DADA’S MESSAGE
Dada urges seekers to inquire into the real significance of Life. What we ordinarily call living is nothing but a series of outward movements directed at fulfilling desires or escaping pain. However, this is hardly the true purpose of Life. The current industrial and commercial culture trains one to be busy on the outside, with ceaseless thoughts, ideas, commitments and ambitions. Even after all one’s desires are fulfilled, the mind runs after something more.
Life is a pulsating energy, the driving force behind our existence. But one never bothers to find out what this subtle and sacred energy is. One is not even aware of the flow of this energy until it gets disturbed due to illness or some trauma. To make matters worse, even when one is well, there are many contradictions in one’s personality due to which one is cut off from this integrated energy and creates friction and tension within oneself as well as in society. Each one is restless and fragmented, never experiencing peace or a sense of being integrated and whole.
Being caught up in the outer life, one never looks at oneself quietly, patiently and objectively, to find our what one is. Thus, there is no real balance of the inner and the outer.
One cannot have this balance and sense of wholeness as long as one is ruled by one’s own fragmented mind, one’s thought-process, one’s ego. The time has come to look into the mind, see the way it works and understand it. The mind has its own utility in life on some levels. But now it has become a ceaseless and domineering mechanism – indeed it has become life itself.
One needs to look at everything that moves within the field of mind. This must not be a superficial inquiry but one carried out with one’s entire being. One has to be watchful to catch every thought as it arises – follow its trajectory – how it comes up, moves and ends. Then one will begin to realize that the entire movement of thought is habitual and mechanical.
Only through attentive watchfulness will this mechanical and compulsive movement of thought, lose its momentum and finally come to an end. In such ending one will discover a mysterious momentum of quietude.
If one wants peace, creativity and love, one has to undertake this inward journey. One may be clever, but mere cleverness will not lead to that state of peace and ecstasy which is the very basis of life.
At present, the mind has become a storehouse of the past – of information and knowledge gathered from books, classrooms etc and used cleverly again and again. All our thoughts and ideas come from stored information which is always of the past. So the mind is an expression of the old, the past, though it works so cleverly and so fast that it appears to be just in the present.
Life, the living quality, functions in the present, in the twinkling momentum of the ‘now’. Thought cannot touch this dynamic momentum which is very spontaneous and intuitive. The past cannot touch the present. One needs a fresh, intuitive consciousness to meet Life – not second- hand ideas based on memory, on the past.
One has to wait within in silence, in the state of innocence and anonymity. The mind activity has to remain absolutely quiet without the interference of thought. Such a silent state of thought-less-ness and not-knowing alone invites something of a higher dimension to give the experience of that which is Timeless.
The mind abhors the state of not-knowing. It always wants certainty and moves happily from the known to the known. But the beauty of spirituality is to remain in the state of not-knowing. Such a state results from the faith that Life energy will sustain one, lead one by the hand. Then one has the strength to bear one’s cross, however heavy it may be.
Taking a U-turn and watching oneself is not meant for just a chosen few. It is available to all sincere seekers of Truth and spiritual understanding. However, it is the mind that keeps harping on the impossibility of the challenge as it fears its own dissolution through such intense watchfulness. The seeker has to stop dodging the real work of watchfulness and begin in full earnest. When objective internal watchfulness becomes a passion, there is sure to be an opening.