Fundamental Purity

Innermost Center

The more you understand your mind, the more you become aware of its mechanism and working, and the more you are disidentified with your mind.

It is identification which creates inner noise. Anger is there in the mind: you are identified with it; you do not see it as an object. The anger is there somewhere outside you, but you begin to feel angry, you begin to become one with it. Then you miss your inner center, you have moved. Many thoughts are flowing in the mind continuously, the thought process is on, and you are identified with each and every thought. Any thought is yours; you become one with it. Then you have moved.

Not only with thought do you become one, but with things still further from your center. Your house is not only your house: you have become your house. Your possessions are not just your possessions: you are identified with them. When your car is damaged, your innerness is also damaged. When your house is on fire, you are also on fire. If all of your possessions are just taken away, you will die.

We are identified with our possessions, we are identified with our thoughts, we are identified with our emotions, we are identified with everything except ourselves. We are identified with everything except with the innermost center. Because of this identification, noise is created, conflict, a continuous anguish, tension.

It is bound to be there because you are not your house. There is a gap and you have forgotten the gap. You are not your wife, you are not your husband. There is a gap: you have forgotten the gap.

You are not your thoughts, your anger or your love or your hatred. There is a gap. When you begin to feel this gap, you are always outside. It is a witness, not involved in it. With anything in which you are not involved, you are outside it.

If John Cage, as he reports, heard his own sounds – the nervous system working, the blood circulating – then two things are there: one is the awareness, the knowledge, the knowing, the consciousness. A point is there inside which becomes aware that two sounds are there. But he is aware of only two sounds. He is not aware of the center which is aware of these two sounds. If he becomes aware of this center of alertness, then those two sounds are just far away. There is a gap. And the moment your focus of consciousness is transferred from object to sounds, to the soundless center of awareness, you are in silence. So I would like to say that YOU ARE SILENCE, and everything else except you is sound. If you are identified with anything, then you will never attain this soundlessness.

Upnishad says: “Silence, stillness, is pradakshina, the movement around. That for worship.” You go to a temple and then you move around the attar of the deity seven times. This is a ritual of worship, but every ritual is symbolic. Why seven rounds? Man has seven bodies, and with each body there are identifications. So when someone moves in, he has to leave seven bodies and the identification with each body. There are seven rounds; when these seven rounds are complete, you are in the center.

The altar in the temple is not something outside you. You are the temple, and the altar is your inner center. If the mind moves around the center and comes nearer and nearer and nearer and, ultimately, is established in the center, this is pradakshina. And when you happen to be at your center, everything is silent. This silence is achieved through understanding – understanding of your anger, your passion, your greed, your sex, everything. It is an understanding of your mind. But we are identified with our minds; we think we are our minds. That is the only problem: how to be detached from our own minds, how to be divorced, so to speak, from our own minds.