The Book of SecretsPUT MINDSTUFF
IN SUCH INEXPRESSIBLE FINENESS
ABOVE, BELOW AND IN YOUR HEART.
Life is not a problem but a mystery. For science life is a problem, but for religion it is a mystery. A problem can be solved, a mystery cannot be solved -- it can be lived but it cannot be solved. Religion offers no solutions, no answers. Science offers answers; religion has none.
This is the basic difference, and before you make any effort to understand what religion is, this basic difference in the very approach of a religious mind and a scientific mind is to be deeply understood.
When I say that science looks at life as a problem, as something which can be solved, the whole approach becomes intellectual. Then the mind is involved, not you. You are out of it. The mind manipulates, the mind tackles, the mind penetrates and analyses. The mind argues, doubts, experiments, but you as a totality are out of it. Hence this very puzzling phenomenon: a scientist may be a very keen intellectual as far as his own department of research is concerned, but in ordinary life he will be just as ordinary a human being as anyone else -- nothing special, just ordinary. In his own branch of knowledge he may be a genius, but in life he is just ordinary.
Science includes only your intellect, not your totality. An intellect has a violence, it is aggressive. That is why very few women can be scientists -- aggression is not natural to them. Intellect is male, aggressive, violent: that is why men are more scientific and women are more religious. Intellect tries to dissect, divide, analyze, and whenever you dissect an alive thing, the life disappears. Only dead parts are left in your hands.
That is why science never touches life. Really, whatsoever it touches becomes dead. When science says there is no soul or there is no God it is meaningful, not because their is no soul or no God, but because this shows that the very approach of the scientific mind is such that you cannot touch life anywhere. Wherever science touches, death happens. In the very method, in the very way, in the very approach of division, analysis, dissection, life is bracketed out.
One thing: intellect is violent and aggressive, so the ultimate outcome through intellect can only be death, not life. It is partial, not total, and parts are dead. Life is an organic unity. You can know life through synthesis, not through analysis. The greater the synthesis the higher the forms of life that evolve. God is the ultimate synthesis, the total unity, the wholeness of existence. God is not a puzzle but the ultimate synthesis of all that is -- matter is the ultimate analysis of all that is.
So science comes to atomic materiality and religion comes to cosmic consciousness. Science moves downwards to the last, lowest denominator and religion moves upwards to the highest denominator. They move in opposite dimensions. So science transforms everything into a problem, because if you have to tackle it scientifically, you first have to decide whether it is a problem or not. Religion takes mystery as the base. There is no problem, life is not a problem. The emphasis is that it cannot be solved. A problem means something solvable, something which can be known, something knowable. It may not be known right now, but it is not unknowable. At the most it may be unknown, but that unknownness will disappear and it will be transformed into a known thing.
So really, religion cannot ask a question like, "What is life?" This is absurd. Religion cannot ask such a question as, "What is God?" This is nonsense. The very approach of religion is not to create problems. Religion can ask how to be more alive, how to be in the very current of life, how to live abundantly; religion can ask how to be a God -- but it cannot ask what God is.
We can live mysteries, we can become one with them, we can lose ourselves in them, we can have a totally difference existence, the very quality changes -- but nothing is solved, because nothing can be solved. And all that appears to be solvable, all that appears to be knowable, is only because we are taking it in fragments. If we look at the whole then nothing is knowable, we just go on pushing the mystery backwards. All our questions are temporary, they appear to be answers only to lazy minds. If you have a penetrating mind you will come again upon the same mystery, only it has been pushed back, a step back. Just behind the answers the question is hidden. You have simply created a facade of an answer, just a curtain over the mystery.
If you can feel the distinction, then from the very beginning religion takes on a different shape, a different color and a different view. The whole perspective changes. These techniques that we are discussing here are not to solve anything -- they don't take life as a problem. Life is there. It has been a mystery and will remain a mystery. Whatsoever we do we cannot demystify it, because to be mysterious is the very quality of it. That life is mysterious is not something accidental, it is not something which can be separated, it is the very life itself. So to me, the more you enter into the mysterium, into the mysterious, the more religious you become.
A really religious man will not say that he believes in God; he will not say that God exists. These things seem to be very superficial, they seem to be like answers given to certain questions. A religious man cannot utter such profanities -- that God is. It is such a profound phenomenon, such a mysterious thing, that to say anything will be profane. So whenever someone asked Buddha whether God existed or not, he remained silent. You are asking a thing which cannot be answered. Not that there is no God, but to answer such a thing will make it answerable. Then life will become a problem which can be answered. Then the mystery disappears. So Buddha said, "Don't ask me any metaphysical questions."
Questions can only be physical. Physics can answer them. Metaphysical questions are not there, they cannot be, because metaphysics means the mystery.
These techniques are to help you to move more deeply into mystery, not into knowledge.
Or you can look at it in a different way: these techniques are to help you to be unburdened of your knowledge. They are not to help you to increase your `knowledgeability', because `knowledgeability' is the barrier. The door is then closed for the mystery. The more you know, the less you are capable of penetrating deep into life. The original wonder must be recaptured, because in a childlike sense of wonder nothing is known and everything becomes a mystery. And if you move into the mystery, the deeper you move, the deeper the mystery becomes. Then a moment comes when you can say that you don't know anything. That is the right moment.
Now you have become meditative. When you can feel a deep ignorance, when you become aware that you don't know anything, you have come to the right balancing point from where the door of the mystery can open. If you know, then the door is closed; if you are ignorant, fully alert that you don't know anything, the door suddenly opens. The very feeling that you don't know opens the door.
So take these techniques not as knowledge, but as a help to make you more innocent. Ignorance is innocent, knowledge is always a sort of cunningness, cleverness. If you can use your knowledge to be ignorant again, then you have used it rightly. This is the only use of all the scriptures, of all the knowledge, of all the Vedas -- to make you childlike again.
Now the first technique:
PUT MINDSTUFF IN SUCH INEXPRESSIBLE FINENESS
ABOVE, BELOW AND IN YOUR HEART.
Three things. First, if knowledge is important then the head is the center; if childlike innocence is important then the heart is the center. The child lives in the heart; we live in the head. The child feels; we think. Even when we say that we feel, we think that we feel. Thinking becomes primary for us, feeling becomes secondary. Thinking is the tool for science, feeling is the tool for religion.
You must start to be a feeling organism again. And both the dimensions are different. When you think, you remain separate; when you feel, you melt.
Think about a flower, a rose flower. When you think, you are separate, there is a gap, a distance, a space. For thinking, space is needed; for thoughts to move, distance is needed. Feel the flower and the gap disappears, the distance drops. Because for feeling, distance is the barrier. The closer you come, the more you feel. A moment comes when even closeness appears to be a sort of distance -- and then melting happens. Then you cannot feel the boundaries of where you are and where the flower is, of where you end and where the flower begins. Then boundaries melt into each other: the flower enters you in a way, you enter the flower in a way. Feeling is losing the boundaries; thinking is creating the boundaries. That is why thinking always insists on definitions, because without definitions you cannot create boundaries.
Thinking says define first, and feeling says don't define. If you define, feeling stops.
The child feels; we think. The child comes close to existence, he melts and allows the existence to melt into him. We are isolated, imprisoned in the head. We are like islands.
This sutra says to come back to the heart center. Start feeling things. It will be a great experiment if you start feeling things. Whatsoever you do, give a certain amount of your time and energy to feeling. You are sitting here, you can listen to me -- but that will be part of thinking. You can also feel me here but that will not be a part of thinking. If you can feel my presence, then definitions are lost. Then really, if you come to a moment of feeling, you don't know who is speaking and who is listening. This can happen right this very moment. Then the speaker becomes the listener and the listener becomes the speaker. Then really they are not two, rather, they are two poles of one phenomenon: on one pole is the speaker, on another pole is the listener. But these are just poles, isolated. They are not real. The real thing is just in-between these two -- the life, the flow. Whenever you feel, something other than your ego becomes important. Object and subject lose their definitions. A flow, a wave, exists -- on one pole the speaker, on another pole the listener, but the life is the wave.
Head gives you clarity, and because of this clarity much confusion has come into being because the head defines clearly, marks boundaries, makes maps. With reason, everything is clear-cut: no vagueness, no mystery is allowed. All that is vague is rejected, only the clear is real. Reason gives you a clarity, and because of clarity, a great misunderstanding arises. Clarity is not reality. Reality is always unclear, vague. Concepts are clear, reality is mysterious; concepts are rational, reality is irrational.
Words are clear, logic is clear life is not clear. The heart gives you a melting vagueness. It reaches reality more intimately, but it is not clear. And because we have chosen clarity as the goal, we have been missing reality. You must have unclear eyes to enter reality again. You must be vague, you must be ready to enter into something which cannot be conceptualized, into something which is not logic, into something which is staggering and real, staggering and alive.
Clarity is dead. It remains fixed. Life is a flux, nothing is fixed, nothing remains the same the next moment. How can you be clear about it? If you insist too much on clarity you will lose contact with it. That is what has happened.
This sutra says that the basic thing is to come back to the heart center -- but how to come to it? PUT MINDSTUFF IN SUCH INEXPRESSABLE FINENESS ABOVE, BELOW AND IN YOUR HEART.
The word `mindstuff' is not a good translation of the original Sanskrit word CHITT. But English has no other equivalent. So it is good in a way, it carries the meaning, not of `mind' but of `mindstuff'.
Mind means mentation, thinking, thought, and mindstuff means the background upon which these thoughts float -- just as in the sky the clouds move. Clouds are the thoughts and the sky is the background upon which they move. That sky, consciousness, has been called mindstuff. Your mind can be without thoughts; then it is chitt, then it is pure mind. When it has thoughts it is impure mind.
If your mind can be without thought, then it is very subtle, the subtlest thing possible in existence. You cannot conceive of a more subtle possibility. Consciousness is the most subtle thing. So when there are no thoughts in the mind, you have pure mind. The pure mind can move towards the heart, the impure mind cannot. By impurity I don't mean any immoral thoughts in the mind, by impurity I mean all thoughts -- thought as such is impure.
Even if you are thinking of God it is an impurity, because the cloud is moving. The cloud is very white, but the cloud is there and the purity of the space is not there. A cloudless sky is not there. A cloud may be a black cloud, a sexual thought moving in the mind, or the cloud may be a white cloud, beautiful, a prayer moving in the mind, but in both cases the pure mind is not there. It is impure, clouded. And if the mind is clouded you cannot move in the heart.
This has to be understood because with thoughts you cling to the head. Thoughts are the roots, and unless those roots are cut you cannot fall back to the heart.
The child remains in the heart only up to the moment that thoughts crystalize, that thoughts start floating in his mind. Then they take root; then through education, culture, cultivation, they become rooted; then by and by the consciousness moves from the heart to the head. The consciousness can remain in the head only if there are thoughts. This is basic. If there are no thoughts, consciousness immediately drops back to its original innocence in the heart.
Hence so much emphasis on meditation, so much emphasis on non-thinking, on thoughtless awareness, on choiceless awareness, or on Buddha's `right mindfulness', which is just mindfulness without any thought, just being aware. What happens then? A very great phenomenon happens because when the roots are cut, immediately consciousness drops back to the heart, to the original place where it had been. You become a child again.
Jesus said, "Only those who are like children will enter into the kingdom of my God." He refers to those persons whose consciousness has come back to the heart. They have become innocent, childlike.
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