VBT – Week’s Meditation 79
Mind Is Accumulation
Whenever you get identified with any memory, any knowledge, any experience, any name and form, that ‘I’ is born. Then you are young, you are old; you are rich, you are poor; you are beautiful or you are not beautiful; you are educated or you are not educated; you are respected or you are not respected – then you go on getting identified with things which accumulate around you and the ego is born. Ego is identification with the mind.
That’s why when you are silent the ego is not, because when you are silent the mind is not functioning. That’s what silence means. Whenever the mind is functioning you are not silent. You cannot be – the functioning of the mind is the inner noise, the chattering, the constant chattering within you. When the chattering stops, or it is not there, or you have gone beyond it, or you have gone within, moved within, there is silence, and in that silence there is no ego.
But it happens only sometimes, and only for a moment, that you are silent. That’s why you feel that those situations in which this happens are lovely. You start desiring those situations. You go to a hill, and while the sun is rising in the morning you look at it. Suddenly you have an upsurge of joy. You feel blissful, a beatitude descends upon you.
What really happened? Because of the silent morning, and the silent rising of the sun, and the greenery, and the hill, suddenly your inner chattering has stopped. The phenomenon is so great – all around you such beauty, such peace and tranquility – that you have stopped for a moment. In that stopping you have realized a non-ego state – for a single moment of course.
This can happen through many situations. In sex it happens, in music it can happen; in anything which is so great that you are overwhelmed, overpowered, and your constant chattering is put aside, forced aside for a moment, it will come again. Whenever you are egoless, accidentally or through some practice, you feel a subtle bliss which you have not felt before.
The bliss is not coming from outside. It is not coming from the hills or from the rising sun or from beautiful flowers; it is not coming from the sex act. It is not coming from outside. The outside is only creating an opportunity – it is coming from inside. So if you repeat the outer situation again and again, it will not come, because you will get immune to it, you will get accustomed to it.
The same hill and the same morning… again you go there and you don’t feel. You feel something is missing. Because for the first time it was so new that it stopped your mind completely. The wonder was so great and the miracle was so new, you couldn’t continue with the past chattering. It stopped – just in awe it stopped – but next time you go there you know everything. There is no awe, no mystery – the mind continues. This happens with every experience. In any experience, if you feel a joy, it will be destroyed if you repeat it, because then, in a repeated experience, you cannot put aside the mind.
So the second thing to remember is that the mind is an accumulation. Your consciousness is just hidden behind this accumulated past, and you are identified with it. Whenever you say ‘I am this, I am that’, you are creating the ego.
Thirdly: if you can understand this, then the third point is not difficult, and that third point is that the mind has to be used. There is no need to get identified; you can use it as an instrument – and it is an instrument. There is no need to get identified with it. Remain always above it.
And really, you are always above it, because you are here, now, always present, and your mind is always past. You are always ahead of it. It is just lagging behind you; it is a shadow. This very moment is a new thing; your mind cannot have it. A moment later it will be absorbed in the memory; then the mind can have it. Every single moment you are free.
If you can be aware of the reality here and now, you will remain always transcendental to the mind.
And if you can remain transcendental to the mind – always above, never entangled in it, using it, but never getting involved in it, using it as an instrument, never getting identified with it – the ego will disappear. You will be egoless, and when you are egoless, nothing else is to be done. Then all else happens to you. You have become vulnerable, you have become open. Then the whole existence happens to you, then all the ecstasies are yours, then suffering is impossible. Suffering comes through the ego. Bliss comes through the egoless gate.
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