LITMIR.BIZ

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and purified – you cannot simply drop it. Patanjali says, “It is impossible to drop it because impurities have a tendency to cling. You can drop it only when the mind is absolutely pure – so refined, so subtle, that it has no tendency to cling.”

      He does not say, “Drop the mind,” as Zen masters say. He says, “It is impossible to drop it. You are talking nonsense.” You are saying the truth, but that’s not possible because an impure mind has a weight – it hangs like a stone. And an impure mind has desires – millions of desires, unfulfilled, hankering to be fulfilled, asking to be fulfilled – with millions of incomplete thoughts in it. How can you drop it? The incomplete always tries to be completed. Patanjali says: “Remember, you can only drop a thing when it is complete.”

      Haven’t you noticed? If you are an artist and painting a picture, unless you complete it, you cannot forget it. That picture continues to haunt you. You sleep badly; it is always there. There is an undercurrent in the mind. It moves, it asks to be completed. Once it is completed, it is finished. You can forget about it. The mind has a tendency toward completion. The mind is a perfectionist, so whatever is incomplete creates tension.

      Patanjali says, “You cannot drop thinking unless it is so perfect that there is nothing more to be done; you can simply drop it and forget.” This is diametrically opposite to Zen, to Heraclitus. The first samadhi, which is samadhi only for name’s sake, is sampragyata – samadhi with a subtle purified mind. The second samadhi is asampragyata – samadhi with no mind. But Patanjali says, “When the mind disappears and there are no thoughts, then too subtle seeds of the past are retained by the unconscious.”

      The conscious mind is divided in two. First, sampragyata – the mind with a purified state, just like purified butter. It has a beauty of its own, but it is there. And however beautiful, the mind is ugly; however pure and silent, the very phenomenon of the mind is impure. You cannot purify a poison, it remains a poison. On the contrary, the more you purify it the more poisonous it becomes. It may look very, very beautiful; it may have its own color, shades, but it is still impure.

      First you purify it, then you drop it. But still the journey is not complete because this is all in the conscious mind. What will you do with the unconscious mind? Just behind the layers of the conscious mind is a vast continent of the unconscious mind. In the unconscious are the seeds of all your past lives.

      Patanjali divides the unconscious into two. He says, “Sabeej samadhi” – when the unconscious is there and the mind has been dropped consciously, it is a samadhi with seeds: sabeej. When those seeds are also burned, you attain the perfect – the nirbeej samadhi: samadhi without seeds.

      So the conscious and the unconscious are in two steps. When nirbeej samadhi, the ultimate ecstasy, is reached… And without seeds within you to sprout and flower and to take you on further journeys into existence, you disappear.

      In these sutras he says: Sampragyata samadhi is the samadhi that is accompanied by reasoning, reflection, bliss, and a sense of pure being. But this is the first step. Many are misguided; they think this is the last step because it is so pure. You feel so blissful and so happy that you think that now there is nothing more to be achieved. If you ask Patanjali, he will say, “The satori of Zen is just the first samadhi. It is not the final, the ultimate; the ultimate is still far away.”

      The words he uses cannot be exactly translated into English because Sanskrit is the most perfect language; no language comes even close to it. So I will have to explain it to you. The word used is kutarka. In English it is translated as reasoning. It is a poor translation. kutarka has to be understood. Tarka means logic, reasoning. Patanjali says that there are three types of logic. One he calls kutarka: reasoning oriented toward the negative; always thinking in terms of no, denying, doubting, nihilistic.

      Whatever you say to the man who lives in kutarka – negative logic – he always thinks how to deny it, how to say no to it. He looks to the negative. He is always complaining, grumbling. He always feels that something somewhere is wrong – always. You cannot put him right because this is his orientation. If you tell him to look at the sun, he will not see the sun, he will see the sunspots. He will always find the darker side of things; that is kutarka: wrong reasoning. But it looks like reasoning.

      Finally, it leads to atheism. You deny God, because if you cannot see the good, and the lighter side of life, how can you see God? You simply deny it. The whole of existence becomes dark. Everything is wrong, and you create a hell around you. If everything is wrong, how can you be happy? It is your creation, and you can always find something wrong because life consists of duality.

      The rosebush has beautiful flowers, but also thorns. A man of kutarka will count the thorns, and come to an understanding that this rose must be illusory; it cannot exist. Amidst so many thorns, millions of thorns, how can a rose exist? It is impossible, the very possibility is denied. Somebody is deceiving you.

      Mulla Nasruddin was feeling very, very sad. He went to the priest and said, “My crop is destroyed again – no rains. What can I do?”

      The priest said, “Don’t be so sad, Nasruddin. Look at the brighter side of life. You can be happy because you still have so much in your life. And always believe in God who is the provider. He even provides for the birds of the air, so why are you worried?”

      Nasruddin replied, “Yes!” very bitterly. “Off my corn! God provides for the birds of the air off my corn.”

      He can’t see the point. His crop is destroyed by the birds, and God is providing for them, “and my crop is destroyed.” This type of mind always finds something or other, and is always tense. Anxiety will follow him like a shadow. This Patanjali calls kutarka – negative logic, negative reasoning.

      Then there is tarka – simple reasoning. Simple reasoning leads nowhere. It moves in a circle because it has no goal. You can go on reasoning and reasoning, but you won’t come to any conclusion because reasoning can come to a conclusion only when there is a goal at the very beginning. If you are moving in a direction, you reach somewhere. If you move in all directions – sometimes to the south, east, west – you waste energy.

      Reasoning without a goal is called tarka. Reasoning with a negative attitude is called kutarka; reasoning with a positive grounding is called vitarka. Vitarka means special reasoning. So vitarka is the first element of sampragyata samadhi. A man who wants to attain inner peace has to be trained in vitarka – special reasoning. He always looks to the lighter side, the positive. He counts the flowers and forgets the thorns – not that there aren’t any thorns, but he is not concerned with them. If you love the flowers and count them, a moment comes when you cannot believe in the thorns, because how can it be possible that thorns exist where there are so many beautiful flowers? It must be something illusory.

      The man of kutarka counts the thorns, and the flowers become illusory. The man of vitarka counts the flowers, and the thorns become illusory. That’s why Patanjali says, “Vitarka is the first element; only then is bliss possible. Through vitarka one attains heaven.” One creates one’s own heaven all around.

      Your standpoint counts. Whatever you experience around you is your own creation – heaven or hell. Patanjali says, “You can go beyond logic and reasoning only through positive reasoning.” You can never go beyond through the negative because the more you say no, the more you find things to be sad about, negative, denied. By and by, you have a constant no inside – a dark night with only thorns, and flowers unable to blossom in you, a desert.

      When you say yes, you find more and more things to say yes to. When you say yes, you become a yea-sayer. Life is affirmed and you absorb all that is good and all that is true through your yes – beautiful. Yes becomes the door for the divine to enter you; no becomes a closed door. With your door closed, you are in hell; with all your doors open, existence flows in. You are fresh, young, alive; you become a flower.

      Vitarka, vichar, ananda: Patanjali says, “If you are attuned with vitarka –

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