Meditation Chapter No.35

[Pravin Kumar]

On the other hand, if he is totally free there will be no point in doing anything, because whatever he does tomorrow he will be free of it, and his past actions will not affect him. That is why man is neither completely bound nor completely free: one of his legs is tied and the other is free.

Once somebody asked Hazrat Ali, "Is man free or bound by his actions?"

Ali said, "Raise one of your legs."

The man was free to raise either his left or right leg. He raised his left leg. Then Ali said, "Now raise the other one."

And the man replied, "Are you mad? I cannot raise the other one now."

Ali asked, "Why?"

The man answered, "I can only raise one at a time."

Ali said, "The same is the case with man's life. You always have two legs but you are able to raise only one at a time; one is alwys tied." This is why the possibility exists for you to free the leg which is bound with the help of the leg which is free to move. But the possibility also exisits for you to tie the one which is free with the help of the one which is tied up.

Whatsoever you have done in the past, you have done. You were free to do it, you have done it. Part of you has become frozen and is bound, but another part of you is still free. You are free to do the opposite of what you did. You can cancel what you did before by doing the opposite. You can destroy it by doing something different. You  can dismiss it by doing something better. It is in the hands of the individual to wash away all his past conditionings.

Until yesterday you were angry; you were free to be angry. Certainly, someone who has been angry every day for the last twenty years will be bound by anger. For example, there are two people; the one who has been continuously angry for twenty years gets up in the morning one day and cannot find his slippers next to his bed; the one who has not been angry in twenty years also gets up in the morning and does not find his slippers next to his bed -- which of them is more likely to get angry in this situation? Anger will arise in the first man, the man who has been angry for twenty years.

In this sense he is tied, because the twenty-year-old habit of becoming angry will immediately arise in him when something does not happen the way he wants it to happen. He is tied in the sense that twenty years of conditoning will make him feel inclined to do the same thing he has always done. But is he so tied that there is no possibility for him not to become angry?

No, nobody is ever that bound. If he can become aware right this moment, then he can stop. It is possible not to allow the anger to come. It is possible to transform the anger. And if he does that, the habit of twnety years may prove to be a problem but it will not be able to stop him completely -- because if the one who has created the habit moves against it, he then has the freedom to completely destroy it. Just by experimenting with it a dozen times he can be free of it.

Past actions bind you, but they don't bind you completely Actions grip you,but they don't grip you completely. They have their chains, but all chains can be broken; there is no chain which will not break. And something which does not break cannot be called a chain.

Chains bind you, but intrinsic  to all chains is the possibllity that they can be broken. If there is a chain which cannot be broken, you will not be able to call it a chain. Only what binds you but can also be broken can be called a chain.

Your actions are chains in the sense that those chains can also be broken. One's consciousness is always free. You are always free to go back over the steps that you have taken and the path that you have called on.

So the past is restricting you, but your future is totally free. One leg is bound and the other is free. The leg of the past is tied, the leg of the future is free. If you want to, you can raise this leg of the future in the same direction as where the leg of the past is tied. Then you will go on being tied up. If you want to you can raise the leg of the future in the direction that is opposite to the leg of the past -- and you will go on becoming free, it is in your hands. The state when both legs are free is called moksha, enlightenment. And the absolutely lowest kind of hell is the state where both legs are bound.

For this reason there is no need to be afraid of the past, or of past lives, because one who has done those actions is still free to do other actions.

Someone has asked: Who is it that thinks after becoming a witness?

When you are a witness there is no thought. The moment you think something, you are no longer a witness. I am standing in the garden and i become a witness to a flower, I am looking at the flower -- if I am only looking I am a witness, and if I start thinking then I am not a witness. The moment I start to think, the flower will no longer be there before my eyes -- the current of thought will come between me and the flower. When I look at the flower and say, "The flower is beautiful," the moment my mind says that the flower is beautiful I am not seeing the flower. Because the mind does not do two things at the same time -- a thin curtain comes in between. And if I start thinking, "I have seen this flower before, this flower is familiar," this flower has disappeared from my eyes. Now I am just imagining that I am seeing it.

Once I took a friend who had come from far away boating on the river. He had just come back from far away countries. He had seen many rivers and many lakes, and he was full of thoughts about those rivers and lakes. When I took him boating on a full-moon night, he kept on talking about lakes in Switzerland and about lakes in Kashmir. After an hour, when we were returning, he said to me, "The place where you took me was really beautiful."

I said, "You were lying. You didn't even see the place. I felt the whole time that you might just as well have been in Switzerland or in Kashmir, but you were not present in the boat we were sitting in.

"And now I also want to tell you this," I said to him, "When you were in Switzerland you must have been somewhere else. And when you were in Kashmir you cannot have been on the lake about which you were talking. Not only am I saying that you did not see any of these lakes."

The curtain of your thoughts does not allow you to be a witness. Your thoughts don't allow you to be a witness. But when you drop thoughts, when you become separate from your thoughts, then you become a witness. The absence of thoughts makes you a witness. But while I am telling you to become a witness, you are asking, "Who is thinking?"

No, there is no one who is thinking, there is only the witness, and that witness is your inferiority. If you are ina state of total witnessing -- where no thought arises, where no wave of thoughts arises -- then you will enter into yourself. In the same way, when there is no wave in the ocean, no movement, then its surface becomes silent and you are able to see below the surface.

Thought is a wave, thought is a disease and thought is excitement. You attain to witnessing when you have lost the excitement of thought. When you are witnessing, no one is thinking. If you think, you are no longer witnessing. Thinking and witnessing is a contradiction.

This is why we have made such a total effort to understand this method of meditation of meditation. In fact, we have been doing experiments in dropping thought. And in the experiment that we are doing here, you are making thoughts very weak so that you come to the state where there are no thoughts and only the thinker is there. By the thinker I mean the one who thinks -- only he is present, but he is not thinking. And when he does not hinnk then seeing happens. Try to understand this: thinking and witnessing are two opposite things. That is why I said before tha tonly blind people think. Those who have eyes don't think. If I don't have eyes and I want to leave this house, I will think, "Where is the door?" If I don't have eyes and I want to get out of this building, I will think about? I will see the way out and leave. So the point is that if I have eyes I will see the way out, why should I think about it?

The less people can see, the more they think. The world calls them thinkers, but I say they are blind. And the more people can see, the less they think.

Mahavira and Buddha were not great thinkers. I hear very intelligent people say that they were not great thinkers. That is absolutely wrong. They were not thinkers at all because they were not blind. In India we call them seers, watchers.

This is why in India we call the science of this method darshan, seeing. Darshan means to see. We don't call it philosophy; philosophy and darshan are not synonymous. Often people call darshan 'philosophy', but this is wrong. It is wrong to call the darshan of India, Indian philosophy, it is not a philosophy at all. Philosophy means thinking, contemplating, reflecting. And darshan means to drop all thinking, contemplating and reflecting.


There have been thinkers in the West, the West has its philosophy. They have thought about what truth is -- they have thought about it. In India we don't think about what truth is, we think about how we can experience the truth. That is, we think about how to open the eyes. This is why our whole process is one of opening the eyes. Our whole work is to open the eyes.

Logic develops only where there is thought. The connection, the relationship of thoughts is through logic. And the connection, the relationship of darshan, seeing, is through yoga.

No logic has developed in the East. We have not loved logic at all. We have considered it to be a game, a children's game. We have looked for something else -- we have looked for darshan, seeing, and to attain that we have looked towards yoga. Yoga is a process by which you can open your eyes and see. And to see, experiment with being a witness. Thoughts will become weaker and a moment will come when there is no thought. I am not talking about a lack of thoughts, but no-thought.

[chrisdee]

That was brilliant i have reached this place of no-thought, a wonderful experience but not always obtainable