The other way to say it is, which is the Zen way: the mind is the problem and the no-mind is the solution. No-mind is simply another way of saying the cosmic mind, the universal mind. The “no” denies the ego not the mind, remember it. The “no” denies the personal not the universal. The “no” simply denies all limitations and helps you to become as infinite as you really are.

This is the most fundamental truth about the buddhas. Their work consists of helping you to dissolve the personal mind, which is like a dewdrop, into the universal, which is the oceanic.

Few people have called that mind god – that oceanic mind. The name is beautiful, but it has created its own problems. The moment you call it God, the idea of worship, churches, temples, rituals, arises…and the lower mind comes from the backdoor. You become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, and you are again trapped in the same chains – maybe colored differently – and you are again imprisoned. Again you become defined and limited. Again you lose contact with the whole.

The personal is the illusory. It is the personal that makes you an idiot. The universal is the truth. Unless one is ready to die into the universal one cannot attain to truth.

Truth is a death: death of the egoistic mind, although it is also a resurrection: resurrection into the universal. You die as a person and you are reborn as god, as a buddha, as a christ. Hence the path consists of understanding the mind and its functioning. The egoistic mind wants constantly to keep itself occupied. That is one of its ways to deceive you. It keeps you so occupied that you don’t have any time to look in. All occupation is extrovert. To look in means to be unoccupied. There is no inner occupation as such. And if you are occupied in an inward way too, then you are deceiving yourself.

You may be chanting a mantra inside, but chanting a mantra inside simply deceives you because you are not the mantra and the mantra is still outside you. It may not be outside your body but it is outside your consciousness. You can witness your chanting, you can see your chanting, you can observe it. That means you are outside it and it is outside you. All occupation is non-meditative.

Hence Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation is a false phenomenon. It is neither transcendental nor meditation. It is simply changing one occupation for another occupation. Somebody is singing a film song and somebody is chanting the name of God. No difference in essence: both are occupied.

This is the first thing to be understood if you really want go to beyond the mind, the so-called ordinary mind, and reach the universal. And to reach the universal is enlightenment. To remain confined to the lower is ignorance.

The first lesson is: learn how to be unoccupied, even for few moments. Just no occupation, inner or outer, because all are outer occupations, even the so-called inner ones. No occupation, and immediately you are beyond ordinary mind. You go beyond limitations, you go beyond boundaries. Suddenly you become the ocean, the dewdrop disappears. In that oceanic experience one is freed, liberated.