Never meditate over something

Question 1:

Bodhi Deshna, the languages of the West have no equivalent to meditation. It is sheer poverty of experience and poverty of language - just as in the East you will not find many words which exist in the Western hemisphere, particularly scientific, technological, objective. So the first thing to be understood is that we are trying something almost impossible.

In the East we have all the three words that English has, but we also have a fourth word that English - or any Western language - has missed. And the reason is not just linguistic; the reason is that this kind of experience has not been available to them.

The first word is 'concentration'. In the East we call it ekagrata, one-pointedness.

The second word is 'contemplation'. In the East we call it vimarsh, thinking, but only about a particular subject. Not diverting, going astray, but consistently remaining with the same experience and going deeper and more comprehensively into it. It is a development of concentration.

The third word is 'meditation'. In the West, since Marcus Aurelius, meditation has been in a mess.

His was the first book written in the West about meditation. But not knowing what meditation can be, he defines it as a deeper concentration and a deeper contemplation. Both definitions are unjustified.

In the East we have another word, dhyan. It does not mean concentration, it does not mean contemplation, it does not mean meditation even. It means a state of no-mind. All those three are mind activities - whether you are concentrating, contemplating, or meditating, you are always objective. There is something you are concentrating upon, there is something you are meditating upon, there is something you are contemplating upon. Your processes may be different but the boundary line is clear cut: it is within the mind. Mind can do all these three things without any difficulty.

Dhyan is beyond mind.

This is not the first time that the difficulty has been raised - it has been raised by many people. After Gautam Buddha, his disciples reached China nearabout eighteen hundred years ago and they were faced with the same difficulty. Finally they decided not to translate the word because there is no possible translation. They used the word dhyan, but in the Chinese pronunciation it became ch'an.

And when fourteen hundred years ago the transmission of the lamp reached to Japan, again there was the same difficulty: what to do with ch'an? The Japanese had no equivalent or even similar word for it. So they also decided to use the same word; in their pronunciation it became zen.

And it is a strange story, that Gautam Buddha himself never used the word dhyan, because he never used the Sanskrit language. It was one of his revolutionary steps to use the people's language, not the language of the scholars. Sanskrit has never been a living language; it has never been used by the people in the marketplace. It has been the language of the learned, the scholars, the professors, the philosophers, the theologians, and there was a tremendous gap between the world of scholars and the world of the ordinary human being. It was tremendously courageous of Gautam Buddha not to use the language in which he was trained, but to use the language of the people. He used a language called Pali. In Pali, dhyan becomes jhan. Jhan and zen are not very far away, and ch'an also fits perfectly well between the two.

But the people who translated the first scriptures describing meditation thought that they understood the meaning of dhyan. Most of them were Christian missionaries, and naturally they had nothing beyond the conception of mind. Christianity has never thought about going beyond the mind; hence the possibility does not exist for anything like dhyan. The closest they could come was 'meditation'.

But the moment you use 'meditation', it becomes, automatically, meditation upon what? 'Meditation' is intrinsically objective - the word. Dhyan is not.

When you use dhyan, it does not mean on what. It simply means going beyond the mind. And the moment you go beyond the mind, you go beyond all objects. You simply are. Dhyan is not a process, but a state of being. Not a duality between subject and object, but simply a dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean.

Talking to you, when I say, "Meditate over it" I know the word I am using is wrong. But the reason that I am using the wrong word is because only the wrong people are around me! All the misfits of the world... they fit me very well! But you can be reminded that language should not become a barrier.

Meditation is a state. You are simply silent - no thought to concentrate on, no subject to contemplate, no object to meditate over. The other has disappeared. And remember, the moment the other disappears, you cannot exist. You are part of the other. Just as if light disappears, there will be no darkness; if life disappears, there will be no death; they are intrinsically joined together. "I" and "you"

can either exist together in a certain kind of coexistence or we have to disappear and then what remains is neither me nor you. What remains is the universal energy.

Meditation is disappearing into the universal.

Mind is the barrier. And the more you concentrate, the more you contemplate, the more you meditate upon something, you will never go out of the mind. And mind is the dewdrop I have referred to. So the first thing to understand is that for meditation, only in the East and particularly in India was the first word coined. Words are coined only when you have a certain experience which is incapable of being expressed in the existing language.

For ten thousand years India has been pouring all its genius into a single effort, and that is dhyan. If you use the word 'dhyan', you will not ask, "On what?" The very word 'dhyan' has no intrinsic duality.

Dhyan means simply silence. Utter silence, serenity.

Your question is significant. You are asking, "What does it mean to meditate over something?" It means nothing! Never meditate over something; otherwise it is not meditation.

You are saying, "I know what it means to think over something. That's what the mind is continuously doing - remembering, analyzing, planning, imagining, etcetera." Everybody knows that.

"I also came to know a state of meditation where the 'I' is no more."

My own understanding is, Bodhi Deshna, that up to this point you were talking about your existential experience; beyond this point you are simply borrowing words which you have not experienced. You say, "I also came to know..." Who will come to know? If the "I" is there, then the "thou" is there. If the experiencer is there, then the experience is there. Still the duality exists; you have not gone beyond the mind. You have not attained what you call a state of meditation.

You say "... where the 'I' is no more..." These are words which are beautiful and you must have loved them, but you don't know the meaning of them. This is the point I was talking about last night, when Bodhidharma chose as his successor the disciple who did not answer. Because any answer will be wrong; any answer will mean "I am still here." Any answer will mean mind is still functioning. Any answer is bound to be wrong. The man who was chosen as the successor had only tears of joy and fell at the feet of Bodhidharma in tremendous gratitude and thankfulness.

Nothing can be said.

The moment you say something you have to use the mind, you have to use language, and then naturally all the fallacies of language and all the boundaries of the mind come in.

You say, "... where the 'I' is no more..." If you are no more, then the question should have stopped here. Now who is prolonging the question still further? You go on, saying, "... where all the boundaries are lost..." Whose boundaries? Certainly you are there, seeing that boundaries are getting lost. But if you are there, boundaries cannot be lost. That is a contradiction in terms.

You are saying, "... just melting into the whole..." Have you ever heard any dewdrop shouting to the world, "Listen, I am melting into the ocean"? One simply melts and there is nothing to say.

And silence prevails.

But you go on describing all the beautiful words that you must have read, you must have heard: "...

just melting into the whole, a disappearing, weightlessness, light and bliss..." But to whom are all these experiences happening? You are no more! For all these experiences to happen, at least you are needed. Your mind is needed, your language is needed, and again you ask. If this were an existential experience, in the first place you would not have said anything.

I am reminded of a great Zen master who was sitting on the sea beach when a king happened to pass by. He had always wanted to see the master, but there was no time - the affairs of the kingdom and the worries and the wars... this was a golden opportunity. He stopped his chariot, got down and went to the master and asked him, "I don't have much time, but I want to know what the essential teaching is. I don't want to die ignorant."

The master remained silent.

The king said, "I can understand, you are very old and perhaps you have gone deaf."

The master smiled.

The king shouted in his ears, "I want to know the essence of your teaching!"

The master wrote with his finger on the sand, "Dhyan." He did not speak.

The king said, "But that does not make much sense to me. I have heard that word many times.

Elaborate a little more."

The master said to him, "I have already fallen for your sake. Otherwise the right answer was the first, when I had remained silent. But perhaps you don't know the communion that exists in silence. Out of compassion, I wrote 'dhyan'; now you want elaboration. I will try." He wrote again in bigger letters, dhyan.

The king was getting a little angry. He said, "What kind of elaboration is this? It is the same word!"

The master said, "You will have to forgive me, because I cannot fall more. Just for your sake, I will not let the centuries laugh about me. Nobody has said anything about dhyan, and nobody can say anything about dhyan."

Then what have the masters been doing down the ages? They create devices, situations in which they hope that perhaps in a thousand people one may get an insight. Those devices are not meditations. Those devices are only to bring you to a point in your own inner space where suddenly you realize and you say "Aha!" And the moment you understand the state of meditation, all methods of meditation become futile. Those methods are just arbitrary, created out of compassion for people to whom there is no other way to communicate a higher reality than the mind.

If what you say has been your experience, then the last part will be missing. You say, "But what, beloved master, do you mean when you say to us: 'Meditate over it'?" I say to you, "Meditate over it"

with all the explanations that there is no "it" and there is no meditator. When I say "Meditate over it"

I mean exactly the opposite:

No it, no meditator.

Just be.

But language is very poor. Even the very cultured languages are poor as far as the interior space of man is concerned. They don't have any indicative words because millions of people have lived but nobody has looked within. And when once in a while somebody looks within, he finds a space which cannot be translated in any way. You should understand not only your difficulty - your difficulty is very small - you should understand the difficulty of the man who has existentially reached the spot which he cannot translate.

One of the most beautiful mystics of India, Kabir, was asked the same question. He laughed and he said, "I cannot exactly give you an explanation, but I can give you some indication. It is like the experience of sweetness to a dumb man. He knows it, but he cannot speak it. The dumb man has no incapacity to experience the sweetness of something, but if you ask him what is his experience, he cannot express it." This inexpressibility has misguided many people. They think that a thing which cannot be expressed cannot exist. They think expressibility and existence are bound to be synonymous. It is not so.

What can you say about love? Whatever you say will be wrong. In fact, when you are in love you don't even say "I love you," because that seems so small in comparison to your experience. My own understanding is that people start saying to each other, "I love you" when love has disappeared.

The American philosopher Dale Carnegie - and a man like Dale Carnegie can be called a philosopher only in America - suggests in his book, which has sold second only to the Holy Bible:

"Whenever you come home, kiss your wife and say, 'I love you.' Whenever you go out of your home, kiss your wife and say, 'I love you.'" And there are millions of idiots who are doing it! The wife knows that this is only bluffing; the man knows it is all bluffing....

When you love, love is so tremendous and so vast that you simply sit hand in hand, not uttering a single word.

The actual experience of love has never been expressed by any poet and will never be expressed.

And love is part of our ordinary reality, just as sweetness or bitterness is. These inner spaces of meditation are not our usual experiences, so when somebody stumbles upon them he is at a loss to say what he has found.

There was a man in Japan whose name people have forgotten - they only remember the "Laughing Buddha" because he never said anything. Ask him anything, his answer would be the same: he would laugh. I think he was a very sincere man, utterly authentic. He did not compromise with any language, with any mind, with any expression. He simply laughed. And if you can understand through his laughter, his smile, it is up to you. Most of the people thought he was mad.

When Bodhidharma became the state of meditation, the first thing that happened to him was to laugh loudly. But Bodhidharma was a learned scholar, not like a simple, Japanese laughing buddha.

He did not laugh. He was asked later on by his disciples, "Please fulfill our curiosity: when you became enlightened, what was the first thing that you wanted to do?"

He said, "The first thing? I was no longer there - a tremendous laughter - but I had not to go on laughing. Otherwise people would think me just a madman. And my master's advice was, 'Even a very wise master rarely finds authentic disciples. If people start thinking you are mad, then the possibility of transforming anybody is almost negligible.' So I reminded myself: laugh within yourself as much as you can, but don't show it!"

Have you seen Bodhidharma's pictures? You can use those pictures to scare your children! Nobody has inquired what happened ... because he was a prince; this face that is depicted is not the face of a beautiful prince. But I know the reason. The reason is, he is holding his laughter inside! And because of this holding, his whole face has become distorted. His eyes are bulging. He has decided to remain serious. But I don't think anybody has ever analyzed why Bodhidharma, one of the most beautiful men, should have such a ferocious look. I can say with absolute certainty that he is in tremendous trouble. If he had laughed, you would have seen his beauty, but the master had said not to laugh, otherwise nobody was going to take him seriously. So the poor fellow became too serious, and when you are containing a belly laughter inside you everything becomes distorted.

Bodhi Deshna, first you have to sort out what is your experience and what is your knowledge.

Knowledge is simply bullshit. If you don't like the word bullshit, then you can call it cow dung, because that is a holy thing. And as you are scraping it away, you will find something of tremendous value, of your own experience. That experience will give you the meaning of meditation.

I cannot give it to you.

I can only show the path, how it is gained.

But to say what it is, I am as dumb as anybody else has ever been.

Wishing to surprise her husband with a new wig she has just bought, Ruthie Finkelstein strolls unannounced into his office.

"Do you think you could find a place in your life for a woman like me?" she asks sexily.

"Not a chance," replies Moishe. "You remind me too much of my wife."

So beware of wigs! And remember one thing, that whatever grows within you undistorted, unpolluted, unpoisoned by the millions who are around you, trust it. That is your potential. And remember that in your potential, you will not find your self. And the moment you don't find your self, there is lightness, there is blessing, there is ecstasy, but you cannot say it. The one who used to say is no more.

The Sufis have one of the most holy books in the whole world, perhaps the only holy book. For fourteen hundred years that book has existed. No publishing house has been ready to print it, because there is nothing in it to print. It is just absolutely blank.

The first master who had the book used to hide it under his pillow. His disciples were very curious...

"He says everything, but if you ask about the book he simply smiles." They tried in every way: they would leave the windows open so that in the night when there was nobody and the master took out the book to read it... They even climbed over his roof, removing a few tiles to see what was written in the book. But the master was reading next to a small candle, and it was very difficult to figure out what was there. And immediately, as soon as he became aware of anybody, he would close the book and put it under his pillow.

The day he died, nobody was so much interested in his death - everybody was interested in the book! They pulled out the book and they were amazed: there was not a single word written anywhere. Those who had the perceptivity could see the great compassion of the master, that he never said anything about the book. He left it for them to discover.

That book still exists - in a distorted form, because one publisher in England has published it but he was also worried about who is going to purchase it. A pseudo-Sufi has written an introduction and its whole history of fourteen hundred years. So there is something written to be read, but that has destroyed the whole mystery of the book.

You are the mystery which cannot be contained in words. And remember it as a criterion: whatever can be reduced to language is just your mind functioning. Meditation is a state when mind stops functioning; you are simply consciousness. Not even conscious of yourself, but pure consciousness.

Not even the slightest idea that "I am this," that "I am enjoying bliss and I am enjoying ecstasy."

When ecstasy comes, the flood is so big, "you" cannot remain in that flood. When blessings shower on you, you evaporate.

Gautam Buddha is right when he says, "I can only point to the moon, but don't cling to my finger.

The finger is not the moon." But you will be surprised about human stupidity. After Gautam Buddha...

because he said, "Don't make statues of me, because I am not here so that you should worship me.

I am here so that I can awaken you." But he has not prohibited... he may not have even thought about how deep is the ignorance of man. People created temples, with a finger carved in beautiful marble, and everybody forgot the moon. And people worshipped the finger and the whole point was missed! What Gautam Buddha was saying was that whatever he was doing for forty-two years continuously was nothing but a finger pointing to the moon. Leave the finger aside and look at the moon.

What I am saying to you is, don't get involved in the linguistics, in the language, in the grammar.

Those are all irrelevant. Just look at the moon. Even a finger which is not very beautiful can point to the moon - words are not very beautiful, but if you are wise enough you can leave the words and listen to the essence.

But don't start believing in that essence and talking about it. Let it become your experience. And even when it becomes your experience you will not be able to give any explanation to it. You can cry out of joy, you can laugh, you can dance... perhaps those gestures signify more beautifully than the ordinary language.

Meera danced - she is one of the most beautiful women in the world. Perhaps no other woman has reached to the heights Meera reached. And she was a queen, but the day the moment arrived and the space within her opened, she forgot all her palaces. She started dancing in the streets of her own capital. Naturally, the family was very much disturbed - a queen dancing in the marketplace!

They came to persuade her, but she said, "I have found something that can only be expressed by dancing. I will dance all over the country."

She danced all over the country. Nobody knows how many people understood the dance. She sang beautiful songs. They are not philosophical treatises, but they have beautiful gaps. If you can catch those gaps, you can enter into the unknown. Her dances are a language of a totally different caliber.

If you can understand her dance, perhaps something will start dancing in you. All that is needed is an openness, a receptivity, so that her dance can trigger the dormant energy in your being. And if you can also dance, you will have communicated, you will have understood what meditation is.

And here there is not one Meera, there are many. If you cannot understand meditation here, there is not much possibility to understand it anywhere else. The world is too worldly; and their antagonism towards me is because I am trying to take you away from the crowd on untrodden paths where no guide exists, no maps exist. And the crowd is worried. Whether the crowd is of Christians or of Hindus or of Buddhists, it doesn't matter. The crowd does not want anybody to get out of its fold; that reduces its political power.

All your religions are simply political powers; in the name of religion the greatest cheating and exploitation of humanity. I want to take you away from the crowd, whichever crowd you belong to.

I respect the individual, because only the individual can know what meditation is and only the individual can know the beauty, the ecstasy, the dance of this immensely beautiful existence. Crowds have never become enlightened, it has always been the individual.

I create the individual.

Just the other day, one of my old sannyasins, Amrito from Holland, told Hasya that he is writing a book called TEN YEARS OF PREPARATION. He is a man of great intellectual capacity, an intellectual giant, but his heart is just like that of a small child. Because of his intellect, he has been going to all kinds of people - Da Free John, J. Krishnamurti, whenever he hears of somebody he will immediately rush there. In these ten years he must have encountered many so-called enlightened people.

He had a personal interview lasting one hour with J. Krishnamurti, and he showed the script to Hasya. Krishnamurti talks about me: "The gentleman in Poona is just a ladder. As far as I am concerned, I am an elevator."

I have sent a message to Amrito that I don't think of it as a criticism of me, I accept it as a compliment!

With a ladder you are free; it is not so with an elevator. In an elevator you are encaged, you cannot go anywhere, and the elevator never goes anywhere - it simply goes up and down. And Krishnamurti, for ninety years, was going just like an elevator, up and down, up and down. With an elevator you are not the master; you are subservient to a mechanical device which depends on many complexities - electricity, engineering, electronics. You can get stuck in the middle and you cannot do anything.

With a ladder, you are absolutely free! You are the master: you can take the ladder wherever you want, you can leave the ladder wherever you want. The ladder will not cling to you and the ladder will not ask you for any kind of surrender. I love the idea! I am certainly an old-fashioned ladder.

My whole effort is to make masters of you. Krishnamurti has not even been able to make disciples of you.

I have called Amrito tonight to ask, "What other nonsense have you been listening to from these so- called enlightened people? You are my disciple and you have to finish your book with my declaration that you are now a master! Without that, the book will remain incomplete. But first tell me what all these idiots have been telling you so I can answer them; otherwise your book will remain incomplete."

There was a man in Bombay, Nisargadatta Maharaj. Nobody knew this big name; he was known to the masses as "Beedie Baba" because he was continuously smoking beedies. You can find in every village such kinds of beedie babas. I think India has seven hundred thousand villages and each village must have at least one; more is possible. And Amrito wrote a few days ago to me, because another young Dutchman became very much involved with Beedie Baba... The man seems to be very sincere, but the trouble is that the people who come from the West have a very childlike heart, very trusting, and they are unaware that in India spirituality is just a routine. Everybody talks about great things and their lives are as ugly as possible.

When Beedie Baba said that he would speak only to this young Dutchman, naturally his ego must have felt tremendously vast.

The crowd that surrounded Beedie Baba was also of the same quality... rickshaw wallahs waiting for their passengers, sitting by the side of Beedie Baba. And when he said he would not speak to anybody unless it was this Dutchman... So he spoke to the Dutchman, who has now compiled books on Beedie Baba.

Now in India it is almost parrot-like, but to the Westerner it seems to be a tremendous revelation - when Beedie Baba said, "Aham brahmasmi; I am God, I am that" the young Dutchman immediately wrote a book: I AM THAT! Because for the West, spirituality is a foreign affair, just as for the East, science is a foreign affair.

I have heard: In a factory in Bombay, they installed a very costly mechanism. Two days it worked, and then it stopped. It worked for two days because the expert was present, and the moment the expert was gone the mechanism stopped. They phoned the expert - "What to do?"

He said, "I will have to come and it will cost a lot of money, ten thousand dollars."

But to keep the factory closed was even more costly, so they had to allow the man to come. And the man came and just hit the machine and it started working! The industrialist asked him, "Just for this hitting you are costing me ten thousand dollars?"

He said, "It is not for the hitting. For hitting it is only one dollar, but to know where to hit it costs money."

When Amrito's letter came to me about this Dutchman, saying that "Many sannyasins are going to him, and I am also going to him," I talked about it. He heard it, and he took the tape to the man.

The man heard it, and he was very grateful but baffled also, because he was gathering a big crowd of disciples. But because he felt baffled and he was grateful that I had talked about him... I would like Amrito, when he goes back, either to bring the man to me or send him to me. Because I know where to hit!

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.