The Mind: Stopping The Mind’s Chatter  

By SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV  

The nature of the mind is to accumulate. A gross mind wants to accumulate things; an evolved mind wants to accumulate knowledge. When emotion becomes dominant, it wants to accumulate people.

The mind’s basic nature is to accumulate. The mind is a gatherer - always wanting to gather something. The mind of a person on the spiritual path starts accumulating 'spiritual’ wisdom. Maybe it starts gathering the guru’s words but until one goes beyond the need to accumulate - whether it is food, things, people, knowledge or wisdom - it does not matter what you accumulate.

The need to accumulate indicates a feeling of insufficiency, because somewhere, you got identified with limited things that you are not. If you bring awareness and sadhana into your life, slowly, the vessel becomes empty. Awareness empties the vessel. Sadhana cleanses the vessel.

When these two are sustained for a long period, then your vessel becomes empty and only then, grace descends upon you. Without grace nobody really gets anywhere. If you need to experience the grace, your vessel has to become totally empty. If you are living with a guru just to gather his words, your life has been wasteful.

If you do not experience the grace, if you do not make yourself receptive for the grace, if you do not empty yourself to bear the grace, then the spiritual path needs to be pursued for many life times to come. But if you become empty enough for the grace to descend, then, the ultimate nature is not far away. It is here to be experienced, to be rea-lised, going beyond all dimensions of existence, into the exalted state. It becomes a living reality.

The attitude that wherever you go, you must gather as much as you can, has become part of you. Your education has always taught you how to gather more and more things in order to make a living. With this gathering, maybe you can enhance the physical quality of life around you to some extent. But all this gathering is incapable of liberating you. It cannot take you even an inch closer to the ultimate nature.

Only sadhana or inner work can bring the awareness necessary to constantly cleanse your vessel. Innocence, too, enables absolute surrender. But surrendering is not something that you do; it happens when you are not. When you lose all will, when you have become absolutely willing, when there is nothing in you that you call as yourself, then also, grace descends upon you. But I would insist, stick to the path of awareness and sadhana ...

The web of bondage is constantly being created only by the way we think and feel. Whatever we are calling as awareness is just to start creating a distance between all that you think, feel and yourself. What we are referring to as sadhana is an opportunity to raise your energies so that you can tide over these limitations or these mechanisms through which you have entangled yourself to your thought and emotion.

When I look back, it surprises me that I have spoken so much. It is not like me to talk so much. I have spoken so much because I did not find enough people who could simply sit with me. So I had to talk and talk and talk - that is the only way they would sit with me.

At least those of you who are in here should learn that you can simply sit with me - not gathering, simply sitting. Being a guru means bearing the burden of the thoughts and emotions of the thousands of people all around. Please, lessen my burden a little bit. Stop your mind’s chatter and just be with me.

( Excerpted from 'Encounter the Enlightened’, chapter: 'Grace’. For ''Harnessing cosmic energy for reaching higher dimensions of life’’ the writer is conducting workshops at Vishwa Yuvak Kendra, New Delhi, October 12 & 13. Phone (011) 3014077, 3014402, 3018083 for details.)

.

.

See also: The Mind, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul)