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| | | Book Name: The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
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Loneliness is the negative aspect of aloneness. If you go deeper into it one moment is bound to come when suddenly you will start feeling the positive aspect of it. Because both aspects are always together.
So be lonely, suffer loneliness. It is difficult, meditation is difficult. People come to me and they ask, 'Yes, we are ready to sit, but give us a mantra so that we can chant a mantra.' What are they asking? They are saying that they don't want to be alone, they don't want to face their loneliness. They will chant a mantra -- the mantra will become their companion. They will say, 'Ram, Ram, Ram' -- now they are not alone. Now this sound of 'Ram' continuously repeated will become their companion.
They are missing the whole point. Transcendental meditation, TM, is not meditation at all, because meditation simply means to be alone, not doing anything -- not even chanting a mantra. Because this is a trick of the mind. That's what the mind has always been doing. When you sit alone, have you watched how many fantasies reveal themselves to you?... endless fantasies, daydreams. Whenever you are alone, you start daydreaming. Whenever you don't have anything to do and you feel bored, immediately you escape into daydreams.
That's why if a person goes to the desert, to the Arabian Desert, to the Sahara, and sits there, he will start imagining, visions will start coming to him, because a desert is a very monotonous thing. Nothing to pay attention to -- just the same monotonous expanse of sands and sands; nothing to distract, nothing new -- monotonous, boring. A person becomes dreamy, one starts substituting. If there is nothing new outside, one creates one's own imaginative world and starts looking into it.
That's what happens to people who go to the Himalayas and sit in caves to meditate. They start imagining. Then they can imagine anything -- gods and goddesses and apsaras and angels and Krishna playing on his flute, and Rama standing with his bow, and Jesus -- and whatsoever your imagination, whatsoever your conditioning. If you have been conditioned as a Christian, sooner or later in a himalayan cave you will encounter Jesus, and this will
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