A Watcher
The old habits will continue; the thoughts will go on rushing. And your mind is always in a rush hour, the traffic is always jammed. Your body is not accustomed to sitting silently – you will be tossing and turning. Nothing to be worried about. Just watch that the body is tossing and turning, that the mind is whirling, is full of thoughts – consistent, inconsistent, useless – fantasies, dreams. You remain in your center, just watching.
When stillness comes on its own, when silence descends without your effort, when you watch thoughts and a moment comes when thoughts start disappearing and silence starts happening, that is beautiful. The thoughts stop of their own accord, if you don’t identify; if you remain a witness and you don’t say, “This is my thought.” You don’t say, “This is bad, this is good,” “This should be there”, “This should not be there.” Then you are not a watcher; you have prejudices, you have certain attitudes. A watcher has no prejudice, he has no judgment. He simply sees like a mirror.
When you bring something in front of a mirror it reflects, simply reflects. There is no judgment that the man is ugly, that the man is beautiful, the mirror has nothing to say. It’s nature is to mirror; it mirrors. This is what I call meditation: you simply mirror everything within or without.
With your watching and watching, slowly the rush of thoughts starts getting less and less. Moments of silence start appearing; a thought comes, and then there is silence before another thought appears. These gaps will give you the first glimpse of meditation and the first joy that you are arriving home.
The art of watching – That is the only thing in you which is not part of the mind. That is the only thing in you which does not belong to you, but belongs to existence itself. For example, I can watch my hand; that means I am not the hand. Whatever you can watch you are not. This is simple arithmetic. The watcher is bound to be separate from the object that he is watching.
You can watch your body from outside, and from inside too. You can close your eyes and you can watch your body from the inside. It will be dark, and it will not be so visible and so clear, but still you can feel many things. You can hear the heart beating. If you are really very silent you can even hear the sound of your blood running. You are not the body.
You can watch your mind. All its thoughts, howsoever fine, are available to your watching. You can see the subtlest expression of the mind. That makes one thing clear – that you are not the mind either. It is a little more difficult, but not impossible, to watch your feelings – what the poets call the heart; your emotions, your moods – which are the subtlest things in your personality. A little sadness, a little joy, or perhaps nothing but an indifference … But even indifference is a certain attitude. Watching goes on becoming more and more deep.
Beyond your moods there is nothing to watch, but only silence. In that silence a great miracle happens. The energy that has been watching turns upon itself.
The golden key is watching. And there is nothing much to learn in it. It is a very simple thing. You cannot imagine anything more simple which can open the doors of the whole existence for you.
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