Failure Of Thinking – In Gita Verse 11.49 You have been perturbed and bewildered by seeing this horrible feature of Mine. Now let it be finished. My devotee, be free again from all disturbances. With a peaceful mind you can now see the form you desire.
Arjuna while seeing the Universal form, opulence from, of Krishna has undergone big turmoil. When he asked Krishna to show his opulence form. The unexpected hugeness and Krishna holding everything within him, which Arjuna never thought. Now Krishna says to Arjuna, as you had gone through all this I will now reveal to you the peaceful form which you are desiring. Means now you will experience silence. Krishna allows Arjuna to go through all this so that his mind can become undivided. He helped him to transcend his mind.
Knowing what thinking is, is the beginning of knowing what meditation is. Thinking is the negative part; meditation is the positive part. Thinking means mind in turmoil; meditation means mind in silence. But the turmoil is the beginning of silence, and only after the storm there is silence.
If you can think, then you are capable of meditation. If a man can be ill, then he can be healthy. Health becomes impossible only when you cannot even be ill. Then you are dead. Only a corpse cannot fall ill. If you can fall ill, then there is still hope. Then you are still alive.
And so is the case with thinking and meditation. Thinking is a mind which is ill – not at ease, not reconciled with itself, disturbed, fragmented, divided. Meditation means the division is no more, the fragments have disappeared into oneness – you are at ease, at home.
It is the same mind. Divided, it becomes thinking; undivided, it becomes meditation. If you can think, then you are capable of meditation, although meditation is not thinking. Thinking is an ill state of affairs, a pathology. But one can transcend it, and the transcendence is easy; it is not as difficult as you think. The difficulty comes because you don’t really want to go into meditation. Because in meditation not only is thinking going to disappear, you also are going to disappear. Only an ill man is, a healthy man disappears. In health you are not; you exist only in illness, you exist only in pain, in suffering, in hell. You can’t exist in heaven, because to feel one’s existence means to feel pain.
Have you ever not observed it? When you have a headache, then you have a head. When the headache disappears, the head disappears too. If your body is perfectly healthy and everything is running smoothly, humming smoothly, you don’t feel the body at all: you become bodiless. In the ancient Indian scriptures, health is described and defined as bodilessness: you don’t feel your body. How can you feel your body if it is not ill? Only illness creates knowledge; self-consciousness is created by it, self is created by it.
So meditation is not difficult if you really want to go into it. It is the simplest thing possible – the most simple, the most primal. In your mother’s womb you were in meditation. There was no distracting thought; you were not thinking about anything, you simply were. To regain that state of womb is what meditation is all about. When you see a person meditating, what do you see? He has disappeared into the womb again, he has made his whole body like a womb and he has disappeared into it. Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree…what is he doing? He has moved back to the source. He is not there. There is nobody sitting under the Bodhi Tree. That’s what a Buddha means: There is nobody sitting under the Bodhi Tree.
When Jesus goes to the mountains away from the multitude, where is he going? He is going inwards, he is trying to make contact again with the original source, because from that original source is rejuvenation. From that original source there is again freshness, vitality, and the waters of life are flowing again–one is bathed, one is resurrected.
In the world thinking is needed. In your inner being thinking is not needed. When you are communicating with somebody, thought is a must. When you are just – communing with yourself, what is the need of thought? Thought will be a disturbance.
Try to understand why thinking is needed and what thinking is. When there is a problem, thinking is needed to solve it. You have to go round about, look from every angle of the problem, think of all possible solutions. And then there are many alternatives, so one has to choose which one is the right one. And there is always the possibility of error, and there is always fear and anxiety – that is natural and still no guarantee that you are going to succeed in finding the solution. One gropes in the darkness, one tries to find a way out of it. Thinking is the confronting of a problem. In life there are millions of problems, and thinking is needed.
I am not saying thinking is not needed. But when you relate with the outside, it is needed. But when you are facing your own being, it is not a problem, it is a mystery. And let it be very clear what a mystery is. A problem is something that can be solved; a mystery is something that cannot be solved by its very nature. There is no way out of it, so there is no question of finding the way.
You are a mystery. It is never going to be solved, because you cannot go behind yourself, how can you solve it? You cannot stand outside yourself and tackle yourself as a problem, so how can you solve it? Who is going to solve whom? You are the solver, and you are the problem, and you are the solution. There is no division at all. The knower and the known and the knowledge are one – this is the mystery.
When the knower is different from the known, then there is a problem. Then there is something objective there. You can think of a way out, you can find out something which becomes knowledge. But inside yourself you are facing the eternal – the beginningless, the endless – you are facing the ultimate. You cannot think. If you think you will miss it. Only through non-thinking, you will not miss it. You can only see into it – with awe, with great wonder. You can go into it deeper and deeper, you can dive into it. You can go on digging, and the more you dig, the more you will understand that this is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. So thinking is irrelevant. And when thinking is irrelevant, there arises meditation.
The failure of thinking is the arousal of mediation.
When Krishna through his words says that – you can now see the form you desire – from that word itself Arjuna is calm. All of us who are practicing meditations know that they have experienced calmness as soon as they realize – Knowing what thinking is…
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