Buddha Block

Every Addiction

A few people are just chewing gum. You take their gum and see how miserable they become!

Immediately they start thinking, “Life is useless. There is no meaning in life. Where is my chewing gum?”

The chewing gum keeps them engaged, and that’s how cigarettes keep them engaged. That’s how people go on gossiping with each other. That keeps them engaged. Nobody bothers whether it is true or false, that is not the point. The question is: How to keep engaged and away from yourself?

So the workaholics are against meditation. Every addiction is going to prevent you from becoming a meditator. All addictions have to be dropped.

But to be total in your work is a totally different thing. To be total in your work is not addiction, it is a kind of meditation. When you are totally in your work, your work has a possibility of perfection, you will have joy arising out of a perfect work.

If you can be perfect and total in work, you can be total in no-work — just sitting silently, totally silent. You know how to be total. You can close your eyes and you can be totally in. You know the secret of being total.

So to be total in work is helpful in meditation. The workaholic cannot meditate, he cannot sit silently even for a few minutes. He will fidget, he will change his position, he will do something or other — look into this pocket or that pocket, and he knows that there is nothing in those pockets. He will take out his glasses, clean them, put them away, and he knows they are clean.

These are the workaholics.

But a man who is total in his work is not a workaholic. He can be total – in anything, he will be total. He will be total while he is sleeping, he will be total while he is going for a walk. He will be just a walker, nothing else – no other thoughts, no other dreams, no other imaginations. Sleeping, he will simply sleep; eating, he will simply eat.

You don’t do that. You are eating and your mind is doing hundreds of trips ….

So be total in everything that you do or do not do. Be total — then your whole life becomes a meditation.

A dropout has to be total. It is not out of fear, it is out of awareness – a certain consciousness that we are living in a bondage of many kinds: social, cultural, racial, political, educational. All kinds of chains are around our being. A dropout simply drops out of all these chains. And the moment he decides to drop out, miraculously he finds those chains cannot prevent him.