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Question 1
PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT YOU MEAN BY YOGA, THE YOGI, AND MEDITATION.
The first thing to be remembered about meditation is that it is not something that can be done. Throughout the world people have the notion that meditation means doing something. It is not a doing, it is not an act, it is something that happens. It is not that YOU go to it; it comes to you and penetrates you. It destroys you in one way and recreates you in another. It is something so vital and so infinite that it cannot be a part of your doing.
Then what is to be done? You can only create the situation in which it happens. All that you can do is to be vulnerable and open to existence from all sides.
Ordinarily we are like prisons: we are closed up within ourselves with no openings. In a way we are dead. One can say we have become "life-proof": life cannot come to us. We have created barriers and hindrances to life, because life can be dangerous, uncontrollable; it is something which is not in our hands. We have created a closed existence for ourselves so that we can be certain and secure, so that we can be comfortable. This closed existence is convenient, but at the same time it is deadening. The more closed we become the less alive we are. The more open we become the more alive we are.
Meditation is an openness to all dimensions, an openness to everything. But to be open to everything is dangerous, to be open to everything unconditionally makes us insecure. It cannot be comfortable because anything can happen. A mind which longs for security, which longs for comfort, which longs for certainty, cannot be a meditative mind. Only a mind which is open to anything that life offers, welcoming each and everything that happens, even death, can create a situation in which meditation happens.
So the only thing that can be done by you is to be receptive to meditation, to be totally receptive -- not to any particular happening but to anything that comes.
Meditation is not a particular dimension, it is a dimensionless existence, an existence that is open to each and every dimension without any conditions, without any longings, without any expectations.
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