Click here to Download The Independent Mind PDF Book for Learning to Live a Life of Freedom having PDF Size 2 MB and No of Pages 116.
No matter how far we may run, it is going to happen. It makes no difference whether you have had the dream or not. This is bound to happen: one day you will meet death at the place where it is supposed to be met. The directions we are running in may be different, our routes may be different and the speed of our horses may vary – this is possible.
The Independent Mind PDF Book for Learning to Live a Life of Freedom
| Name of Book | The Independent Mind |
| PDF Size | 2 MB |
| No of Pages | 116 |
| Language | English |
| Buy Book From Amazon | |
About Book – The Independent Mind PDF Book
But ultimately it won’t make much difference. Someday or other, under some tree, a hand will be placed on your shoulder. Then you will find yourself meeting the one you were running away from. That day you will feel frightened. In fact, you were only running toward that which you were trying to run away from. There is no way to escape death. No matter where we may run, we only run toward death.
The very running takes us to death. Whoever runs, will reach death. It is possible that a poor man may run very slowly. He does not have a horse, so he will have to run without a horse. A rich man may run with a bigger horse and the emperors may run with a fast horse. But eventually the people without horses will reach the same place – death – as the people with horses have reached.
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Then what is the solution? What is the path? What can be done? The first thing I would like to tell you is that whatever you are doing will simply take you to death. This is nothing to be surprised about. Even in the past, whatever people have been doing has taken them to death. Very few people have escaped death.
What they have done to transcend death you are not doing at all. Whatever preparations you are making, they are simply preparations for death. The way to give birth to this awareness is to appraise your life as if you are facing death. One day, you will have to appraise it anyway in the face of death, but then there is nothing you can do about it.
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Someone who starts appraising it beforehand will be able to do something about it. Then something will surely happen in his life, some revolution intensify in his life. So it is essential to start assessing it from today onward, to evaluate it every day. Bernard Shaw once said that there should be courts in the world where a person has to appear every three years.
Prove that in those years his life has been meaningful. It was just a joke. Would it be possible to have such courts anywhere? Even if it were, there would be difficulties. How would you prove the meaningfulness of your life? How would you prove, “This is the end result of what I have lived, the significance and meaning”? Forget it, there are no such courts.
But in his mind every person needs to have a court of his own wisdom where he appears every moment. Every day, he should stand in front of it and ask himself, “How am I living? Will something substantial happen by this? Will I gain anything out of it? Will I reach anywhere by it? Will it put an end to my running? Will it eliminate my suffering? Will it dispel darkness? Will it destroy death?” The Independent Mind PDF Book
Why not make this certain fact of life the primary element of contemplation? Why not create a philosophy of life keeping this in mind? Whatever the philosophy of life may be, why should it not be based on the foundation of death? Because this is the only certain foundation, all other foundations are uncertain. Why not have this as the only foundation?
It is a fact that has to be faced – if not today then tomorrow – so why not catch hold of it and face it this very day? The whole direction of life will change for someone who agrees to face it today, for someone who starts contemplating on it today. His life is transformed. The people who are courageous, who are capable of contemplating death, who turn around and face death, who accept death this very day.
Their feet, their very breath, stop moving in the direction of death. Then a new path and a new door open up in front of them. I will talk to you about how that path can be opened up. But tonight I only want to share this small thought with you, so that you can think about it and keep it in mind. The Independent Mind PDF Book
Tonight, go to sleep thinking about death, so that tomorrow morning when you get up, this thought occurs to you again and again: whatever work you are doing, whatever is happening, whatever you are creating and accumulating, will this have any meaning when in the end you face death?
Therefore it is neither a question of the body nor of the soul. While meditating, the whole question is centered around the mind: are our minds independent or are they dependent? If the mind is dependent, life cannot rise beyond the body. Then life will take you to death. But if the mind is independent, then life’s eyes can begin to look toward immortality. Ordinarily our minds are dependent.
Our minds have not known any freedom. Not only do we wear the same clothes as others, not only do we eat what others eat, we also think what others think. At the level of thinking too we are followers – and someone who is a follower is dependent. Anyone who follows another is dependent. So at the level of the body we are dependent, and at the level of the mind we have also made ourselves dependent. The Independent Mind PDF Book Download
Have you ever had one or two thoughts of your own, or are all your thoughts borrowed? Has a single thought ever been born inside you, or have you gathered all your thoughts from the outside? You may have many thoughts in your mind, so just watch them a little. If you watch, you will find that they have come from somewhere and have accumulated inside you.
Just as the birds come and sit on the trees in the evening, similarly the thoughts have come and inhabited our minds. They are all others’ thoughts; they are aliens, borrowed. Only someone who is able to generate one or two thoughts of his own has the right to call himself a man. Then inside him freedom begins; otherwise we are dependent.
So in that village there was rivalry between the two temples. Their rivalry was so strong that the priests would not even look each other in the eye. They were so much against each other that the devotees of one temple would not even go to the other temple. In their scriptures it was written that it is better to die getting crushed under a mad elephant’s feet than to take shelter in the rival’s temple. The Independent Mind PDF Book Download
Visiting the rival’s temple was considered to be worse than dying under a mad elephant’s feet! The priests of the temples each had a small boy who used to take care of them and do work like bringing vegetables from the market. Since they were small boys, they were not yet in the grip of the disease the old people were suffering from. So sometimes when they met in the street, they would talk to each other.
Older people want to infect small children with their diseases as early as possible. If they don’t, they feel afraid that the children will go astray. Hence the priests of both temples used to constantly warn their boys: “Beware, never go near the other temple. Never talk to anyone from the other temple.” But children are after all children; they had not yet grown up and were still innocent.
So occasionally they used to meet each other. One day both boys were going to the market when they met on the way. The temples had names: one was called the Temple of the South and the other was the Temple of the North. The boy from the Temple of the North asked the other boy, “Where are you going?” The Independent Mind PDF Book Download
Just sow the seed of the question and don’t bother about the answer. Wait silently. Sow the seed of the question and wait for the answer, for the solution. Out of that question a bud will sprout. Out of a seed, which seems to have no life, looks utterly dead, a living bud sprouts. The seed breaks open, rots away but gives rise to a bud. Then out of that bud, life grows and brings forth the flowers.
The answer, which at first you cannot see, is hidden in the question. Let the question go deep into the soil of your heart, don’t be in a hurry. Let that question remain within you, let it melt in your heart, let it melt and break open. Then a bud will sprout and an answer will come. But you will have to wait patiently. And the longer one patiently waits, the quicker the seed can sprout.
It will bear the fruit and flowers of a solution, and your life will be filled with its fragrance. It is necessary for us to sow within ourselves all the deeper questions concerning our life. But we don’t sow the seeds; we simply want to get rid of the questions. And the only way we know to get rid of them is to start asking answers from others so that we can feel content. The Independent Mind PDF Book Free
The thinking state is the center, the thinking state is the being and the thinking state is the soul, but we don’t have any thoughts of our own. We have learned only thoughts that are borrowed. We have accumulated stale and leftover thoughts and we consider them to be our treasure.
But good conduct does not arise out of those stale and leftover thoughts, hence the difficulty, hence this question arises: how to create a harmony between thinking and good conduct. This is utterly foolish. Where the question of creating a harmony between thought and good conduct arises, you can know that this thought must be stale, old, leftover, another’s, not your own.
All these thoughts – you should speak the truth, you should love, you should love your enemy as yourself, you should not cheat or lie to anyone, you should not commit adultery, you should have no desires and lust – have been borrowed from others. Your conduct is totally contrary to them, so you have become disturbed and upset and ask how to create a harmony between thoughts and conduct. The Independent Mind PDF Book Free
There just cannot be because there is no way harmony can be created. It is fundamentally essential to know that your conduct is your own but your thoughts are from others. If you are a thief, that conduct is your own. The thought that non-stealing is religious and that it is a great virtue not to steal is simply another’s thought.
The conduct is yours but the thought is someone else’s, so how can there be harmony? The thought could be from Mahavira or Buddha or Krishna or from Christ, but the conduct will be your own. When we burn a lamp, the lamp radiates light on everything around it. Similarly, inside you the lamp of awareness should remain lit and all that is happening around should be illuminated, the light should fall on everything.
Slowly, slowly within five to seven minutes, silence starts descending. If we can accomplish just this much awareness, an unprecedented silence will descend. Just today a friend told me: “For years I have been constantly trying to find ways to be silent, but nothing happened. I did this and I did that, but nothing happened. Yesterday when I just sat down in awareness, I was amazed at what happened. The Independent Mind PDF Book Free
It was beyond my imagination.” It will happen and it is going to be something beyond your imagination. You just won’t know it. Whatever happens will be totally unknown and unfamiliar, you just cannot expect it to happen. You won’t even be able to figure out what will happen. You cannot predict what will happen in meditation nor can you imagine it. Whatever happens will be unique.