Words From The Master - 08 May 2008

Be unclutched become free

YOUR entire belief in rationality and logic is based on the premise that your thinking is sequential and it follows a pattern. This is a lie.

Buddhists say mind is a monkey. That’s very true. Your thoughts are not sequential. Your thoughts are independent of each other. They are not connected. They are illogical and irrational. They are like the bubbles in a fish tank which appear connected; but there is no connection between one bubble and another. They are all independent.

Just try this. For a few minutes, truthfully, write down all your thoughts as they occur to you. When you read what you have written again, it will appear to you that what you have written is a madman’s diary. Nothing will be connected, nothing will seem logical. You would have jumped from past to present, from future to past, all with no logical connection whatsoever.

It is only when you link thoughts to one another, when you try and provide a logical and rational sequence to thoughts with the help of your mind, you invite suffering. The pleasurable experiences or painful experiences that you had 10 years ago, five years ago, two years ago and yesterday and today are all independent of each other. They are unconnected. Yet you try and fit them in a pattern and then expect that pattern to repeat. This expectation leads to disappointment and all suffering.

Each thought that you have comes after another only when you have renounced the first one. Unless you renounce the thought of sitting you cannot stand up. Unless you renounce the thought of standing you can not walk. This tendency to link thoughts and form a pattern is what creates your value systems and beliefs, your samskaras, the root cause of all your problems.

It is the pattern that the mind weaves and not the ground reality that you experience that drives your life. Connected thoughts are the foundation of all illusions and suffering. Once you drop the connection between thoughts you can go to the source of thoughts, the truth of who you are, where you come from.

When you drop the connection between thoughts, you will then realise the futility of that connection except in causing you suffering. When you realise that thoughts arise in you at random and not in any sequence and are always unconnected, you then drop into the present. You become unclutched, you become free. You then regain your Self.