Table of Contents
Introduction
The world was very different in the past, obviously. About six weeks worth of sensory stimuli six hundred years ago is what we now get in a day. Six weeks worth of stimulation, information, we are getting in a single day about forty times the pressure to learn and adapt. Modern humanity has to be capable of learning more than ever before, because there is more to learn now. Modern humanity has to become capable of adapting to new situations every day, because the world is changing so fast. It is a great challenge.
A great challenge, if accepted, will help tremendously in the expansion of consciousness. Either modern man is going to be utterly neurotic, or he is going to be transformed by the very pressure. It depends on how you take it. One thing is certain: there is no way of going back. The sensory stimuli will go on increasing more and more. You will be getting more and more information, and life will be changing with faster and faster rhythms. And you will have to be capable of learning, of adapting to new things.
In the past, mankind lived in an almost static world. You would leave the world exactly as your parents had left it to you. You would not have changed anything at all. Nothing changed there was no question of learning too much. A little bit of learning was enough, and then you had spaces in your mind, empty spaces, which helped people to remain sane.
Now there is no more empty space unless you create it deliberately.
Meditation is needed today more than ever before. Meditation is needed so much that it is almost a matter of life and death. In the past it was a luxury a few people, a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna, were interested in it. Other people were naturally silent, happy, sane. There was no need for them to think of meditation; in an unconscious way they were meditation. Life was moving so silently, moving so slowly, that even the most stupid people were capable of adapting to it.
Now the change is so tremendously fast, with such speed, that even the most intelligent people feel incapable of adapting to it. Every day life is different, and you have to learn again. You have to learn and learn, again and again. You can never stop learning now; it has to be a lifelong process. To the very point of death you will have to remain a learner; only then can you remain sane, can you avoid neurosis. And the pressure is great forty times greater.
How to relax this pressure? You will have to go deliberately into meditative moments. If a person is not meditating at least one hour a day, then neurosis will not be accidental it will be self-created!
For one hour every day, you should disappear from the world into your own being. For one hour you should be so alone that nothing penetrates you no memory, no thought, no imagination. For one hour no content in your consciousness, and that will rejuvenate you and that will refresh you. That will release new sources of energy and you will be back in the world younger, fresher, more able to learn, with more wonder in your eyes. With more awe in your heart again a child.
Meditation isPLAYFUL
Meditation is not anything of the mind, it is something beyond the mind. And the first step is to be playful about it. If you are playful about it, mind cannot destroy your meditation. Otherwise it will turn it into another ego trip; it will make you very serious. You will start thinking, I am a great meditator. I am holier than other people, and the whole world is just worldly I am religious, I am virtuous. Thats what has happened to thousands of so-called saints, moralists, puritans: they are just playing ego games, subtle ego games.
Hence I want to cut the very root of it from the very beginning. Be playful about it. It is a song to be sung, a dance to be danced. Take it as fun and you will be surprised: if you can be playful about meditation, meditation will grow in leaps and bounds.
But you are not hankering for any goal; you are just enjoying sitting silently, just enjoying the very act of sitting silently not that you are longing for some yogic powers, siddhis, miracles. All that is nonsense, the same old nonsense, the same old game, played with new words, on a new plane.
Life as such has to be taken as a cosmic joke and then suddenly you relax because there is nothing to be tense about. And in that very relaxation something starts changing in you a radical change, a transformation and the small things of life start having new meaning, new significance. Then nothing is small, everything starts taking on a new flavor, a new aura; one starts feeling a kind of godliness everywhere. One does not become a Christian here, does not become a Hindu, does not become a Mohammedan; one simply becomes a lover of life. One learns only one thing here, how to rejoice in life.
But rejoicing in life is the way towards god. Dance your way to god, laugh your way to god, sing your way to god!
Meditation is CREATIVE
You have lived in a certain way up to now dont you want to live in a different way? You have thought in a certain way up to now dont you want some new glimpses into your being? Then be alert and dont listen to the mind. Mind is your past, constantly trying to control your present and your future. It is the dead past, which goes on controlling the alive present. Just become alert about it.
But what is the way? How does the mind go on doing it? The mind does it with this method: it says, If you dont listen to me, you will not be as efficient as I am. If you do an old thing you can be more efficient because you have done it before. If you do a new thing you cannot be so efficient. The mind goes on talking like an economist, an efficiency expert; it goes on saying, This is easier to do. Why do it the hard way? This is the way of least resistance.
Remember, whenever you have two things, two alternatives, choose the new one, choose the harder, choose the one in which more awareness will be needed. At the cost of efficiency always choose awareness, and you will create the situation in which meditation will become possible. These are all just situations. Meditation will happen. I am not saying that just by doing them you will get to meditation but they will be helpful. They will create the necessary situation in you, without which meditation cannot happen.
Be less efficient but more creative. Let that be the motive. Dont be bothered too much about utilitarian ends. Rather, constantly remember that you are not here in life to become a commodity; you are not here to become a utility, that is beneath your dignity. You are not here just to become more and more efficient you are here to become more and more alive. You are here to become more and more intelligent; you are here to become more and more happy, ecstatically happy.
But that is totally different from the ways of the mind.
Meditation is ALERTNESS
Whatsoever you do, do it with deep alertness; then even small things become sacred. Then cooking or cleaning become sacred; they become worship.
It is not a question of what you are doing, the question is how you are doing it. You can clean the floor like a robot, a mechanical thing; you have to clean it, so you clean it. Then you miss something beautiful. Then you waste those moments in only cleaning the floor. Cleaning the floor could have been a great experience; you missed it. The floor is cleaned but something that could have happened within you has not happened. If you were aware, not only the floor but YOU would have felt a deep cleansing.
