H.W.L. POONJA

ETERNAL REST

I say to people, "Sit quietly and watch where the mind goes." If you observe it you will see that it is always running off to enjoy or suffer experiences that belong to the past. So, whenever you catch it doing this, bring it back to the present moment. In this present moment there are no dialogues going on. In this present moment there is nothing to control or repress.

The mind is just like a thief. It is stealing your happiness by making you run after things and ideas that make you suffer all the time. Bring it back to the present each and every time you find that it is wandering somewhere else. This thief in your head loots your property, your happiness, every waking moment. And you allow him. You make friends with him and let him do what he wants. Why should you fondle and be friends with a snake that is going to bite you and make you suffer? Show the mind the way home and don't let it make you suffer all the time.

The internal dialogue will go on interminably until you decide to stop indulging in it. This dialogue continues all day and even at night while you are dreaming. If you are serious about stopping it, you can, by taking a firm decision and sticking to it. "I am going to do it now. If not now, then during this life span." If that intense determination is there, that determination itself will be enough to stop the flow.

How can you feel well when you are indulging in all these mental projections? They are all just ideas that are fighting with each other. How can you be happy with all these mental fights going on inside you? True quietness is there when you are not manufacturing any mental projections. You can't be quiet as long as these projections are there because the projections themselves are non-stop mental noise.

Everything that you see, feel and think is a projection of the mind. You fall in love with the objects you create. You end up falling in love with them because you think that they are separate from you. It's all a shadow. It's not real. As I have just said, you can never be quiet while these projections are there because these projections are made up of mental noise. You will only be happy, only be quiet when the projections stop completely.

Everything that you see, within and without, is just a projection of the mind. When the mind stops, there is no projection and when there is no projection, bliss remains.

Different teachers say different things. Everyone claims to have a remedy for this mental uneasiness. But if the remedy needs mental activity to carry it out, it is not going to work. Because mental activity, no matter how well directed, always leads to an increase of uneasiness. Whenever you catch the mind wandering, put it back in the Self and leave it there. Put it in the place of no-thought and sooner or later it will develop such a liking for that place that it will never want to leave again.

Everyone wants to give you some practice or some method as a solution to mental uneasiness. That's not my way, and I will tell you why not. If you perform any practice to get a particular result, you must begin it at a certain time. And if it is something that begins, then it must also end. Whatever begins must end one day. What has a beginning and an end cannot be eternal.

So, I don't give out any methods which can be done in time. Instead, I say, "Keep quiet and don't make any effort". This is not a method, it is just the natural state of being.

Stay quiet and don't make any effort. Do it now. It's not something that you need to put off till later. Experiment with it now. Do it now and tell me what happens. Sit quiet for at least one minute and don't make any effort. Give up all desires and tell me what is left?

Now, during this minute, what did you do? Were you thinking during this time? I am asking this because the problem is about mind control. If you are having trouble, it means that you are having a lot of thoughts. So I am asking you, "Tell me what thought you had when I asked you to be quiet and not make any effort".

When I tell you to keep quiet, I am cutting you off from your past memories. If you can be in this state of absolute quietness, in which no thoughts or ideas from the past intrude, you will see and be aware of something new, something you have never seen before. It has no name and no form, because anything which has name and form belongs to the past. You recognize name and form only because of past experience. So, if you recognize something, it means that you are living in the past, not the present.

How to cut this link with the past? By sitting quietly, by having no thoughts, and by making no effort. Just for an instant. When you stop making effort, when you stop looking for peace, you find that it is already there, inside you. You don't have to make any effort or do any practice to get that peace.

Your reaction to any object, person or idea has to be based on your experience of them in the past. You like certain things and dislike others. These judgments are all derived from past associations.

You must have seen puppets dance and perform their acrobatics in empty space. Everyone is a puppet. We are all dancing in the air, in empty space. But the one who pulls the strings is never seen.

Who is not a puppet in this world? We are all dancing around like puppets, performing our different activities. What is the difference between a puppet and a person? I don't think there is any difference.

The audience can enjoy a puppet show if it doesn't see the one who pulls the strings. You can get lost in the drama and imagine that the dances are real once you forget about the man who makes the puppets move. This is how it is in the world. Once you cease to be aware of the one who pulls the strings in this world, you get emotionally involved in all kinds of dramas and imagine them to be real. You look at the scenes in front of you and take them to be real because you can't see that there is a single power, a single source which is manifesting as all the actors and making them move according to a pre-ordained script.

It is not enough just to have an intellectual understanding. Intellect itself is a puppet. It dances very well and deceives you into thinking that it does everything by its own power and authority. This is just one of its tricks. To see through it you have to go back to the source. When the strings are being pulled, you can feel the pull. Feel that pull. Follow it. See where the pulling is coming from. Find out who is really pulling your strings and making you do and even think all the things that you do and think. What is beyond this intellect? Follow it back and find out. If you stay in the intellect you will never find out. You have to transcend it; you have to go beyond it and find out where it derives all its power from. What is its source?

There is a fountain of energy that enables you to think, but where does it come from? First there is this energy which enables you to discriminate. It enables you to think, so mind comes into existence. Then you can act, perform activities. You function in the world through the senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing and seeing. An object is known to you through the senses; the senses are known by the mind which processes them; a judgment is then made about them by the intellect. But where does this intellect come from? What is that which is prior to the intellect and which gives the intellect its power?

This intellect comes from Atman, and Atman means Self. Sitting quietly here today, you have seen that Self. Your own Self. Out of that Self comes all the energy that runs the intellect and the mind. With this intellect you can command the mind and enjoy, via the senses, all the things of this world. Everything comes from the Atman, from the Self, from the unknown, from emptiness itself. All the phenomenal waves arise from this ocean of the unknown.

No one identifies with the Self. Everyone instead identifies with something that is manifest. This causes all the unhappiness, all the suffering in the world. When you identify yourself with the Self, when you can say with confidence of direct experience, "I am the Self", you can enjoy all this manifestation without having to suffer. You can enjoy all the waves on the ocean of samsara [worldly life] once you know that you are the Self, and not any of the names and forms that appear in it.

When you set yourself a goal called silence and have told your mind that you want to attain it, you are never in silence. The silence of no-mind, of no thought does not come and go. What come and go are the mental states that you programme yourself into having.

You have desires and you put a lot of mental energy into accomplishing them. You are attracted to beautiful things. Your mind goes out to them. You try to obtain them for yourself. But these things are only beautiful because your mind has made a judgment about them. The things that you classify as beautiful may not be beautiful to anyone else. Look at this flower in the vase. Somebody put it here because she thought it was beautiful. But if a goat comes along, the goat mind will see it as food and eat it. No thought of beauty will arise in the goat. Goats of the past teach the goats of the present what is good to eat and what should be avoided. This is all stored in the memory of the current generation of goats, who are all conditioned to be attracted to certain things because they know they are edible.

So, what is desirable differs from person to person, creature to creature. A diamond has no value in the hands of a man who has not been educated to know that it is worth something. For him, it is just a worthless pebble. But when your mind identifies it as a diamond, this otherwise useless piece of charcoal suddenly becomes immensely valuable. It's just a piece of carbon, chemically no different from charcoal. But when the mind gives it value, then for you it has value.

You have decided that you want mental silence and you are working towards it, making a great effort to make the mind quiet. You have chosen to strive for a state which you call silence. You have decided that silence is desirable, so you put in a lot of effort to try and reach that desirable state. But I say, "If you are choosing and striving, then you are still living in the mind." The efforts you are making are mental, and the goal you have set yourself is also mental. The experience of a state you have chosen and striven for will be a mental experience.

If you want eternal rest; if you want the state of real silence, then you have to be choiceless. Your true nature is choicelessness. As long as you choose and strive, the experience of your true nature will be hidden from you.

If you want real silence, you have to give up all ideas about attaining it or striving for it. You have to give up all your searching. And having given up all your searching, what will be left? I will tell you. What will be left will be what was already there before you started running around looking for it. It is so easy. In just a single moment all inner dialogue stops. And why does it stop? Because you stopped making any effort to stop it. In the moment of no effort you become aware of the substratum, that place from where mind rises. You didn't do it before because you were too busy making efforts to control the mind. It was you who was making it complicated.

It's very simple. Keep quiet, don't make any effort, and don't speak also. Then you will understand what I am talking about.

You don't have to go anywhere, jump anywhere. For jumping you need two locations: the place where you are starting from and the place you are planning to jump to. There is no jumping board and no swimming pool. You don't have to start from one place and jump into somewhere else. This is just your concept. When there is no jumper, no diving board, no swimming pool, then what are you going to do? Where will you jump?

Don't give rise to this thought, "I have to jump into silence". But if it does arise, find out where it comes from. Follow it back to the depths, to the place from which it originally arose. If it has arisen, it must have come from somewhere. Everything you speak and think must have come from somewhere. Where is that 'somewhere'? Where do all your desires come from: "I like this"; "I don't like that"; "I have to jump"; "I am in a state of unease." All these are just thoughts. Find out where they all come from. Turn the mind backwards and simply look at the source from which they came. That's all you have to do.

Real knowledge can only be of your own Self. You have gone to school and your teacher has given you knowledge which he himself has acquired from somewhere else. But what I am talking about cannot be learned or acquired. No one has ever learned it from anyone else. It has been there since the creation of the world.

Everything rises from the same source. Everything is a manifestation of that same source. What is in between the projector and the object of projection, in between you and another? What separates them? Empty space. Nothingness is all around you. In your immediate vicinity you have to admit that there is only nothingness, emptiness. So, why do you exclude yourself from it? Why do you think that there is something, somebody in the middle of the nothingness?

You think that what is seen is separate from the one who sees it. Isn't that so? You think that the subject who sees is different from the object that is seen. I am telling you to find out who the seer is. Find out who is the one who is seeing objects. You look at your body and it becomes an object of your sight. But who is the seer of the body?

If the seer is consciousness, then you yourself must be consciousness. You are not the object which is seen; you are not the body which is seen by the seer. You are the seer itself, consciousness, not an object of the senses. That means that you cannot be the body or anything else which you can see, hear, feel, smell, touch or even think about. You can be a witness of all the things that you perceive, but you cannot be the objects themselves. You have to find out who is the witness, who is this character who is searching for peace of mind. Nothing else needs to be done.