VBT – Meditation 40.1
Become Totally Alert
This sleepiness can be broken. You have to use certain techniques. This technique says, IN THE BEGINNING AND GRADUAL REFINEMENT OF THE SOUND OF ANY LETTER, AWAKE. Try with any sound, with any letter – Aum, for example. In the beginning, when you have not yet created the sound, AWAKE. Or when the sound moves into soundlessness, then awake.
How can you do it? Go to a temple. A bell is there or a gong. Take the bell in your hand and wait.
First become totally alert. The sound is going to be there and you are not to miss the beginning.
First become totally alert, as if your life depends on this, as if someone is going to kill you this very moment, and you will be awake. Be alert – as if this is going to be your death. And if there is thought, wait, because thought is sleepiness. With thought you cannot be alert. When you are alert, there is no thought. So wait. When you feel that now the mind is without thought, that there is no cloud and you are alert, then move with the sound.
Look when the sound is not there, then close your eyes. Then look when the sound is created, struck; then move with the sound. The sound will become slower and slower, subtler and subtler and subtler, and then it will not be there. Then go on with the sound. Be aware, alert. Move with the sound to the very end. See both the poles of the sound, both the beginning and the end.
Try it with some outer sound like a gong or a bell or anything, then close your eyes. Utter any sound inside – Aum or anything – and then do the same experiment with it. It is difficult; that is why we do it outwardly first. When you can do it outwardly, then you will be able to do it inwardly. Then do it.
Wait for the moment when the mind is vacant, then create the sound inside. Feel it, move with it, go with it, until it disappears completely.
Until you can do this… it will take time. A few months will be needed, at least three months. In these three months, you will become more and more alert. The pre-sound state and the after-sound state have to be watched. Nothing is to be missed. Once you become so alert that you can watch the beginning and the end of a sound, through this process you will have become a totally different person.
Sometimes this looks very absurd. Such simple techniques, how can they change you? Everyone is so disturbed, in anguish, and these methods seem so simple. They seem like tricks. If you go to Krishnamurti and tell him that this is the method, he will say, “This is a mental trick. Do not be tricked by it. Forget it, throw it!”
It looks so. Obviously, it looks like a trick. How can you be transformed through such simple things?
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