How does one stop the thinking mind and dive deep within?
Q : Is it possible to go beyond words? Any method or effort, thinking or not thinking, doing or not doing, meditating or not meditating is only the product of mind which is nothing but accumulation of the past. The past keeps on rolling or re-rolling every moment of one’s life. Any effort or even lack of it then cannot be the way and yet deep inside lingers a ray of hope. Does truth lie beyond this hope and is there an end to sufferings at all as one cries & cries out of one’s sense of helplessness? Rajendra Dev
Answer It is true that whatever way you may choose - witnessing, meditating, thinking, contemplating - all these are indeed again a set of new words, a set of new mental thoughts, a set of new ladder of contemplation, where again more & more sentences are included in your thinking process, in your recognition, but the question is this that can words lead you towards wordlessness, can words lead you towards silence? Truth is, these words cannot lead you towards the silence and ‘doing’ cannot lead you to non-doing.
But yet, we have to understand what kind of ‘doing’ we are talking about. There is one kind of ‘doing’ which will lead you to messier situations and then there is another kind of ‘doing’ that will lead you to the state which is beyond doing. Say, when you do a mantra - mantra is a word, mantra is a syllable, mantra is a set of those syllables which create such vibrations in your mind that would bring chemical changes in your body & you may experience great things. But a mantra cannot be called a mantra if you are stuck in it. "Man antar saa ithi mantra". Mantra when leads you to your inwardness, leads you to the center of your mind, to the core of your being then the mantra has been used in a proper way. Else you are just stuck in the mantra.
In the name of contemplation, people go on thinking & thinking that ‘I am Shiva’, ‘I am Shiva’. It does not lead you anywhere at all because attachments are there, desires are there, frustrations are there; the trap of mind is still there. When you see these Vedantees, most of them are just stuck in the words. Indeed, they have a new kind of vocabulary now. But this vocabulary is not going to lead them into the state of total contemplation, where the mind stops.
So what should you do? You have to learn that particular set of ‘doing’ which can lead you to non- doing. Let me give you an example; when the body is sick, when the body is having some kind of bad elements - it could be bacteria, it could be a virus - what do you do? You take some medicine; what is medicine? Medicine again is some kind of chemical which is derived from some bacteria and now this vaccine or this chemical is taken which is going to relieve you from your pain which was caused by that unwanted bacteria.
In a way, you can say, poison can heal you and poison can kill you. A medicine is a poison which has been structured by some chemist, by some pharmaceutical professional which will help you to come out of your pain & disease. Let me give you another example; suppose you are walking in a jungle, you are lost and you have lost your shoes also. You are walking bare feet and a thorn goes right inside your foot. What would you do? There is no dispensary, no doctor, no first aid. If you are wise, you will look for another thorn and use it to take out the thorn which has broken inside your foot. So you pull the thorn out with the thorn and then you throw both the thorns away. You don't save the thorn as a souvenir or as a trophy with which you picked the thorn out as now it is of no use. Meditation or any other so-called method is just like a thorn which can bring out those thorns, those thoughts which are hurting you. But once it has done its job we let go of even that. I can say that you begin with meditation and then soon you come to a point where you drop the meditation, you begin with a thought and then soon you come to a point where even this divine and wise Vedantic thought too is discarded.
If you are not able to do that, well, again you are stuck. Rajender, you need not cry & cry helplessly but what you need is to be in association, be in presence of some Master where the Master can whack your head and bring a stop to your thinking mind. On your own, it may take many lives but with the Master, if you are totally surrendered to him and if you can dedicate your life for this cause, I can assure you in this very life you can achieve the greatest experiences possible within the realm of human approach.
Gurumaa
