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Your Own Book
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All
you have to do is to still the mind. There are two ways to quiet the
mind: One is through inquiry, which is suitable to a very few qualified
people; and the other is through yoga, which includes concentration,
meditation and other practices.
First you need the
capacity to discern the real from the unreal, to embrace what is real
and to adhere to it. Reject what is unreal and false. Fascination
with study, karma , pilgrimages, or dips in the holy waters will not
help you. Learning all the Vedas, all the sutras, like a parrot is
not going to help you. No gift, austerity or charity is going to help
you.
More important than
anything is the burning desire for freedom. This alone is enough.
If you have this burning desire you will be led to satsang. Satsang
means to stay quiet, to still the mind, to bring it back to the center
wherever it goes. If you can't do it by yourself then search for a
perfected teacher, but do not make any mistake, you see.
When you go shopping
you have free choice about what to buy and you have this same freedom
in selecting a teacher. In the supermarket you choose, "I don't
want this, I don't want that, this is not good, that is not good."
You have freedom of choice, no bargain can be struck. Your human life
and enlightenment is on one hand, and wasting your life with someone
incompetent to liberate you is on the other.
Someone came to see
me saying, "I have gone to many teachers without finding enlightenment,
and finally I found that my current master himself is not enlightened.
He has initiated me and now he is filling me with all kinds of fear.
He says that if you leave the teacher you will have to go to hell.
I met someone who told me to come here. I am here to be enlightened.
My guru is very loving, he is not withholding anything from me; he
teaches me with great love. He has taught me all the scriptures so
that I know them by heart, but I am missing freedom. I have found
that my mind is not free, it is not quiet. But now I know that I am
on the right track and in some way I am here to help my teacher. After
enlightenment I will go and enlighten my teacher." I have never heard a student resolving to enlighten his teacher
before!
If you are bent upon
freedom - determined to win freedom in this span of life, this year,
this month, today, now - you will have to make a choice. Anything
will surface from the mind to sabotage you. Find the best ways to
quiet the mind. The instant that the mind is stilled there is meditation.
Meditation has to be perennial, permanent, not just sitting for an
hour a day. It does not mean chanting the thought, "I have to
be free." It means being centered in the Self, which is alone
true; all else is false. There must be a very strong understanding
in your mind. It is not difficult once you discover the ability to
discern what is real from what is unreal. Pleasures of the senses
may try to distract you, religions may promise you pleasures in heaven
after life, but you will have to abandon all these things. Abandon
studying any book; it does not help you. Now you open your own book
for the first time. Open your own book and keep quiet.
22 February, 1992
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