treat another. But you don’t believe it so deeply. That’s just a comfort, an escape,
a worthless word.
Find out what it means to die—not physically, that’s inevitable—but to die to
everything that is known, to die to your family, to your attachments, to all the
things that you have accumulated, the known, the known pleasures, the known
fears. Die to that every minute and you will see what it means to die so that the
mind is made fresh, young, and therefore innocent, so that there is incarnation
not in a next life, but the next day. To incarnate the next day is far more
important than in the future, so that your mind is astonishingly innocent. The
word innocence means a mind that is incapable of being hurt. Do you understand
the beauty of it? A mind that can never be hurt is an innocent mind. Therefore a
mind that has been hurt must die to the hurts every day so that it comes the next
morning fresh, clear, unspotted, with no scars. That is the way to live. That is not
a theory; it’s for you to do it.
That is a mind that is without effort. We have understood how effort comes
into being when there is conflict, when there is the observer and the observed. So
from that you have order, because order comes when you understand what
disorder is. Your life is disorder, but when you understand it, not intellectually
but actually, out of that comes order. And that order is virtue; that order is
rectitude. It’s a living thing. A man who is vain tries to have humility. See the
contradiction. I am vain and I have tried to become humble. In that attempt to
become humble there is a conflict. Whereas if I face the fact that I am vain and
understand that and go beyond it, then there is humility without any attempt to be
humble. So there must be the understanding of oneself completely. There must
be order that is not habit, that is not practiced, that is not the cultivation of some
virtue. Virtue comes into being like a flower of goodness when you understand
disorder in your life. Out of disorder comes order.
Then you can begin to inquire into what it is that mankind has sought
throughout centuries upon centuries, asking for it, trying to discover it. You
cannot possibly understand it, or come upon it if you have not laid the foundation
in your daily life. And then we can ask what meditation is. Not how to meditate
or what steps to take to meditate or what systems and methods to follow to
meditate, because all systems, all methods make the mind mechanical. If I follow
a particular system, however carefully worked out it is by the greatest, purest,
intellectual guru you can possibly imagine, that system, that method makes the
mind mechanical. And a mechanical mind is the most dead mind. And that’s
what you are all seeking when you ask how to meditate. At the end of a year of
practicing you will have a dull, stupid mind, a mind that can escape, that can
hypnotize itself. And that’s not meditation. Meditation is the most marvelous
thing. We will see what meditation is not; then you will know what meditation is.
Through seeing what it is not, through negation, you come upon the positive. But
if you pursue the positive it leads you to a dead end.
We say that meditation is not the practice of any system. You know people
who sit and become aware of their toes, of their bodies, of their movements, who
practice, practice, practice. A machine can do that. Systems cannot reveal the
beauty and the depth of the marvelous thing called meditation. Meditation is not
michael s
(Michael S)
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