No Sound

Ecstasy

Find ecstasy within yourself. It is not out there. It is in your innermost flowering. The one you are looking for is you.

Ecstasy or blissfulness are all toys to allure you towards meditation. You will find them only in the beginning. As the meditation grows deeper there is only, isness. Everything disappears, even ecstasy, because ecstasy too, carries with it, just behind it, the shadow of agony. It is a duality. Blissfulness carries with it, hiding behind it, suffering, misery. It is a duality. Only isness is not a duality because isness is simply synonymous with existence, and there is no non-existence.

The meditation I am talking about is not a meditation on something: rather, it is a state of meditation. So this is what I mean when I am talking to you about meditation as a state. Meditation does not mean remembering someone. Meditation means to drop everything which is in one’s memory and to come to a state where only consciousness remains, where only awareness remains.

If you light a lamp and remove all the objects surrounding it, the lamp will still go on giving light. In the same way, if you remove all objects from your consciousness, all thoughts, all imagination, what will happen? – Only consciousness will remain. That pure state of consciousness is meditation. You don’t meditate on somebody. Meditation is a state where only consciousness remains.

When only consciousness remains without an object, that state is called meditation. I am using the word meditation in this sense.

What you practice is not meditation in the real sense; it is only a concept. But meditation will happen on its own through this. Try to understand that what you are practicing at night, exercises involving the chakras, and in the morning, exercises involving the breath, is all a discipline, it is not meditation. Through this discipline a moment will come when the breath will seem to have disappeared. Through this discipline a moment will come when the body seems to have disappeared and thoughts have also disappeared. What will remain when everything has disappeared? That which remains is meditation. When everything has disappeared, that which is left behind is called meditation.

A state of meditation is an innocent, silent state. You are blissfully unaware of your awareness. You are, but you are utterly relaxed. You are not in a state of sleep; you are fully alert, more alert than ever. Rather, you are – alertness.

Meditation has two meanings. That’s why in India we have two words for it: dhyana and samadhi. Dhyana means temporary meditation, arbitrary meditation; samadhi means you have come home, now meditation is not needed. When even meditation is not needed, one is in meditation – never before it. When one simply lives in meditation, walks in meditation, sleeps in meditation, when meditation is just one’s way of being, then one has arrived.