Fundamentally, meditation is not so much an exercise as it is a certain way of using one’s mind or one’s consciousness.
Thought is linear. You know, it goes one word after another. It’s strung out in a line. We think: thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, in a line like this, one after another. Whereas, when we see, we see to what is going on entirely. We take in a volume when we see. We take in a great area. Nature is a volume rather than something strung out in a line. But when we think, we get one thought after another, and so the process of thought is much slower than the process of seeing and using our consciousness or our mind as a whole.
The more we tend to live in a world of thought, the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature.
Remember this point. It’s important. This is not saying that thinking is a disturbance; is a thing that human beings shouldn’t do. On the contrary. It’s a highly important acquisition of man. But thinking is of no real value to us unless we also can practice non-thinking; unless we can have our mind silent and make immediate contact with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction.
Although there is a difference, in a way, between the knower and the known, between man and the world, nevertheless these two go together and they are fundamentally inseparable.
To overcome that kind of beguilement by the fantasies of thought, not thinking is an important adjunct to thought—to be able, every so often, to cease the hubbub going on inside one’s head, and to let talking to one’s self stop and come to stillness.
