| |
past, it is always of the dead -- an accumulation of dead experiences. So whenever the mind is working, you always misunderstand -- you are bound to. But when it is not working -- when it is quiet, silent, absolutely nonexistent, when only awareness is there -- a gap is created and the door to the heart is opened.
The heart understands without any interpretation; its understanding is direct and immediate. You just understand -- you KNOW, "This is so." This putting the mind aside is what I call meditation. If you can see things through the heart, if you can contact existence through the heart, then you are in meditation; but if you are always living through the mind you will never be in meditation.
It can be said that the heart is the faculty for meditation, and the mind is the faculty which functions against meditation; and the two cannot work simultaneously. If the mind is functioning, the heart cannot. It goes away because it is not needed; it goes to sleep. Only when the mind is not working does the heart come to the surface to breathe, to see. It comes only when the mind is not needed, when the mind has been discarded. And the moment the heart comes in contact with the existential, you feel the ecstasy, the beatitude. Everything becomes divine. It is divine, but then you know it.
When the heart is in contact with the world, the world is divine; when the mind is in contact with the world, the world is material. Mind cannot know anything beyond matter and the heart cannot know anything below the spiritual. That is why those who have been heart-oriented have said that the world is unreal, illusory; it is maya -- just a magical show. There is a reason for saying so: because the heart cannot come below the spiritual, it can never know the material. The material world becomes illusory, unreal, dreamy -- as if it were not.
The mind-oriented have denied the spiritual. They say that it is a dream, fiction which is nowhere to be found. Only matter exists for them; there is nothing spiritual: the spiritual is illusory, dreamlike, foolish. Nietzsche has said somewhere, "There are people who say that Jesus was a genius, a wise man. But I would
|
|
|