Empty Your Cup

Togetherness

Jesus must have lived with some Sufis in Egypt. He carries a few of their teachings in The Bible. One of them is: Whatsoever you do with your right hand, don’t allow your left hand to know about it. This is a Sufi tradition: Live completely in the dark, so nobody knows and intruders don’t come, pseudo-seekers don’t knock, and foolish people don’t trespass on your time and your energy.

Then second, if somehow you come to know about a Sufi master, years you will have to wait with him – as an apprentice, not for meditation. If he is a shoemaker, you will have to learn shoemaking for years. And they are hard taskmasters. Sometimes ten, twelve years will pass and you will be simply working on shoes and preparing shoes, and the question should never be raised, unless the master himself asks, ‘What have you come for? What do you want?’

He will watch you. He will be with you. In that togetherness something will grow, by and by, through very indirect methodology – for example, shoemaking. It is a meditation because the disciple is told to do only the thing that is given to be done; no thinking is allowed. And remember this, if you work with your hands there is much possibility for the mind to remain vacant. If you work with the mind, then there is less possibility of course because the mind will have to think.

Sufis work with their hands – carpet-making, shoe-making, carpentry, or anything whatsoever, but with their hands. Hand and head are the two poles, and if your energy is moving through the hands, the head by and by subsides. And if for years, twelve years – such a long time! – You are simply working with the hands, you completely forget the head. There is no need of it. The head becomes non functioning, and that is what is needed for a disciple: the head must be in a nonfunctioning state. Thinking should stop. The mind should become like a no-mind. Not filled with thoughts, dreams, ideas. Completely empty.

While the disciple is an apprentice, working on shoemaking, the master goes on watching what is happening in his head. Is the energy completely moving into the hands?

Now physiologists agree that if you work with the hands, the same energy moves from the head. The energy is the same. Your right hand is joined with your left brain, your left hand is joined with your right brain. Try this: whenever you feel that there is too much thinking, and you cannot stop it, rub both your hands fast, make them hot by rubbing, and suddenly you will feel the head has stopped, the energy is moving in the hands.

People who cannot sleep – this is the best medicine for them yet known, better than any tranquilizer. Just close your eyes and rub your hands, and feel them getting warmer and warmer and warmer – and through rubbing they will get warmer – and you put into your imagination also that they are getting warmer. When the hands are warm, the head becomes cool.

These are the two polarities. Hands should be warm, and the head should be cool. But when there is too much thinking, the head will be warm and the hands will be cool. That is unhealthy. You are going towards madness. A moment will come when the head starts functioning on its own, unconnected with the whole body. That is what madness means: a part has become autonomous, a part has become dictatorial.