to know everything without being ready to understand anything.

There are few significant questions.

And there is only one really fundamental question.

But that small quantity does not satisfy the greed of the mind.

You will be amazed to know that the English word `greed' comes from a very strange word in Sanskrit -- and if you want to see those people from where this word has come, Bombay has most of them. In Sanskrit the vulture is called giddha, and from `giddha'

comes greed. And Bombay has the greatest number of vultures in the whole world, because Bombay has the greatest number of Parsees. There is a certain relationship between Parsees and vultures.

Parsees have a very strange way of disposing of their dead: they don't burn them like the Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas; they don't bury them like the Christians and the Mohammedans and the Jews. They have a unique way of their own, and they have a certain rationale for it. In their cemetery... and Bombay has the biggest, because Bombay has the biggest population of Parsees.

In their cemetery they have a big well. There are steel rods on top of the well. The dead body is put on those steel rods, and between the steel rods there are gaps. All around, there are big, ancient trees and thousands of vultures are sitting there, waiting for some poor Parsee to die -- the vultures need food every day; Parsees supply the food. The dead body of the Parsee is put on those rods on top of the well and the vultures eat whatever is edible. And whatever is not edible -- bones, et cetera -- goes on falling through the gaps between the rods into the well.

On the surface it looks very strange -- "What are you doing?" -- but the Parsees have their rationale. In this world everybody has some reasonable grounds for every superstition.

They say, "Because we have been eating everything, now it is our duty to be eaten." A beautiful logic: you have been eating for your whole life. If you are a meat-eater you have been eating animals. If you are a vegetarian, then you have been eating vegetables; that too is life. For your whole life you have been eating, and it is natural to be part of the same circle by being eaten. According to the Parsees, this is the most natural thing.

And I think people who believe in nature will support their idea -- because to burn a body is to destroy food, is to unnecessarily kill a few vultures, or to keep them hungry.

In a Hindu village, vultures don't exist. What will they do there? At the most, once in a while a cow dies, or a buffalo, and they can eat that.

Now there is a widespread movement amongst intellectuals around the earth that we should not break natural cycles anywhere. For our whole lives we have been eating -- now it is time that we should be eaten. And anyway you are dead; why unnecessarily destroy good food for the vultures?

Just go here in Bombay, you will see a beautiful scene -- you will not see it anywhere else in the whole world -- so many vultures together just waiting for poor Parsees to die, praying to God, "Finish someone today." And God seems to listen to the vultures; some Parsee is bound to come.

The English word `greed' comes from the same root as `giddha', the vulture.

The vulture is one of the ugliest birds you can conceive of.

And greed is certainly one of the ugliest things in man that you can think of.

But the mind is a vulture. It is never satisfied with anything. You go on giving to it, it goes on taking, and it goes on asking for more. It never feels grateful; it is always complaining that it is not enough. Nothing is enough to the mind.

Question after question -- meaningful, meaningless, relevant, irrelevant -- and not even a small space for any answer to enter into your mind. It is so crowded with questions.

The heart knows no questions.

And this is one of the mysteries of life: that the mind questions the whole life long and never receives any answer, and the heart never asks but receives the answer.

But there is one thing to be remembered: the mind is noisy, there is maddening noise. The heart may be receiving the answer, but because of the noise of the mind you may not come to feel that the answer has been received, that you are carrying it with you, that you are pregnant with it.

Not only does the mind disturb your peace, your silence; it disturbs it to such an extent that the heart -- which is capable of listening to silence, waiting, receptive -- is denied all connection with your being. The mind monopolizes your being; it simply puts the heart aside. And because the heart is silent, and a gentleman, it does not quarrel; it simply goes down the street, waits by the side of the road.

Mind wants to occupy the whole space.

The disciple has to understand this whole situation -- that the dictatorship of the mind has to be destroyed, that the mind is only a servant, not a master. The master is the heart, because all that is beautiful grows in the heart; all that is valuable comes out of the heart - - your love, your compassion, your meditation.

Anything that is valuable grows in the garden of the heart.

Mind is a desert, nothing grows there -- only sand and sand and barren land. It has never given any fruit, any flower. You have to understand it: mind should not be supported as much as you have been supporting it up to now. Mind has to be put in its right place.

The throne belongs to the heart.

And this is the revolution through which the disciple becomes a devotee: when the heart becomes the master, and the mind becomes a servant.

This has to be remembered: that as a servant, the mind is perfect. As a master... it is the worst master possible; as a servant, it is the best.

And the heart -- wherever it is, either on the throne or on the street -- is your only hope, the only possibility for you to be bridged with your being, to be bridged with existence. It is the only possibility for songs to arise in you, stars to descend in you, for your life to become a rejoicing, a dance.

You are asking me how to stop this mind, its constant questioning, its silly crowd of questions.

That is where everybody takes the wrong step. If you try to stop it, you will never be able to stop it. Ignore it. Be indifferent to it. Let it chatter.

Be aloof, unconcerned -- as if it does not matter whether it chatters or not, whether there are questions or not. Only this aloofness, this ignoring -- Buddha has given it the right name, upeksha -- this indifference slowly, slowly makes the miracle happen.

What you want to achieve by fighting is not possible, because when you fight with someone you are giving energy to the enemy. You are giving attention, and attention is food; you are getting entangled with the mind, and mind enjoys a good fight. It has never happened that anybody has been able to stop the mind by fighting with it. That is the most important thing to understand: don't take any step towards fighting.

Just ignore, just be aloof, just let the mind do whatever it wants to do. When the mind feels unwelcomed, when the mind sees that you are no more interested in it, that it is pointless to go on shouting; you are not even hearing it, that you are not even curious about what is going on in the mind -- it stops.

It happened... and I have remembered it because the boy is here today. He is my sister's son.

He was very young, six years old. We had gone to see the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and his father was driving. His father went to make inquiries, to say that I had come, and ask whether the chief minister was in the house or not.

At that very moment -- the boy must have been feeling sleepy in the jeep; we had come a long distance -- he fell asleep and hit his head on the dashboard in front of him. He looked at me. I didn't pay any attention, I looked outside the jeep. He was going to cry and create trouble -- he looked again and again I looked outside.

Then his father came out. I went in for a half-hour meeting. Then we went home. It was almost two hours later, as we arrived home, that he started crying. As soon as he saw his mother he immediately started crying. I said, "What happened?"

He said, "I hit my head on the jeep."

I said, "That happened two hours ago!"

He said, "I know, but there was no point in crying because twice I looked at you and you looked outside the window. What is the point in crying with such a man? You did not even ask what had happened... you had seen that I had hit my head. Now my mother is here; now I can cry."

Even that small child could understand that when there is indifference, it is pointless to make any fuss; it is as if there is nobody in the jeep.

When you are indifferent, the mind starts feeling as if there is nobody -- what is the point of all the questions? Because you are interested, curious, you get involved, you are giving juice to the mind.

Indifference to the mind is meditation.

And all those questions will disappear, because they are absolutely meaningless. And when the chattering of the mind has disappeared, there is a silence, a peace, so that you can hear the still, small voice of your heart.

Only the heart knows the answer... it already knows it.

And if you are with a master, the heart simply says yes to the master, because the heart knows the answer already. Perhaps the master is putting it in a better way, more articulate, but the heart is in complete agreement. And that agreement dissolves all distances between the master and the disciple.

Then silence is not only silence, it is also communion.

Then things are not said but heard; then things are not said but shown.

And when the heart is totally willing, life is such a simple, uncomplicated phenomenon that you cannot conceive of anything more simple.

It is the mind which creates complications, goes on creating complications and questions.

Mind's whole expertise is to create complications.

If you want to live a simple, a beautiful, a silent, a joyful, a blissful life, let the mind be ignored and let the heart be restored to its status as master. This is the whole work of a religious seeker; nothing more is needed.

Question 2:

Purna, the process of dreaming and the process of remembering the dream are two things.

Very few people remember dreams; that does not mean that they don't have dreams.

Everybody has dreams -- but remembering a dream is a totally different thing. Even the people who remember dreams remember only the last dreams, the dreams of the early morning when you are just waking up, because the mechanism of memory is part of the conscious mind. Dreams happen in the unconscious; the unconscious doesn't have any memory mechanism. Only the conscious mind has the memory mechanism.

So if a dream is happening in the unconscious mind but very close to the conscious mind, then it remembers it faintly, vaguely.

In the morning when you are waking up you are coming closer to the conscious mind -- from the unconscious, back to the conscious mind. The last dream, the tail end, will be remembered, because it will be very close to when you wake up. So even people who remember, remember only the last dreams. They have been dreaming for almost six hours through the whole night; if they are sleeping for eight hours, they are dreaming for six hours. You can catch hold of just a faint reflection of the last dream, but if you don't catch hold of it for a few seconds, it will be gone. As you become more awake, you are farther away from the unconscious.

So to different people, different things will be happening.

There are people who wake up very slowly; they don't wake up quickly, in a jump.

The people who wake up quickly, in a jump, will have a different kind of memory from the people who wake up very slowly. They will have another kind of memory.

It also depends on what kind of dreams you are having.

Because you are a therapist -- and not only a therapist but my therapist -- your repression cannot be superficial. Because my whole teaching is: Don't repress; live out every instinct, every feeling, every emotion. If you are living out your emotions, your feelings, then you will not have superficial dreams; your dreams will be very deep. They will be less in the unconscious and more in the collective unconscious -- so deep that you will not be able to remember them. Unless a special effort is made, they cannot be remembered. And the only effort that is possible is hypnosis.

If you are hypnotized and led by your hypnotist deep into your unconscious and asked, "What is happening there? What kind of dream is going on?" only then will you be able to express it to him. When you wake up, you will not be able to remember what you have said either. It will take a long training between you and the hypnotist: after each hypnosis he has to suggest to you that you will remember it when you wake up. He has to emphasize it every time so much that it becomes a deep-rooted impression. Then you may be able to remember your dreams.

But there is no need. Unless you are especially working on dreams, for some specific purpose, there is no need.

I am emphasizing that you should ignore the mind. Now the unconscious, collective unconscious, cosmic unconscious -- these are all parts of the mind, and you are trying to remember them. Just the conscious mind is enough to torture you -- why do you need to remember the unconscious mind?

In the East we have been aware that the conscious mind is not the only mind. Below it, there is the unconscious mind; then below that is the collective unconscious mind; then below that is the cosmic unconscious mind. Above it, there is the superconscious mind; above that there is the collective superconscious mind; above that there is the cosmic superconscious mind. And when I say `mind' I mean this whole range -- they are one entity, one rainbow.

Ignore them all. There is no need to remember.

Many people are in madhouses because by some accident their collective unconscious has broken up and released its memories. Now their conscious mind is not capable of holding those memories, the weight is too much; that's what is driving them mad.

For example, in your collective unconscious mind, the woman who is your wife now may have been your mother in your past life. If this memory comes to your mind then you are going to be in trouble. Then how are you going to behave with your wife, as your mother or as your wife? Just being your wife was enough; just being your mother was enough too -- now she is both. And you will be crushed, because you cannot have a sexual relationship with a woman who is your mother... the whole inhibition of thousands of years. And how will you manage your wife? Because she has no remembrance; she is going to say, "You are crazy, just forget all about it" -- but you cannot forget about it.

Nature has a beautiful arrangement: with each death, a thick layer of forgetfulness comes over your memories. You are carrying all the memories of all your lives. But a small human being finds it so difficult to live with a small conscious mind of one life -- if so many lives burst upon him, he is bound to be insane. It is a natural protection.

It happened....

I was in Jabalpur and a girl was brought to me. She must have been, at that time, nine years of age. She remembered her past life completely -- so realistically that it was not a memory for her, it was a continuity. It was just some accidental error in nature that there was no barrier between the past life and this life.

There is a place just eighty miles away from Jabalpur, Katni. She was born in Katni and she remembered that she had her family in Jabulpur. She remembered the names, she remembered her husband, she remembered her sons, the house -- she remembered everything. One of my friends brought them to me.

I said, "This is strange, because the people she is remembering are living just three or four blocks away from my house." They had a petrol pump, so I used to go for petrol at their petrol pump every day. But I said, "You wait. You wait in my house and I will call them -- the Pathak brothers -- I will call them and we will see whether this girl remembers them or not."

So they came with their servants and a few other neighbors. There were twelve, thirteen people in the crowd, so that they could see whether she could find out.... She immediately jumped, and said, "Brother, have you recognized me or not?" She caught hold of both brothers, among thirteen people, and she inquired about the mother and the children... and father had died, and she was crying. It was not a memory, it was a continuity. They took her to their home and then it was a problem: the girl was torn apart about whether to go to this family's house in Jabalpur and live there, or to go back to Katni to the new family where she had been born.

Of course, in this family she had lived for seventy years, so the pull was more towards the past-life family. And in the new family she had been born only nine years before; there was no pull -- but that was her family, her real family. This other family was only a memory, but to her, it was such a heart-rending problem.

And both the families were disturbed about what to do: if she remained in Jabalpur, she would remember the other family continuously, worry about what was happening to them and feel, "I want to go there." If she was there, she would be thinking that she wanted to be in Jabalpur.

Finally I suggested that the only way -- it was a freak case, there was nothing spiritual in it -- was that she needed a deep hypnosis for a few days, so the barrier could be created.

She had to be hypnotized to forget the old and the past. Unless she could forget the past, her whole life was going to be a misery.

Both families were ready to accept that something had to be done. She was hypnotized continually for at least ten days, to forget. It took ten sessions to create a small barrier so that the old life's memories didn't float into the new life.

I have been inquiring about her. She is now perfectly okay -- married, has children, has forgotten completely. Even when those people come to see her, she does not recognize them. But her barrier is very thin and artificial. Any accident, and the barrier could be broken, or any hypnotist could break it very easily within ten sessions; or some great shock, and the barrier could be broken.

There is no need for you to remember. It is perfectly good.

We have to get free from the mind.

The East has known all the layers of the mind, but the East has emphasized a totally different aspect than the West: ignore it -- you are the pure consciousness behind all these layers.

Western psychology is just childish, just born at the end of the last century. It is not even a hundred years old. They have taken up the desire to enter into dreams and to find out, to dig deeper into what is there in the mind.

There is nothing. You will find more and more memories, more and more dreams, and you will destroy the person because you will make him vulnerable to an unnecessary burden which has to be erased.

One has to go beyond mind, not within the mind.

And you don't have any memory as far as the state of beyond mind is concerned.

Just drop the idea of the mind. Don't meddle with it; it is getting into an unnecessary trouble and nightmare. You have to surpass the mind, you have to transcend the mind.

Your whole effort should be one-pointed, and that is how to be a no-mind: no dreams, no memories, no experiences.

Then you are at the very center of your being.

Only then do you taste something of immortality. Only then, for the first time, do you know what intelligence is.

Question 3:

The master never does anything.

And if you are remaining aloof, nothing will ever happen to you.

Your receptivity and openness is not needed for the master to do something; your openness and receptivity are needed so that the very presence of the master can provoke something to happen in you -- and these are two different things. Doing something is a very positive effort, and just allowing your presence for something to happen in you is a totally different thing. There is no positive effort. The effort is on the side of the disciple.

So what you have discovered, you have discovered wrongly: it is not a two-way affair, not a two-way road; it is a one-way street. It is up to you to be open, ready, available.

The presence of the master is there, just like the light -- you open your eyes and the light is there.

The light does not travel to your eyes in particular. You can keep your eyes closed and the light will not knock on your eyelids: "Please open your eyes." You can keep your eyes closed; the light is very democratic, it will not interfere. But if you open your eyes you will see the light; not only the light, but in the light you will see many other things too -- the flowers, the people, the whole world. Still, you cannot say that light has been doing something to you. Something is transpiring in you. It will not transpire without the light, so certainly the presence of the light is needed -- but just the presence is needed, not the action.

Action is needed on your part, not just presence, because you can be present here and closed -- nothing will evolve out of it.

The disciple has to do everything.

And this is the beauty of the whole phenomenon. Otherwise, you will become a puppet in the hands of the master. Then he will do things that he wants to do; then he will make you the way he wants to make you -- the ideal, the mold. He will destroy your individuality, he will destroy your freedom. No master worth the name can do that.

The master can give his whole being to you, can make it available -- but only as a presence, not as an action.

The doing is on the part of the disciple. You have to be receptive, you have to be silent, you have to be meditative, you have to be trusting everything, because it is your life and you should be responsible for it. You are not a painting that the master painter can change in whatever way he wants.

I have heard that in a small school, a beautiful painting was shown that had been made by the drawing teacher of the school. He was showing the students the art and the craft of painting. And he said, "It is such a delicate phenomenon. You look at the painting."

And they said, "Yes, we can see a man with a sad face."

The painter went to the painting and just gave one or two touches with his brush and the whole painting changed -- the face was smiling. And because the face was smiling, the whole complex of trees and flowers and stars now had a different effect. Everybody was impressed: the teachers were impressed... parents had come; they were very much impressed. Just one small boy was not interested.

The painter asked, "Are you not interested?"

He said, "I am interested. But this is not something great; my mother does it every day."

He said, "What do you mean? Is she a painter?"

He said, "She is not a painter. But I go home smiling, and with one slap the whole world changes into tears and tears and crying. And if you want me to show you, I can show you here, because I have also become an expert. Every day it is happening."

He simply went and hit a small girl sitting there, and the girl started crying. And she had been smiling and enjoying, but suddenly the hit, and tears came to her eyes and she started crying. And because of her crying and this boy's craftsmanship, the whole crowd fell silent.

And even the drawing teacher said, "This is right. I was thinking that I had some great art. Your mother knows better. Without brush, without color, just a hit and everything changes; the whole world changes."

The master can change you, but that change is very costly. He can do many things, but you are becoming more and more of a slave. You had come to be liberated, and it is going the wrong way.

No authentic master has ever done anything. He has made himself available in many ways. He has taught you how to be available, how to be open, how to be receptive -- and then, whatever your potential is will start growing. In the blissful showering of the presence of the master your potential will grow, but it will grow according to its own intrinsic qualities. Nothing is imposed from outside.

So please note it down: your observation is not right, it is not two-way traffic. From the master's side there is no traffic at all.

You have to do something. Certainly the master is present and available, his love is available. In his shadow, in his loving radiation, you will start growing. But he will not touch you; he will let you be whatever you can be. Whatsoever is your destiny, you should not be carried away from it.

He is just a silent help: without touching you, he transforms you. That is the miracle of the master.

Question 4:

My presence has to be only a lesson.

Once you have learned the art of opening, the art of being silent, it does not matter whether I am present or not. If you have really learned it, it will happen anywhere. It may be a little difficult in the beginning, but soon you will get the knack of it.

It is almost like swimming. The teacher who teaches swimming just gives you courage and trust, and is there so that nothing goes wrong. Just in three or four days' time, one hour each day, you start swimming. And the moment you start swimming you are surprised -- why didn't you start it from the very beginning? There is nothing to it. It's just that in the beginning you were not moving your arms artfully, it was haphazard. Just in three or four days you have learned to move your arms more smoothly, more harmoniously; now the teacher is not needed. Now you can go anywhere, for any distance, because the depth of the bottom does not matter; you are swimming on the surface. The depth can be one thousand feet, ten thousand feet, five miles deep; it does not matter, because you are always swimming on the surface.

And once you have learned... it has not been heard of in the whole history of humanity that anybody who has learned swimming has forgotten it. You may not swim for fifty years, and when again somebody pushes you into the swimming pool, you start swimming. You cannot say, "For fifty years I have not practiced" -- it is not a question of practice at all. It is a knack: once you have known it, you have known it; there is no way not to know it anymore.

Meditation is also a knack.

You are not to become attached to the presence of the master, because that will be learning something wrong. You have to learn how you are opening. Forget about the master; that is his business, to be present or not to be present. Your business is to see how you are opening, what happens in your opening, and then try on your own, when you are alone to see whether it can happen or not. It is bound to happen.

Maybe in the beginning you will feel that it is a little difficult; a certain attachment grows, unconsciously. But you cannot say that the teacher has to follow you everywhere, wherever you go swimming. That will not do. Then each swimmer will need one teacher; it will be too much. Each meditator will need one master with him; it will be too costly, and there is no need at all. You just have to see what is happening in you, and let the same happen when the master is not present.

Or, you can visualize. He will be present somewhere, a few miles away. Here, it is a few feet away. It is only a question of visualizing -- just visualize that your master is a few feet away....

Space makes no difference, but you have to learn what happens in you so that you can repeat it in the absence of the master. Otherwise, one can become attached to things which were to help you... but now they will hinder you. The presence of the master was to help you; now it has become a hindrance -- because the master is not there, so you cannot meditate.

Remember: no attachment should grow, no clinging should grow. They are all against your independence, your freedom, your individuality. And whatever is happening here can happen anywhere; it just needs a little understanding of how it happens here.

Just try. Even if you fail a few times, don't be worried. It is a knack which will come to you.

And once it happens without any support from outside -- even the smallest support, such as the presence of the master -- you will feel a great joy, because a great freedom has happened.

Now there are no barriers for you. Wherever you are you can be in meditation, you can be in silence, you can be peaceful. Now you can carry your paradise within you.

And unless that happens, a disciple has not matured.

Beyond Enlightenment