The Role of Mindfulness in Improving Productivity

Mind Is Vacillation

Mind is vacillating. The discipline of a meditator is to become so watchful of the mind, so alert to the mind and its stupidities – its hesitations, its trembling, its vacillations – to become so watchful that you are cut off. That is the whole purpose of watching: watching cuts you off. Watch anything in the mind, and you are cut off. Watching is a sword. If a thought is moving in your mind, just watch it – and suddenly you will see the thought is there, you are here, and there is no bridge left. Don’t watch, and you become identified with the thought, you become it; watch, and you are not it. Mind possesses you because you have forgotten how to watch. Learn it.

Just looking at a rose flower, watching it; or at the stars, or the people passing on the road, sit by the side and watch. And then slowly slowly close your eyes and see the inner traffic moving – thousands of thoughts, desires, dreams, passing by. It is always rush hour there. Just watch as somebody watches a river flowing by, sitting on the bank. Just watch – and watching, you will become aware that you are not it.

Mind is being identified with it. No-mind is being disidentified with it. Don’t be a mind, because in fact you are not a mind. Then who are you? You are – consciousness. You are that watchfulness, you are witnessing, you are that pure observation, that mirrorlike quality that reflects everything but never becomes identified with anything.

Mind And Desiring

Mind and Desiring: We don’t live in existence, we live in desires. Really, we don’t live in the world at all, we live in desires. Our life is not here and now, it is always somewhere else where the desire is arrowed. It may be anywhere, but it is never here. Never here, because desire needs time – desire cannot be here.

Can you desire anything in the present moment? The moment you desire, you desire for the future; you cannot desire here and now. Here and now there is no desire, there is no possibility of desiring. Desire needs space – that space is time.

Desire needs some point somewhere else from here – only then can desire exist. It exists as a bridge: a bridge needs two banks, a bridge cannot exist only on THIS bank. How can the bridge exist? There must be the other; the other bank must be there. Only then does the bridge become possible. Desire is creating a bridge from here to there.

And the moment you have gone there and lost this moment, you will always live in an inner tension, inner anguish. And really you will never be existential; you will always be in desires, in desires, in desires – always longing for the other shore. Even if you can get to the other shore, you will be again longing for the other shore. No shore can be the fulfillment – desire is self-frustrating. We are nothing but desires. Can you find anything in you which is not a desire? Even when you are praying, it is a desire; even when you are meditating, it is a desire; even when you are thinking of the divine, it is a desire. We convert everything into desire. This is the disease, that we cannot conceive of anything without desire.