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The whole day he was arguing against religion, against all kinds of superstitions. He had written in his sitting room in big letters: GOD IS NOWHERE.
Then a small child was born to him.
One day the small child was looking at the writing. He was just learning to write, learning the alphabet, so he could not manage to read GOD IS NOWHERE; on the contrary, he read: GOD IS NOW HERE -- nowhere can be divided into two.
The father heard it and was amazed. He had never thought about it, that `nowhere' consists of `now' and `here'.
The small child changed the man's whole approach; he started thinking about now and here. And he was puzzled... because he has never been now; his mind has been wandering in the past or in the future, but never now, never in the present.
Mind has no relationship with the present.
This moment, if you are here, the mind is no more.
Mind needs the past as memory, and mind needs the future as projection. Without future and past, the mind cannot exist. And the present is so small, just a split second. In the present, there is no work for the mind to do -- either it can do some work for the future or some work for the past, but it is absolutely impotent as far as the present is concerned.
The father had defeated many philosophers, but this small child changed his whole life because he started to be here, and to be now, and he found a new area opening within himself.
That area is meditation.
Meditation means no mind -- no past, no future, no present... just eternity, a pure mirror which reflects the whole and is not scratched by anything. Just as the sky is not scratched by the clouds moving, or the sun rising, or the full-moon night, the sky remains unscratched.
You have heard the Zen haiku about the shadows of the bamboos... sweeping the temple steps, but they don't make any noise.
The moon in the sky is reflected in the smallest pond but it does not disturb the pond. It does not create even a single ripple. And the miracle is, neither does the pond want the moon to reflect nor does the moon want to be reflected. But existence manages spontaneously a beautiful phenomenon
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