Mind : ( 24/10/2012. )

This is not religion, this is not spirituality, this is not any kind of esoteric doctrine, but a scientific fact of the law of nature that everything is cohesive and fitted into one another so that each one is everything and everything is each one. This is a highly developed consciousness of democracy, if you can think in this manner. It is a feeling that consciousness is an ideal that gathers itself into a cohesive force by which it becomes inseparable from what it regards as something that is outside. Here is the characteristic of a saint or a sage. Nothing is outside the saint and, therefore, he needs nothing from outside. One should not want anything from outside, because the outside thing does not exist apart from you and you do not exist outside that thing which you consider as outside. The saints and the sages ask not anything. They do not require anything because they have got everything by being united with that which you regard as outside you. The thing which y...

The agitations of the mind, caused by various factors, produce repercussions in the external atmosphere, and it looks like social conflict. There cannot be social conflict unless there is individual disturbance and conflict in one's own self, because society is nothing but many people like you, like me, like anybody. If every individual is filled with inner peace, society will have a completely peaceful atmosphere around. It is no use saying society is bad. Things are worse because you are one of the things, and you are a unit of society.  When you complain against the world, against society, against people, you are including yourself also as a target of this complaint. Whenever you speak, whenever you think and make any judgment whatsoever, you seem to be standing outside the atmosphere of judgment and perception. Unfortunately, that is not so. The judge is involved in the very circumstance of judging. A judgment is an organic action. It is not an individual's pred...

Such renunciates are world masters, because they are self masters. When the taste for things ceases, you have conquered the world; when the taste is conquered, the world is conquered. Taste of the tongue, taste of the eyes, taste of the ears, taste of the nostrils, taste of touch – all these are tastes of one kind or the other. They persist till our death almost, because of the fact that we never succeeded in living as world individuals. We have never succeeded in maintaining the position of a world personality. Can any one of you feel convinced within yourself that you are a world individual? "I do not merely belong to the world; it is not that the world belongs to me. I will stand as a meeting point of the world and the individuality of everybody." Unthinkable is this situation. A master-mind we call such people; a super-man, an incarnation, an avatara – all sorts of names and nomenclatures are attributed to such achievements in a person who ceases to be a perso...

The ways of saints, the methods adopted by masters and seekers of yore, are very interesting. They are not always logically rigid, but a beautifully construed methodology of handling the mind. I have told you many years back, perhaps, a Sufi saint's story. There was a great mystic called Jalaluddin Rumi in the Middle Ages. He had many followers. He recited an instance of how a person can change himself by changing his circumstances. There was a Sufi guru who had several followers and disciples, many of whom were poor Arabs, but very devoted to their master. One of them came in the early morning to pay homage to his master. The master asked, "How are you, my dear boy?" "Master, I am living in hell." "What is the trouble with you?" "I have one room only, which is a small area where I have my family, my wife and two children. There inside I cook my food. I have a camel which brays continuously, and there is a dog barking all night. W...

But, is there not a way? The very longing within us is a pointer to the problem capable of solution. Our longings are so firm, so convincing, so irrefutable, so unrelenting that we seem to be enshrining within our own selves a non-finite impulse simultaneously with the finite impulse of bodily affirmation. The control of the mind is, therefore, equal to the finding of the relation between the finite and the Infinite. Great persistence, great understanding and capacity to discriminate is here called for. Ancient masters and seekers of truth, to one of whom I made reference yesterday, had their own way of solution. Sometimes the solutions seem to be very humorous, but very practical. The mind has to be handled in an intelligent manner, but persistently. When we drive a nail continuously on the wall, without changing the spot, with the determination to drive the nail into the wall, it will go inside and yield to our pressure. But, if we strike at one place and find a brick, at...

There is a famous statement of Neo-Platonist origin: “This is a centre which is everywhere.”  We cannot think of a centre that is everywhere.  Such a thing is never seen anywhere in the world.  The centre of a circle is only in one place; it cannot be everywhere in the circle.  But this is a centre which is everywhere in the sense that it has a uniform characteristic.  However much we may scratch our head, we cannot understand what all this means because we have never seen such a thing in our life.  With effort of thought we have to subdue the old habit of thinking, cultivate a new habit altogether in a reoriented form, and strive to learn this art of Yoga proper, which is the system introduced for the appreciation and recognition of the centre that is everywhere.  Because the centre is everywhere, the circumference can be nowhere.  We have heard this said many times, and we dismiss it as a joke and a humorous gesture made b...

Well, it is not so. Just as the centre of your being is not an object of your perception – it is an intuitionally 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 substantiality – 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 becomes a ...

Have we in our life any such background of thought? If we are tormented because we cannot understand the processes of life outside, what are we supposed to do? Where are we to withdraw ourselves? We have not found such a centre of our life. We have lost our centre; we have been thrown out of the moorings of our life, and therefore, we drift from centre to centre in order to find solace and refuge. As the centre has been lost, we are still moving on the periphery, the circumference, searching for the centre alone. 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 eno...