Osho reminds us: “When one remembers one’s sacredness, one’s infinity, joy wells up. When one thinks oneself limited by a thousand and one limitations, misery arises, because a limitation is a kind of confinement; it is a prison. How can one be happy in such a small body? How can one be happy in such a petty mind? It is impossible. They don’t allow you space to dance, to sing, to celebrate. One is cluttered, one is like a junkyard. One needs the vast sky. In that vastness is freedom. In that freedom is joy.”
Fall in love with the transcendental… search for it. And I call it “falling in love” because the search has to be through the heart and not through the mind. If you search through the mind, you will never go beyond the mind. The mind is very jealous and it won’t allow you to surpass it; it is very possessive. The mind is the jailer, it guards the gate. It won’t allow you to go beyond the limits. You can function within the limits — it gives you all freedom within the limits — but don’t step outside; that is not allowed. The heart is not a prison, it is an opening; it is a door, not a wall. Hence I say “fall in love with the beyond”.
Mind Is the Jailer
There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let your mind and subtle body rest upon that and not on anything else.” It is important to remember these beautiful words of Maitri Upanishad, when world is filled with hatred and noisy slugfest.
What is beyond our mind, which abides in silence? It is our consciousness. It is our heart. And being totally intoxicated by our mind and its manipulations, we tend to forget who we truly are. Our consciousness feeds on peace and our heart expands with love, but our mind, when it monopolises our whole being, our life becomes a battlefield. This is the downhill path of misery. It shrinks our vision and narrows it to make it a tunnel vision. We become totally selfish and violent, thinking of others as our enemies. This is a very unnatural state of being. The consciousness wants to fly high in the open sky and the heart yearns for love, but the mind is always preoccupied to have its way of animosity towards others. Mind creates Pandavas and Kauravas — the holy and the unholy. The consciousness knows that God’s creation is all divine — it is Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam, one family of universal brotherhood. All divisions are fictitious and illusory. This is the mayajaal of the mind. When our consciousness transcends the divisions created by our mind, we feel others not as others but as ourselves. We transcend the artificial confinements.
Friedrich Nietzsche said “That day will be the most unfortunate when man stops surpassing himself.” When the arrow of human consciousness does not have anything like a target beyond itself, that day will be the most unfortunate. But that day will never come, it cannot come — the urge is built in. Man is man only because of the desire to surpass himself… that very desire is his humanness. Our mind finds fault with everything and everybody. But if we see meditatively, with the pure vision of consciousness, everything looks perfect and beautiful. You just approach this great shrine of God. God is enshrined here in every stone, and every stone is a sermon, and He is flowering in every flower, and He is breathing in every heart. You just approach with innocence.
— This Article written by Swami Chaitanya Keerti was published in The Asian Age and the Deccan Chronicle in summer 2014….