Your consciousness is not available to the mind. Your mind is not the right vehicle to know yourself. Unless you have a new eye – what in the East we have called the third eye, symbolically…. These two eyes open outwards. Just as a symbol, the third eye opens inwards. The two eyes are for the duality of the world, the one eye is for the singleness of your being.

As you start looking inwards, you are amazed: you were ignoring yourself, and that was the trouble. That was why you were in misery, anxiety, suffering. You were trying everything to remove the misery, but it was caused by your unawareness, by your unconsciousness, by your ignorance of your own being. That was the cause. And unless that cause is removed, you will never have a taste of blissfulness, of ecstasy, of immortality, of the divineness of existence.

The pretty young thing came slamming into her apartment after a blind date and announced to her roommate, “Boy, what a character! I had to slap his face three times this evening!”

The roommate inquired eagerly, “What did he do?”

“Nothing,” muttered the girl. “I slapped him to see if he was awake!”

But nobody is awake. Spiritually, we are all asleep. Meditation is a way of awakening.

Concentration has nothing to do with meditation. But you have been told by Christians, by Hindus, by Mohammedans, by all your so-called organized religions to concentrate on God; concentrate on a certain mantra; concentrate on the statue of a Buddha, but concentrate. And remember, whether you concentrate on a hypothetical God which nobody has ever seen, nobody has ever met, for which no proof, no evidence exists anywhere…. You can go on concentrating on an empty hypothesis, that is not going to reveal you to yourself.

Concentrate on a statue which is man-made, manufactured by you; you can go on concentrating but you will not find anything to transform your being. Or concentrate on scriptures, mantras, chantings…but all those efforts are an exercise in utter futility.

Go beyond the mind – and the way beyond the mind is very simple – just become a watcher of the mind, because watching immediately separates you from the thing you watch. You are watching a movie; one thing is certain, you are not an actor in the movie. Watching the road and the crowd passing by, one thing is certain; you are standing by the side, you are not on the road in the crowd.

Whatever you watch, you are not.

The moment you start watching the mind, a tremendous experience happens – a recognition that you are not the mind. Just this small recognition that “I am not the mind” is the beginning of no-mind. You have transcended the crowd, the voices, the chaos of the mind; you have moved into the silences of the heart.

Here is your home, your eternal being.

Here is your deathless, essential existence.