The Track – In Gita Verse 18.25 That action performed in illusion, in disregard of scriptural injunctions, and without concern for future bondage or for violence or distress caused to others is said to be in the mode of ignorance.
Krishna says that the mind is creating disturbance to consciousness. Because of this disturbance men act from illusion, bondage etc.
In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 17.12, blog I wrote – Man has been conditioned down the centuries for goals, destinations, purposes, meanings – that’s how man has lived hitherto, with the goal-oriented ideology.
Because of goal oriented ideology, the mind is the first disease, the basic disease in a way. Why is the mind a disease? – Because the mind is just a disturbance. Mind is just a disturbance in consciousness. It is not your nature; it is just a disturbance. The moment there is no disturbance, there is no mind. And this state of no-mindedness is the state of consciousness – the expansion of consciousness. You drop into yourself: not into dreaming, not into projections, into yourself. Consciously, with full alertness, you come to your center the moment your mind is not there.
Meditation means how to be not a mind. How to be not a mind! Meditation means how to create the state of no-mindedness.
It doesn’t mean unconsciousness. It means conscious and still, without any disturbance in the consciousness; conscious with no ripples, with no waves, with no vibrations; conscious as a deep, calm, silent pool with no ripples on it, with no disturbances on the surface; just a calm silent pool with no breeze to disturb, just mirror like.
With mind one goes on being disturbed more and more, and then this whole process of disturbance is self-perpetuating. One disturbance creates ten more, and those ten create a hundred more. This is self-perpetuating, and then you are in a vicious circle. With this mind something can be done.
That is, you can travel outwardly, you can go more into the world. But the more you go into the world the farther you are from yourself. And the farther you have gone, the more the track back is lost.
Then you only remember that there is a home, but there is no way to get back. And we continue to remember there is a home; there is a homesickness always somewhere present. There is a home and one has to go back.
But there is no way, and we continually try to find the home with the mind itself, which has led us astray. Then we go into scriptures, then we go into words, then we go into philosophies, metaphysical systems. And then we are lost even more in it, even more deeply, and the track is not found at all. The track can be found only if you begin to feel and understand that mind is the disease, so you cannot go back with the mind; the mind cannot be used as a vehicle, it cannot be used as a passage. It is not a door towards consciousness. It is a door towards the world, towards objects – not towards subjectivity. That’s why it is said to be a disease, a complex.
The second is PRANA, life itself; rather than life, the lust for life. There is a deep fear – fear of death – and there is a deep lust to continue anyhow, to live anyhow. Life itself seems to be the end.
Life cannot be the end itself; if life itself is the end, then one will have to exist on the periphery.
Something must transcend life itself, something must be higher than life itself; otherwise, life can have no meaning. If you say that life itself is the end, then life is bound to be meaningless, because meaning comes from the beyond – always from the beyond. Something for which you exist gives the meaning – that’s why we create many so-called meanings all around us.
Money becomes the meaning because you live for it; power becomes the meaning, prestige becomes the meaning. You create meanings, but those are just bogus meanings – because really, if life is at peril, you will be ready to lose power, money, everything. So you just deceive yourself, but those deceptions can never become the reality. Life remains above them; they are not beyond, they cannot be. That’s why in the West, there are so many feelings of frustration and meaninglessness.
That’s an obvious corollary of life being taken as the end.
Life originates in something and then again dissolves into something. Life comes up and then goes down and is dissolved. So the original source of life must be beyond life. It comes out of it and then goes back, just as a wave raises itself and then falls down into the ocean; the ocean remains beyond the wave. The wave comes and goes; it is there this moment, and the next it is gone. The ocean is behind, beyond.
Life is just a wave. Existence is beyond life.
Krishna says that one who begins to be too involved and too attached, too infatuated with life, loses the existential source of life itself.
Tags: The Track
