And Joad said, “I am immensely grateful. I cannot express my gratitude…I had never thought about the possibility that I can watch the mind; that certainly means I am not the mind. The watcher is certainly different from the watched. And rather than explaining it to me intellectually, you gave me the experience itself. It was so beautiful and so silent. These last days, staying in bed, I have nothing else to do. I am going to continue watching my mind.

“Perhaps Gurdjieff is right, and perhaps the Eastern mystics are right. And this is the right time for me. If I can get away from the mind into myself, into my witnessing, into my watching – what they call no-mind – perhaps I will go from life not feeling that I lived meaninglessly.”

After just ten days he died. But before his death, he dictated to his secretary a small statement to be delivered to George Gurdjieff and to Ouspensky. He said, “I am dying with great gratitude – you showed me the way. Now death does not matter, now nothing matters. I have tasted something of the beyond, of the eternal. Mind was the barrier. I was thinking mind is all that we have, but I never thought that mind is just an instrument, like any other instrument.”

You have kidneys, you have hands, you have legs; if your hand is cut off, that does not mean that you are destroyed. You are more than the total sum of your parts – that is the meaning of no-mind. You are not an arithmetical entity, you are a spiritual being.

I would like to repeat so that you remember it: You are more than the sum total of your parts, and that which is more than the sum total of your parts is your real being. A machine is not more than the sum total; a machine is exactly equal to the sum total of its parts.

It is only life which is more than its sum total.

And when life becomes conscious, it is even more.

And when consciousness becomes absolute illumination, it is tremendously more. The sum total of your parts remains far behind, a very small, tiny thing. You become as vast as the sky itself.

But Ta Hui has no understanding yet. He is still talking like a thinker.

When correct mindfulness stands out alone, inner truth adapts to phenomena; when inner truth adapts to events and things, events and things come to fuse in inner truth. When phenomena fuse with their inner truth, you save power…

That too has to be understood. Power from the lips of Ta Hui is not the same power about which a Gautam Buddha may talk.

Power – according to the mind – is always power over others. Mind is continuously trying to dominate, to enslave, to be powerful over others, because mind has no power of its own. All its power is borrowed. What does the prime minister of any country have as his power? Just the votes that he has begged. He is really the greatest beggar in the country. All his power belongs to the people; he does not have any power of his own.