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distorted, given ideas which are absolutely false. Your mind is functioning almost like a mask and hiding your original face.
To transcend the mind is the whole art of meditation, and the East has devoted almost ten thousand years to a single purpose -- all its intelligence and genius -- of discovering how to transcend the mind and its conditionings. That whole effort of ten thousand years has culminated in refining the method of meditation.
In a single word, meditation means watching the mind, witnessing the mind. If you can witness the mind, just silently looking at it -- without any justification, without any appreciation, without any condemnation, with no judgment at all, for or against -- simply watching as if you have nothing to do with it... it is just the traffic that goes on in the mind. Stand by the side and watch it. And the miracle of meditation is that just by watching it, it slowly slowly disappears.
The moment mind disappears, you come to the last door which is very fragile -- and that too is not polluted by the society -- your heart. In fact, your heart immediately gives you a way. It never prevents you, it is ready almost every moment for you to come to it and it will open the door towards the being. The heart is your friend.
The head is your enemy. The body is your friend, the heart is your friend, but just in between the two stands the enemy like a Himalaya, a big mountain wall. But it can be crossed over by a simple method. Gautam Buddha called the method vipassana. Patanjali called the method dhyan. And the Sanskrit word dhyan became, in China, ch'an and in Japan it became zen. But it is the same word. In English there is not exactly any equivalent for zen or dhyan or ch'an. We arbitrarily use the word meditation.
But you should remember: whatever meaning is given to the word meditation in your dictionaries, is not the meaning as I am using it. All the dictionaries will say meditation means thinking about something. Whenever I say to a Western mind, "Meditate" the immediate question is, "On what?" The reason is that in the West, meditation never developed to the point dhyan or ch'an or zen have developed in
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