From Mind to Meditation

 

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From Mind to Meditation

Mind is misery and cannot be otherwise, because mind lives in desires, ambitions, it is always hankering for more - and that hankering cannot be satisfied. It always goes on jumping ahead of us, wherever we may be, the mind will be asking for more. It is always ahead of us. The distance between us and the mind always remains the same. We have this much money, the distance is there. We can have that much money; the same distance is there.

And it is this distance that creates the misery because it is always frustration, always a wound. It hurts that “I have not been able to fulfil myself,” but nobody has ever been able to fulfil anything through the mind. Mind’s very texture consists of unfulfillment. Hence the people who teach peace of mind are doing simply something very absurd. Nothing like that has ever existed. It cannot exist. Peace of mind is a contradiction in terms.

One can get out of the mind, and that is what meditation is. Meditation is not peace of mind, it is transcendence of mind, and that distinction has to be remembered. Priests of all religions tell us to do this, do that in order to get peace of mind – all that talk is balderdash! That is not the peace of mind the awakened ones talk about.

The awakened ones are all agreed about one thing, that we have to go beyond mind, only then there is peace. In mind there is no peace. Mind is the turmoil, the noise. It is the very hell, but it can be transcended. Because we are not our mind, we are something totally different, so we can step over it, we can go beyond it, we can use it as a stepping stone, as a ladder.

The hell of the mind can become a ladder to the heaven of meditation - and that’s the work that realised Masters are doing today: to help us use the mind in such a way that we can go beyond it. And once we have tasted even a single moment of that beyond-ness, of that transcendence, then everything becomes clear. Then one knows why there has been misery: it was the cause that was causing it.

The moment we are no more on the mind suddenly there is bliss. Not that we have to look for it - it is already there – it is just that we are so engrossed in the mind that we cannot look at our own centre. At the centre there is absolute bliss and nothing else. It is waiting for us. All that is needed is a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. Right now, our back is towards our centre and our face is toward the world - this is the state of mind.

Just the opposite is the state of meditation: when our back is towards the world and our face is towards the centre, suddenly we become aware of something that has always been there. We have not lost it even for a single moment. It is our very nature to be blissful. Meditation gives us only that which we have had always. It simply makes us aware of our reality. It does not bring anything new in. It simply reveals we have the treasure that is lying there ignored and neglected, and we are running all over the world for it. We will not find it anywhere else because it is within us.

Mind is misery, meditation is bliss. Mind is misery because it takes us away from our true nature and meditation is bliss because it brings us back to our true nature, it brings us back home.