Snowflake

Pay Attention

You may not know that the word meditation comes from the same root as medicine, medical, and the original meaning of the word was – a technique to become whole, a technique to become healthy. Medicine is medicinal; just like that, meditation is also medicinal. It makes you whole, integrated, healthy.

Pay attention, listen as meditatively as possible. When you listen meditatively you understand, when you listen concentratedly you learn. If you listen with concentration, you will gain knowledge, if you listen meditatively, you will lose knowledge. And the difference is very subtle.

When you listen attentively, attention means “a tension” – it means you are tense, too eager to learn, to absorb, to know. You are interested in knowledge. Concentration is the way toward knowledge; a mind focused on one thing of course learns more.

Meditation is an unfocused mind. You simply listen silently, not with a tension in the mind, not with an urge to know and learn, no; with total relaxation, in a let-go, in an opening of your being.

You listen, not to know, you simply listen to understand. These are different ways of listening. If you are trying to know, then you are trying to memorize what I am saying; deep down you are repeating it, you are taking notes inside the mind, you are writing it in the world of your memories. You are interested in letting it become deeply rooted in you so you don’t forget. Then it will become knowledge.

And the same seed could have become unlearning, understanding. Then you simply listen, you are not interested in accumulating it, you are not interested in writing it in your memory, in your mind. You simply listen, open – as you listen to music, as you listen to the birds singing in the trees, as you listen to the wind passing through ancient pines, as you listen to the sound of water in a waterfall. There is nothing to remember, nothing to memorize. You don’t listen with a parrot mind, you simply listen without any mind – the listening is beautiful, it is ecstatic. There is no goal in it, in itself it is ecstatic, it is blissful.

Listen meditatively, not with concentration. All schools, colleges, universities, teach concentration because the goal is to memorize. Here the goal is not to memorize, the goal is not to learn at all, the goal is to unlearn.

Listen silently and don’t think that you will forget. There is no need to remember; only that which is rubbish has to be remembered because you go on forgetting it. Whenever you hear the truth there is no need to remember it because it cannot be forgotten. You may not be able to remember the words but you will remember the essence – and that will not be part of your memory, it will be part of your being.

Watchfulness Not Concentration

Meditation has nothing to do with mind; meditation simply means a state of no-mind. The functioning of the mind is the only disturbance in meditation. If you are trying to achieve meditation THROUGH mind you are bound to fail, doomed to fail. You are trying to achieve the impossible.