What is meditation?

MEDITATION

is

a state of no-mind.

 Meditation is a state of pure consciousness with no content. Ordinarily, your consciousness is too  full of rubbish, just like a mirror covered with dust. The mind is a constant traffic: thoughts are moving, desires are moving, memories are moving, ambitions are moving – it is a constant traffic! Day in, day out. Even when you are asleep the mind is functioning, it is dreaming. It is still thinking; it is still in worries and anxieties. It is preparing for the next day; an underground preparation is going on.

This is the state of no meditation. Just the opposite is meditation.  When there is no traffic and thinking has ceased, no thoughts move, no desire stirs, you are utterly silent – that silence is meditation.  And in that silence truth is known, and never otherwise. Meditation is a state of no-mind.

And you cannot find meditation through the mind, because mind

will perpetuate itself. You can find meditation only by putting the mind aside, by being cool, indifferent, unidentified with the mind; by seeing the mind pass, but not getting identified with it, not thinking that I am it. Meditation is the awareness that I am not the mind. When the awareness goes deeper and deeper in you, slowly slowly, a few moments arrive – moments of silence, moments of pure space,  moments of transparency, moments when nothing stirs in you and  everything is still. In those still moments you will know who you are,

and you will know the mystery of this existence.

A day comes, a day of great blessings, when meditation becomes your natural state.

Mind is something unnatural; it never becomes your natural state. But meditation is a natural state – which we have lost. It is a paradise lost, but the paradise can be regained. Look into the child’s eyes, look  and you will see tremendous silence, innocence. Each child comes with a meditative state, but he has to be initiated into the ways of the society – he has to be taught how to think, how to calculate, how to reason, how to argue; he has to be taught words, language, concepts. And, slowly slowly, he loses contact with his own innocence. He becomes contaminated, polluted by the society. He becomes an efficient mechanism; he is no more a man.

         

All that is needed is to regain that space once more. You have known it before, so when for the first time you know meditation, you will be surprised – because a great feeling will arise in you as if you have known it before. And that feeling is true: you have known it before. You have forgotten. The diamond is lost in piles of rubbish. But if you can uncover it, you will find the diamond again – it is yours.

It cannot really be lost: it can only be forgotten. We are born as meditators, then we learn the ways of the mind. But our real nature remains hidden somewhere deep down like an undercurrent. Any day, a little digging, and you will find the source still flowing, the source of fresh waters. And the greatest joy in life is to find it.

Meditation

Is

 not concentration

MEDITATION is not concentration. In concentration there is a self concentrating and there is an object being concentrated upon. There is duality. In meditation there is nobody inside and nothing outside. It is not concentration. There is no division between the in and the out. The in goes on flowing into the out, the out goes on flowing into the in. The demarcation, the boundary, the border, no longer exists. The in is out, the out is in; it is a non-dual consciousness.

Concentration is a dual consciousness: that’s why concentration creates tiredness; that’s why when you concentrate you feel exhausted. And you cannot concentrate for twenty-four hours, you will have to take holidays to rest. Concentration can never become  your nature. Meditation does not tire, meditation does not exhaust you. Meditation can become a twenty-four hour thing – day in, day out, year in, year out. It can become eternity. It is relaxation itself.___

Concentration is an act, a willed act. Meditation is a state of no will, a state of inaction. It is relaxation. One has simply dropped into one’s own being, and that being is the same as the being of All. In concentration the mind functions out of a conclusion: you are doing something. Concentration comes out of the past. In meditation there is no conclusion behind it. You are not doing anything in particular, you are simply being. It has no past to it, it is uncontaminated by the past. It has no future to it, it is pure of all future. It is what Lao Tzu has called wei-wu-wei, action through inaction. It is what Zen masters have been saying: Sitting silently doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Remember, ‘by itself' – nothing is being done. You are not pulling the grass upwards; the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. That state – when you allow life to go on its own way, when you don't want to direct it, when you don’t want to give any control to it, when you are not manipulating, when you are not enforcing any discipline on it – that state of pure undisciplined spontaneity, is what meditation is.

Meditation is in the present, pure present. Meditation is immediacy. You cannot meditate, you can be in meditation. You cannot be in concentration, but you can concentrate. Concentration is human, meditation is divine.