Mind is knowledge, meditation is non-knowledge. Mind knows, meditation experiences. Mind can only give you a certain acquaintance but not the taste. If you want the taste of the Tao you have to move to no-mind, to Meditation.
Meditation is the art of transforming madness into Buddhahood. Meditation is the art of taking you beyond logic and yet keeping your sanity intact. Meditation is the greatest discovery ever made, and I don’t think there is ever going to be another discovery which can surpass meditation.
Meditation is nothing but a way to learn how to do a thing totally – once you have learnt, make your whole life a meditation, forget all about meditations, let the life be the only law, let the life be the only meditation. And then time disappears.
For a prayer oriented religion the concept of a personal God is needed – to relate to. For meditation-oriented religions God is a useless hypothesis; it can be discarded easily into the dustbin. It is not needed.
To be a criminal needs great unconsciousness. Meditation destroys your unconsciousness, opens the doors of light and suddenly what you were doing in the darkness starts disappearing.
The people who crucified Jesus were not able to see his godliness at all; they could only see the mischief in him.
Without Jesus they were the great priests of the temple; with Jesus suddenly they were nobodies. In the presence of Jesus there was God himself and all the priests felt their glory had been taken away.
Jesus was a lover of life, a very affirmative person, but Christianity is life-negative.
But Jesus has been depicted as a serious man. And Christians say he never laughed. Then what is the function of an Enlightened man? If Jesus cannot laugh, then who is going to laugh in this world?
Wherever there is desire and ambition, you are in bondage.
The family gives you ambition, and ambition is one of the hindrances for enlightenment. It gives you desires, it gives you a longing to be successful, and all these things create your tensions, your anxieties: how to be a celebrity?
We start making every child ambitious, and ambition means you cannot love; ambition is anti-love. Ambition needs fight, ambition needs struggle, ambition needs you to use others as a means.
Love says respect the other as an end unto himself or herself; never use the other as a means. Nobody is a means for you, everybody is an end. But then ambition will flop, and our whole educational system depends on ambitiousness, our politics depends on ambition, our religions depend on ambition.
Mind is politics, because mind is ambitious and ambition is the root of politics. If you are ambitious you are political. Your ambition may take the form of religion, but the politics is there. Then you are competing with other saints.
Only no-mind can be without any duality, because it is empty. The no-mind is choicelessness. The no-mind is pure awareness. It is just the empty sky.
The man of control lives in choice, and the man of understanding lives in choicelessness.
Consciousness means choicelessness, and to be choiceless is to be free from all desire, is to be free from all projection, is to be free from all imagination, is to be free from future.
Enlightenment is choicelessness. But don’t misunderstand me. Before that, you will have to move very cautiously, choosing the right against the wrong, choosing the truer so that you can reach to the ultimate truth.
Meditate, become more aware and then you will see: choices disappear, a choicelessness arises. And it is such a tremendous joy to have a choiceless spontaneity. It is such a freedom. Choice is such a burden.
Choicelessness brings you to the whole. Choice is always of the part, necessarily so. And then one person goes from one choice to another, becomes a driftwood – from this bank to another bank, from that bank to this bank. This is how you have been moving, down the ages, for so many lives.