Chapter 3: Returning To The Original Mind

First, what is the original mind?
Because the original mind is the very goal of all yogas.

The East has been searching continuously the path to the original mind. The original mind is that mind which you had before you were born, not in this life, but before you entered the world of desires; before you were confined to thoughts, desires, instincts, body, mind --> that original space, uncontaminated by anything; that original sky, unclouded - that is the original mind.

On that original mind, layers and layers of minds are there. A man is like an onion; you go on peeling it. You peel one layer, another layer is there; you peel that layer, another layer comes up. You don't have one mind, you have layers and layers of many minds. Because in each life you have cultivated a certain mind, then in another life another mind, and so on and so forth. And the original mind is lost completely behind these minds, these layers upon layers. But if you go on peeling the onion, a moment comes when only emptiness is left in your hands. The onion has disappeared.

When minds disappear, then arises the original mind. In fact, to call it a mind is not good, but there is no other way to express it. It is a no-mind. The original mind is a no-mind. When all the minds that you have, have been dissolved, dropped, the original appears with its pristine purity, with its virginity.

This original mind you have already. You may have forgotten. You may be lost in the jungle of your mind's conditionings, but deep down, hidden behind all these layers, you still live in your original mind, and in rare moments, you penetrate to it. In deep sleep, when even dreams have stopped, in dreamless sleep, you have a dip into the original mind. That's why in the morning you feel so fresh.

But if there has been a continuity of dreams the whole night, then you feel tired. You feel more tired than you were feeling when you went to bed. You could not have a dip into your inner Ganges, into your stream of pure consciousness. You could not move into it, you could not bathe in it. In the morning you feel tired, worried, tense, confused, divided. You don't have the harmony that comes out of deep sleep. But it is not coming out of deep sleep; deep sleep is just a passage to the original mind. That's why Patanjali says that samadhi is like deep sleep with only one difference: in samadhi, you move into the same original mind that you move into in sleep, but you move fully aware; in deep sleep, you slip into it unawares, not knowing where you are going, not knowing what path you are following. That's your only contact left with the original mind.

Doctors and physicians know well that whenever somebody is suffering from a disease, if he cannot sleep well, then there is no way to cure him. Sleep is therapeutic. In fact, the first thing for the patient is: how to help him move into deep sleep, deep rest. That rest cures because the patient becomes again connected with the original mind, and the original mind is a healing source. It is your source of life-energy, love. All that you have is coming from the oceanic world of your original mind.

Of course, when it has to pass so many layers of mind, it is contaminated, polluted. Your inner ecology is no longer original. It has been filled up, stuffed with many dead things. Your minds are nothing but your dead experience.

A person who wants to move into the original mind alert, aware, has to learn how to unlearn, how to unlearn the experience, how to die to the past continuously, how not to cling to the past. One moment you have lived - finished - be finished with it. Let there be no continuity with it; become discontinuous. It no longer belongs to you. It is finished and finished forever. Let it be a full point, and you get out of it as a snake moves out of the old skin and does not even look back. Just a moment before, that skin was part of his body; now, no more. Move out of the past continuously so that you can remain in the present. If you can remain in the present, you cannot go out of your original mind. The original mind knows no past and no future.

What you call the mind is nothing but past and future, past and future - a swing between past and future - and your mind never stops here-now. That's the meaning of meditation: to get out of the past, not create the future, and remain with the reality that is available here-now. Remain with it.

Suddenly, you will see there is no mind between you and the reality, between you and that which is, because mind cannot exist in the present. You cannot think about it, because the moment you think about anything it is already the past, or, it is not yet present. Thinking needs time. Hence, the sutra, that only through meditation does one come to the original mind.

Meditation is not thinking; it is dropping of thinking.

I have heard:

An old tramp was on the dole and he was asked what he did all day long. "Well," he said, "sometimes I sits and thinks and other times I just sits."

That 'just sits' is exactly the meaning of meditation. In Japan they call meditation zazen. 'Zazen' means: just sitting and doing nothing, just being and doing nothing; in a state of suspended mentation.

And clouds open, and you can see the open space, the blue sky. Once you know how to move in that space, it is available always. You can go on working and whenever you want, you can have a dip inside. It becomes so easy, as if you move inside the house and outside the house. Once you know the door, there is no problem in it. You don't even think about it. When it is feeling too hot, you move inside the house, into the coolness and the shelter. When it is feeling too cold and you are freezing, you move out of the house into the hot sun. You become fluid between the inner and the outer.

The mind is blocking the path to the inner. Whenever you go within yourself, again and again you find some layer of mind: some thought fragment, some desire, some planning, some dream, something of the future or something of the past. And remember, future is nothing but a projection of the past.

Future is again asking for the past in a slightly modified way, a little better. In the past you had happinesses and unhappinesses, pleasures and pains, thorns and flowers. Your future is nothing but flowers, thorns deducted, pains dropped - just pleasures and pleasures and pleasures. You go on sorting out your past, and whatsoever you feel was good and beautiful, you project it into the future.

Once you know how to get out of the past, future automatically disappears. There being no past inside, there cannot be any future. Past produces the future. Past is the mother of the future, the womb. When there is no past and no future, then what is, is. Then what is, is! Then suddenly, you are in eternity.

This is what the original mind is: with no flicker of thought, no cloud in sight, no dust around you.

Just pure space.