In the mind, in the process of thinking, there is so much energy. How can we use that energy in a creative and constructive way?
The question is very complex. It sounds simple, but it is not simple.
You are asking: The mind is full of energy, how to use this energy in a creative and constructive way?
Who is going to use this energy?
If mind itself is going to use this energy, it can never be creative and can never be constructive.
That is what is happening all over the world. That is what is happening in science. The whole misery of science is that mind is using its energy. But mind is a negative force; it cannot use anything creatively; it needs a master. Mind is a servant. Do you have a master?
So to me the question is . . . meditation brings the master in. It makes you fully aware and conscious that the mind is your instrument. Now, whatever you want to do with it you can do. And if you don’t want to do anything with it, you can put it aside and you can remain in absolute silence.
Right now, you are not the master – even for five minutes. You cannot say to the mind, “Please, for five minutes, just for five minutes be silent.” Those will be the five minutes when mind will be faster, rushing more than ever – because it will have to show you who is the master.
There is a famous story in Tibet. A man wanted to learn the art of miracles, so he served a saint who was thought to be a knower of all the secrets. He served the saint day in, day out; he closed his business. The old saint told him again and again, “I don’t know anything. You are unnecessarily wasting your business, and you are becoming a burden to me because whenever I look at you . . . Twenty-four hours a day you are sitting here, on my head, and I don’t know any miracles. What to do?”
The man said, “You cannot avoid me so easily. I have heard that you have been hiding those secrets. But if you are stubborn, I am also stubborn. I will die sitting here, but I will learn the secret.”
Finally, the saint said, “Listen. This is the mantra” – it was not much, it was a simple mantra – “Just repeat Om, Om, Omkar and all the secrets of all the miracles will be available to you as you become more and more attuned with the mantra.”
The man rushed toward his home. While he was going down the steps of the temple the saint said, “Wait! I have forgotten one thing. After taking the bath, when you are sitting to chant the mantra, remember not to let any monkey enter into your mind.”
That man said, “You must be getting senile! In my whole life no monkey has ever entered into my mind. Don’t be worried.”
He said, “I am not worried. It is just to make you aware, so you don’t come later on and tell me that a monkey disturbed everything.”
The man said, “There is no fear about the monkeys. Everything has entered into this mind, but a monkey? I don’t remember this at all, not even in a dream.”
But as he started moving toward his house he was amazed; monkeys started appearing on the screen of his mind – big monkeys, giggling. He said, “My God!” He tried to push them away, “Get out! Get lost! I don’t have anything to do with monkeys, and particularly today!” But he was surprised that it was not one monkey, it was a vast line; they were coming from all sides.
He said, “My God, I had never thought that in my mind so many monkeys are hidden. But first let me take a bath.” But it was so difficult to take a bath because continually he was shouting “Get out! Get lost!”
Finally, his wife knocked on the door – “What is the matter? Who is inside the bathroom? Are you alone?”
He said, “I am alone.”
“But then why are you shouting so loudly, get out, get lost?”
He said, “About these monkeys . . .”
The woman said, “You have gone mad. What monkeys? There are no monkeys here; keep quiet.”
He said, “Strange. This woman has never been so hard on me, but in a way, she is right because there is nobody in the bathroom. But to say that they are in my head looks even worse.”
He sat in his worshipping place, but the monkeys were inside. He closed his eyes; they were sitting all around him. He said, “I have never thought that monkeys are so interested in me. Why are you bothering me? A few are inside the mind, and if I close my mind, a few are sitting all around me. They push me from this side and from that side, and giggling! I am a silent man, and this is not gentlemanly behavior.”
And again the wife looked into his worshipping place and she said, “With whom are you talking?”
He said, “My God, now I have to explain something which I do not understand myself. Just don’t you disturb me tonight. Tomorrow morning I will go and I will see that old man.”
The whole night he took showers many times, rubbed the soap as much as he could to clean himself, but there was no way. In fact, the bathroom was so full of monkeys that to make his way into the bathroom was difficult; to come out of the bathroom was difficult. And when he came back to his worshipping place they were sitting all over – even in his place a big monkey was sitting chanting Om, Om, Om.
That man said, “I cannot wait for morning.” It was midnight. He rushed to the temple, woke up the old man and told him, “What kind of mantra have you given to me?”
He said, “I have told you, that was the condition. That’s why for so many years I have not told it to anybody – because that condition is unfulfillable. You simply drop this idea of miracles, and the monkeys will disappear.”
The man said, “Just . . . I have come for that. I don’t want any miracles; I don’t want any secrets. Just please help me to get rid of these monkeys because they are sitting all over the place, and if I open my shop tomorrow, they will be sitting all over the shop. I am a poor businessman. I got into the wrong business; this is not my business. You do your business but please, if you can help me . . .”
The saint said, “There is no problem. If you drop the idea of miracles those monkeys will disappear. They are the guardians of the miracles.”
If you try even for five minutes to stop thinking, more thoughts will rush in than ever – simply to show you that you are not the master. So first one has to get the mastery, and the way to become the master is not to say to the thoughts, “Stop.” The way to become the master is to watch the whole thought process.
If the man had simply watched the monkeys, had allowed them to giggle, had allowed them to do whatsoever they were doing; if he had been simply a witness, those monkeys would have gone – seeing that this man seemed to be absolutely indifferent, not interested at all.
Your thoughts have to understand one thing: that you are not interested in them. The moment you have made this point you have attained a tremendous victory. Just watch. Don’t say anything to the thoughts. Don’t judge. Don’t condemn. Don’t tell them to move. Let them do whatsoever they are doing, any gymnastics let them do; you simply watch, enjoy. It is just a beautiful film. And you will be surprised: just watching, a moment comes when thoughts are not there, there is nothing to watch.
This is the door I have been calling nothingness, emptiness.
From this door enters your real being, the master.
And that master is absolutely positive; in its hands everything turns into gold.
If Albert Einstein had been a meditator, the same mind would have produced atomic energy not to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki but to help the whole of humanity to raise its standard of living. Without meditation the mind is negative, it is bound to be in the service of death. With meditation the master is there, and the master is absolute positiveness. In its hands the same mind, the same energy, becomes creative, constructive, life affirmative.
So you cannot do anything directly with the mind. You will have to take a little roundabout way; first you have to bring the master in. The master is missing, and for centuries the servant has been thinking he is the master. Just let the master come in, and the servant immediately understands. Just the presence of the master and the servant falls at the feet of the master and waits for any order, for anything the master wants to be done – he is ready.
The mind is a tremendously powerful instrument. No computer is as powerful as man’s mind – cannot be because it is made by man’s mind. Nothing can be because they are all made by man’s mind. A single man’s mind has such immense capacity: in a small skull, such a small brain can contain all the information contained in all the libraries of the earth, and that information is not a small amount.
Just one library, the British library, has so many books that if we put those books in a line side by side, they will go three times around the earth. And a bigger library exists in Moscow, a similar library exists in Harvard; and there are similar libraries in all the big universities of the world. But a single human mind can contain all the information contained in all these libraries. Scientists are agreed that we may not be able to make a computer comparable to the human mind which can be put in such a small space.
But the result of this immense gift to man has not been beneficial – because the master is absent and the servant is running the show. The result is wars, violence, murders, rape. Man is living in a nightmare, and the only way out is to bring the master in. It is there, you just have to get hold of it. And watchfulness is the key: just watch the mind. The moment there is no thoughts, immediately you will be able to see yourself – not as mind, but as something beyond, something transcendental to mind.
And once you are attuned with the transcendental then the mind is in your hands. It can be immensely creative. It can make this very earth paradise. There is no need for any paradise to be searched for above in the clouds, just as there is no need to search for any hell – because hell we have created already. We are living in it.
I have heard that a great politician died. Naturally, he was afraid that he would be taken to hell. He knew his whole life: it was absolutely criminal and nothing else. It is impossible without crimes to succeed in getting political power. In going higher on the ladder of power, you have to crush, kill, destroy – you have to do everything. But if you succeed then you are forgiven, nobody remembers that you have done anything wrong. And he was a successful politician. But as he was dying, he was afraid; he remembered his whole past, and he was certain that “I am going to hell. Now nothing can help. Those political tricks will not be helpful here.”
But when he opened his eyes, he was in front of heaven. He could not believe it. He asked the angels who had brought him there, “There seems to be some mistake, some bureaucratic mistake. This is heaven and you have brought me here?”
“This is, certainly. And there is no mistake, you have earned it.”
The man said, “What are you talking about? I have done everything wrong that can be done.”
They said, “We know, but your whole life you lived in hell, and now to send you to hell again will not be justified. Moreover, our hell will look very old-fashioned. You have been living in a very ultramodern hell, and we don’t want to feel ashamed. Our hell is very ancient, our methods of torture are very ancient, and you have refined everything so well that in fact you will laugh – ‘Is this hell?’ So the only way . . . even God was puzzled. You are three days late. You must have died three days ago, but it took three days for God to make the decision about where to take you. Finally, we decided, ‘It is better to take him to heaven because hell he has lived enough.’”
People still go on thinking that hell is somewhere down underneath the earth – and you are living in it, this is the beauty – and heaven is somewhere above.
You can change this hell into heaven if your mind can be under the guidance of the master, of your self-nature. And it is a simple process . . .
But don’t try directly with the mind; otherwise you will be getting into trouble. One can even get into insanity. If you try to put your mind energy into creative directions – you are not capable even of stopping it for one moment and you are trying to put it into a creative dimension – you will go crazy. You will have a nervous breakdown.
Don’t touch the mind. First just find out where the master is. It is a complicated mechanism. Let the master be there, and the mind functions as a servant so perfectly.
In the East we have done this. Gautam Buddha could have become Albert Einstein without any difficulty; he has a far greater genius. But his whole life was concerned with transforming people, into awareness, into compassion, into love, into blissfulness.
-Osho
From The Osho Upanishad, Discourse #4, Q2
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