Sunday, June 12, 2011

Talk to teachers, chapter 11, part 3

What is meditation and what is thinking? If we enquire into what meditation is, we have to enquire into what thinking is. Otherwise, merely to meditate when I do not know the process of thinking is to create a fancy, a delusion, which has no reality whatsoever. So to really understand or to discover what meditation is, it is not enough to have mere explanations which are only verbal and therefore have little significance; one has to go into the whole process of thinking.

Thinking is a response of memory. Thoughts become the slave of words, the slave of symbols, of ideas, and the mind is the word and the mind becomes slave to words like god, communist, the principal, the vice-principal, the prime minister, the police inspector, the villager, the cook. See the nuances of these words and the feelings that accompany these words. You say sannyasi and immediately there is a certain quality of respect. So the word for most of us has immense significance. For most of us the mind is the word. Within the conditioned, verbal, technical symbolic framework, we live and think; that framework is the past, which is time. If you observe this process taking place in yourself, then it has significance.

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