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happens in the body has nothing to do with you is such a freedom, is such a relief, that suddenly you become weightless. That weightlessness is one of the significant by-products of meditation.
Meditation simply means the art of witnessing. Start by witnessing your body and then your mind -- and get out of both! In fact by meditating you will be out of both. And the day one knows 'I am not the body, not the mind,' one has come home. Then one knows who one is.
The English words 'mind' and 'man', both come from the same Sanskrit root, manu.
Mind is our past. It has no concern with the present or with the future, it is simply a record of all that has happened in the past. And remember that to live through the mind is a wrong way to live, because life goes on changing every moment. To live through the mind means to live through the past, to live through the dead, to live through that which is no more. It will distort your vision and you will never be adequate to the situation you are in, you will always fall short of the challenge, your response will never be right.
Mind is the cause of all our failures, because mind goes on giving you ready-made answers. Those answers may have been right in some other situation in the past but they are no longer right because life has changed -- life is a constant change. Only one thing is permanent and that is change. Otherwise everything changes.
Heraclitus says 'You cannot step in the same river twice'; and I say to you, you cannot step in the same river even once, because the river is constantly changing. When your foot touches its surface it is one river, it takes time for your foot to go a little deeper -- it is another river. By the time you reach to the bottom, of the river it is still some other water, it is no more the same water that you had touched on the surface. So even to step once in the same river is impossible.
We have to learn not to function through the mind. Mind is good as a record, good as a computer which contains all your past experiences, it is factually helpful if you want to remember somebody's name -- unless the person has become a sannyasin! (laughter) Then nobody
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