Mind : ( 24/10/2012. )

Our problem in meditation and in spiritual practice in general is that we cannot escape this old grandmother’s habit of externalising the centre and interpreting it in a sensory fashion. Though we may say that God is everywhere, for us He is a sense object only. However much we may think otherwise, it would be impossible to comprehend in any other manner. This is the influence of sensory perception on our life – so deep and so hard to overcome that whatever be our effort at the recognition of truth, we give it a colour of untruth. The character of an object is foisted on the universal subject, and that is why the mind hankers after pleasure in spite of trying to seek the centre in meditation. We have not been able to overcome our weaknesses yet because of the fact that the senses have not left us fully; we are still under their clutches. The readings that we make of life are only sensory readings, empirical appreciations which disturb our meditation and our effort at spiritual ...

Well, it is not so. Just as the centre of your being is not an object of your perception – it is an intuitional  accepted fact in your own nature – so also the centre or the ultimate substance of any person and anything in the world is such an intuited non-objective something which has to be appreciated by everyone in a manner suitable to its nature. We find it hard to observe the law of Dharma and to proclaim the nature of truth in the world because we cannot appreciate the truth or the centre of other things and other persons, except in an objective manner. When we do not objectify our centre and our substantial – we regard it as a pure subject which has an intrinsic worth of its own – how is it that we externalise that very same centre and substance in other persons and things? This is the error of thought, a mistake in our thinking. A centre is that particular something which cannot be externalised. The moment it is externalised, it ceases to be a centre. It bec...

We have been defining Dharma, or duty, by transferring the character of this centre of ourselves to other aspects of our life which are workable and necessary and yet do not exhaust the nature of truth. We have various kinds of duty such as social duty, duty to others, duty to Nature, duty to the Creator, and so on, which are extensions of the application of this law of our centre in terms of the nature of our perceptions, cognitions and appreciations in the world, while really it is a consonance of our conduct with our own nature. We will realise on a careful analysis that the truth or the centre of our life is an indivisible unit, and not a ramified or distracted conglomeration or a composite. We are not divided in our own being. You know very well that you are an undivided centre in yourself. You cannot be divided or cut into parts because even if you are to be divided, your awareness of the division is undivided. You cannot be divided because it is the basic fundamental....

If we are to be happy, we have to find the centre of our being and a background for our thought by detecting or discovering this centre in the place where it is, and not in the place where it would appear to be. Generally, we try to discover this centre in outward circumstances and objects of sense. That is the reason why we are very busy from morning to evening throughout the day and pass our lives in this manner by judging ourselves in terms of objects and outer conditions, thus not discovering a perpetual common denomination of happiness. Though by a difficult adjustment that we make in our conscious life we seem to be satisfied, inwardly we are shaken and feel very miserable. When the wind blows, the branches of the tree shake violently but the root is not shaken; but if an earthquake takes place and there is a complete shaking of the root itself, then the tree will not survive. The outer circumstances may be like shaking leaves, but the inward part of our life should be lik...

We have our own definition of Dharma and our own definition of Satya, no doubt. We have various degrees of righteousness and truth – the Vyavaharika and the Pratibasika. The apparent and the practical aspects are what mostly attract our attention. Utility is regarded by us as the test of truth. This is the pragmatic criterion that we generally employ in judging things by collecting evidence, weighing the evidence on a balance, and seeing how far it conforms to accepted major premises in the argument of justice and law. But people even today have never been able to find out to their fullest satisfaction what this ultimate law or ultimate righteousness is, because that which varies from person to person or from condition to condition cannot be called a perpetual source of Dharma. We make a distinction between what are known as Samanya Dharma and Visesha Dharma, the general principle of righteousness and the modified form of it to suit particular instances. We are mostly concern...

There is an accretion of psychological growth which we have regarded as our personality and which we hug with great devotion and affection. The social personality, the egoistic personality, the desireful personality, the greed personality, the anger personality, the vindictive personality and many other personalities have grown over us, over the truth of our nature, like moss. When these personalities have grown for years, they become so hardened that the core over which they have grown gets completely submerged. We are only the moss that has grown over, and the inner core has been completely lost sight of. We dread truth both outwardly and inwardly. Though we say truth triumphs, we are afraid of truth for the reason that the law of truth, the Dharma of Satya, is not always in conformity with the call of our senses and the desireful mind. Dharma and Satya go together like the light of the sun and the orb of the sun. If the orb of the sun is Satya, or truth, the radiance o...

The centre of our own selves is our deepest resource, which can come to our aid when we are almost alone in the world, unbefriended and unsupported. That is our truth; that is our substance. Who will help us when we have no friends anywhere, when we have nothing to eat and nothing to clad ourselves with? When the winds of the world seem to be blowing everywhere, counter to our wishes, when we have lost the very ground under our feet, who will help us? Who will be our support? What will be the sheet anchor for our life at that moment? That is the truth of our nature, which we have not yet discovered because we have been searching for it elsewhere on account of its uncomfortable character. The truth of our nature is not always very pleasant. The unpleasant nature of truth is unveiled before the senses and our mind; we dread its perception, and even its thought. Would we like to know what we really are? We would not like to know it because if we are opened threadbare and expose...

Now, no man can be said to have fully discovered this centre of life because the proof is in the eating of the pudding, as they say. We have the demonstration of the futility of human effort in the unhappiness of mankind as a whole. You are not happy, I am not happy, and no one is happy, for a common cause – namely, that we have not yet been able to find a centre for our thoughts. If the thought of our mind could find a centre to rest which it can take as stable enough to protect it from all danger, then that would be a source of happiness for the mind and for the thought. But we are still searching. For ages we have been searching, but the centre has not yet been found. How is it that for centuries people search and cannot find it? It is because of a wrong methodology employed in this search, an erroneous procedure that has been adopted, and a misconception that has been entertained in our hearts from the beginning, right from childhood, in regard to the characteristic of thi...