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I am torturing myself and gaining nothing."
I said, "I know a way. You can sit silently -- that is the symbol; this one finger on my lips simply means be silent. Just for half an hour.... You are alone" -- his wife was dead and his sons had gone into their own businesses -- "you have nothing else to do. You have a beautiful house and a beautiful garden. You can sit anywhere, just in silence."
He said, "The idea is good, but in silence can I go on repeating from one to a hundred? And from a hundred backwards -- ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, down to one, and then back? That way will be easy for me, just like a ladder -- from one to two to three to four, and then coming back down the ladder. But without engagement, just sitting silently...."
I said, "This won't do because you will still be doing the same stupid thing -- the mathematics you have been doing your whole life. But what is the trouble with sitting in silence?"
He said, "It just looks... somebody may see me. Somebody may ask, `What are you doing?' Just my whole upbringing is such that if somebody asks, `What are you doing?' you cannot say `nothing'; otherwise, people will think something is loose. Nothing? The whole world is there to do everything and you are sitting here doing nothing?"
In every language there are proverbs which say "Anything is better than nothing." Anything -- without any conditions! Strange -- anything is better than nothing? Every language has such proverbs. "Don't sit there doing nothing; do something."
I have heard, one woman was telling another woman, her neighbor, "Today there is good news. My son, who used to do nothing, has joined a meditation group. Now he is doing meditation."
I was just passing; I said, "You don't know what you are talking about because meditation simply means doing nothing. Your boy has found really the right people, his own kind. Now he is not doing nothing alone, he is doing nothing with many people."
Meditation is not something.
Once the negative part is complete -- and it depends on your intelligence, it can be complete within a second. If you can see that all that you have is borrowed,
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