Mind Is Closed – In Gita Verse 10.12-13 Arjuna said: You are the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the ultimate abode, the purest, the Absolute Truth. You are the eternal, transcendental, original person, the unborn, the greatest. All the great sages such as Nārada, Asita, Devala and Vyāsa confirm this truth about You, and now You Yourself are declaring it to me.
This is the difficulty with us also. When God is showering grace we doubt. Arjuna says that now You Yourself are declaring it to me.
This whole tragedy, this dilemma of the human mind, is that the mind is closed, the mind is closing, and this mind goes on searching for that which will be freedom. This mind is an imprisonment, and this imprisonment goes on seeking freedom. This is the whole tragedy of human existence.
This mind is a prison. It cannot find any freedom anywhere. It must die before freedom comes to you. But we have taken the mind as; us. We are identified with it. This death of mind never happens to us, it never occurs to us.
Mind is something other than; me. But we go on being identified with the mind. How then can you come out of the past if you have become identified with the past? The one who has forgotten that he is a prisoner is the most imprisoned, because there is no possibility of freedom then. But even that prisoner may become aware. An even greater prisoner is the one who has become one with the imprisonment, one with the prison, who has become identified. The walls of the prison are his body. The whole arrangement of the imprisonment is his mind.
Be aware; be conscious of your mind. And you can be because you are something different. The dream can be broken because you are not the dream. The dream is occurring to you, but you are not the dream. You can shatter this imprisonment and come out because you are not the imprisonment. But there is such a long association with the body and the mind.
And understand this well: that the body is new; each birth is new; each beginning is new. But the mind is old. It is continuing from your previous, your past births. That is why if someone says your body is ill, you are never angry. You feel that he is sympathetic to you. But if someone says your mind is mad, your mind is ill, you are mentally deranged, then you become angry. Then you do not feel he is sympathetic to you. He does not seem friendly.
With the body this is a new association, only of this birth. Other bodies have died with which you have been in association. And this body association is broken with each death. It has been broken so many times that one thinks of himself as a body, even if he is not identified with his body. So if his body falls ill, something else has fallen ill.
Just be a witness. Whenever the mind is working, just sit aside and see it – how it works. Do not interfere: do not come in. The coming in will again create the strength which makes the identity. Do not come in, do not say anything, do not be a judge. Just sit aside as if the traffic is passing on the road, and you are sitting by the side just looking. Do not make any judgment. And if even for a single moment you can sit aside and look at the mind’s traffic, the continuous traffic, you will see the gap – the gap between you and the mind. Then this gap can be made greater, wider, and unbridgeable.
When the gap is such, when the interval is such, then there is no bridge. You have seen from all possible points that the circle of the mind is somewhere where you are not. You are always inside – somewhere else. When this is not a theory, but has become a fact, a realized fact, then you are open. Then you have jumped into an inner space, into the inner sky, into the inner space of the heart: you have jumped in. Now you are there and you are open.
You will know then that you have always been open. You have been sleeping in an open sky but dreaming that you are in prison, and thoughts are not any other substance than what dreams are made of. They are of the same stuff. In the day you call them thoughts and at night you call them dreams. But because they are transparent, identifying becomes easier. With anything transparent you can forget.
If there is a totally transparent glass between you and me, I will forget the glass. I will think that I am seeing you directly. It means that I become so totally identified with the glass that it is not there. My eyes and the glass have become one.
Thoughts are transparent – more transparent than any glass you can look through. They are not at all a hindrance then. That is why the identity becomes deeper. The transparency of thoughts is so close to you, you forget totally that there exists a mind which is always around you, always between you and the world, always – wherever you are: between you and your lover, between you and your friend, between you and your God, it is always there.
Wherever you go, your mind is a step ahead of you. It is not only that it follows you like a shadow. It is always one step ahead of you; it has reached before you. But you are never aware of it because it is so transparent. Whenever you are entering a temple, your mind has entered before you. When you are going to a friend, when you are embracing him, your mind has embraced before, and this you can know. Your mind is always rehearsing. That stepping ahead is always rehearsing. Before you speak, it is always rehearsing what to speak. Before you act, it is always rehearsing what to act. Before you do anything or do not do anything, it is rehearsing. The rehearsal is constantly going on. The rehearsal means that the mind is preparing itself before you, one step ahead. And that is a constant, transparent barrier between you and everything else that you will come across, that you will encounter.
Thus an encounter can never be real, authentic, because something else is always in between. Neither can you love, nor can you pray. You cannot do anything which requires the removal of this barrier, and the grace is not felt because the barrier is there, always surrounding you like a transparent shell. Grace, love or existence are not God’s attributes. They are divine in nature. But we are not open to them. When someone is open, he becomes the receiver. But then too we will not say that he has become a receiver. The ego is competitive. We will say he has received grace. We are denying him anything. Now we say, “God has become graceful to him.”
It is good that we should say God is graceful, because now nothing exists except God. Once the barrier is not, nothing exists except God. Once the barrier is not, there is nothing upon which to stand the ego.
He is a grace. If someone is ready to receive he is always giving. He is not even ready to give: He is giving. When you are not receiving, then too he is giving. When you are closed, then too he is raining His blessings are raining. Be open and know it. Be conscious and be open, and only then you can know what love is, what grace is, what compassion is. And they are one and the same thing. They are not different things. Basically, they are one and the same.
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