The mind creates so many temptations – so alluring they are, so magnetic is their power – that unless you are in the power-field of someone whose magnetism is far more powerful than any other kind of temptation, it is impossible to reach. That is the meaning of disciplehood.
Wherever you go, your mind will go with you. Your knowledge will go with you, your prejudices will go with you, your scriptures will go with you. Your idea that you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan will go with you. So what are you renouncing?
The mind always wants to choose. The mind lives through choice. If you don’t choose the mind drops. This is the way of Lao Tzu. How to drop the mind? – don’t choose! That’s why he never prescribes any meditation, because then there is no need for any meditation.
To be aflame with silence, with joy, is wisdom. It is not through logic but through love. It is not through words but through a wordless state called meditation or a state of no-mind, satori, samadhi.
Zen is the most scientific method to inquire into your consciousness. It takes you beyond mind into a space called no-mind. No self, but pure awareness, and you have a taste of eternity and immortality.
To love God means to surrender, to trust, to be ready to die into Him, because dying in God is the beginning of a new life; it is resurrection. Love has to become such an intense flame that it bums you out, that you are not left behind, that you are consumed in it. If you are not, the Guest comes.
The terrorism is not in the bombs, in your hands; the terrorism is in your unconscious.
Ambition is violence, the very effort to succeed in the world is violent.
Just for a few tiny buds on your tongue you are killing live animals, with no sensitivity, with no awareness, with no love. It seems impossible; how can a man who has known love be capable of doing such things? A man who loves his wife, who loves his children goes on eating meat? Impossible.
When sadness comes, just sit by the side and look at it and say, “I am the watcher, I am not sadness,” and see the difference. Immediately you have cut the very root of sadness. It is no more nourished. It will die of starvation. We feed these emotions by being identified with them.
I am less interested in your chain-smoking; I am more interested in your habit. Any habit that becomes a force, a dominating force over you, is a sin. One should live more in freedom. One should be able to do things not according to habits but according to the situations.
I have just instructed Laxmi to make a small temple for smoking here in the ashram. But you have to go very alert, aware, meditative! If you can smoke meditatively, it is perfectly beautiful. If it stops by being meditative, that too is perfectly beautiful. Life is sacred.
Mind is a door that leads you outside in the world; meditation is the door that leads you to your interiority – to the very innermost shrine of your being.
In meditation you are not unconscious, you are conscious – more conscious than ever.
Meditation has only one meaning, and that is going beyond the mind and becoming a witness. In your witnessing is the miracle – the whole mystery of life.
Meditation is a flower and compassion is its fragrance.
And meditation is nothing but enjoying your beautiful aloneness. Celebrating yourself; that’s what meditation is all about.
One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it.
That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.
Meditation means removing all your prejudices, putting all your conclusions aside, seeing without any hindrance, seeing without any curtains, seeing clearly without any mediation of any thought, seeing without Buddha standing between you and reality, or Krishna, or Christ.