Sat expounds upon the answer to Question 1 from Most Precious,“Speak to us of Pain and Suffering.”
Sat: In Most Precious it says, “Go beyond the mind, and you experience no pain and no suffering. ‘I’ exists not in the mind and the body, but beyond both.” Who can tell us how to go beyond the mind and body?
A student named Saranya says: By not taking ourselves to be the mind and body. If I say “my mind and body,” then I am the cause of suffering. But if I see myself as separate from my mind and body, maybe I won’t experience pain and suffering. But Sat, I wanted to ask you how I could do that, because each time I say “I,” I am relating it to my mind and body.
Sat: Of course you do, because that “I” is the body and mind. That was a very good question; I am going to answer you step by step. The “I” that is called “Saranya” is the one that was born from a mother and a father. Normally, around two or three years old, that “I” realizes it has a body or it can think. The one that calls herself “Saranya” is the one that started shaping at age 2 and 3, with a lot of ideas that the parents give, that the culture gives, that traditions give, etc. So, Saranya became a girl with this name and a lot of characteristics. We are not talking about that ‘I’ that was born.
The best way to realize the “I” that is beyond the mind and body, as far as I am concerned with My 40 years of practice, is to first realize that the thoughts are just like a night dream, except they happen in the day time. They don’t have a base of their own, if they did, they would not be changing so much. In order to do this, you start with Stop Meditation. Meaning that at the beginning, you sit down and let your mind think, you just watch it, without any movement, without any pushing and pulling, without getting involved, just like a watcher, just like you are sitting on a train and watching the trees outside passing by.
The next step is to find out who is watching? Who is the thinker? Who is the one that thinks? Of course it’s “Saranya.” Once you realize that the thinker and the thoughts are not separated, they are different ideas that were glued together, you just go into your silence, when you see “Saranya” struggling with the mind, you go to silence. That silence is beyond the mind and the body. And that’s what ends the suffering: when one becomes a real expert at dropping the beliefs and the thoughts, and recognizing the thinker, that was born out of the ideas of the parents and society. Go back to the silence and don’t get involved, don’t get involved as “Saranya.” As silence, just sit, that is what makes someone realize themselves, that is the “I” that goes beyond “Saranya” and beyond Saranya’s mind.
The first practice for that, is a sitting meditation, for a few minutes a day at least, and to watch without movement; I call it a passive gaze! That’s when you start knowing yourself, and little by little, you start to see all the thoughts that were giving you different emotions, different tension, different anxiety, different joy, are nothing but an idea. And once you get expertise in that, then you say, “Who was that who was obeying these ideas?” Me, I, me, and then take this “me” to silence and that’s beyond the mind.
Most Precious says, “Pain and suffering are only products of the mind,” meaning if we don’t think, we have no pain and no suffering, like a deep sleep without the night dream! “Go beyond the mind” (now we know how) “and you experience no pain and no suffering.” There is no way that any of us can find pain and suffering in the emptiness of the mind, or the complete silence of the heart, there is none; there is not even a body or a mind there. How could the world exist, so that is the “I” that is Omnipresent and was never born!
Every step we took in life Saranya, everything that we did, was to bring us to a point to realize who we really are, the bad, the good and the ugly, they all brought us here, they ripened us enough to be hearing the highest truth.
In “Most Precious” it says “Do not believe in the world.” This means do not believe your mind, do not believe your thoughts anymore, at least a little bit at a time. But do believe in your “Sat, Chit, Ananda (truth, awareness, bliss),” which is silence, it is Totality, it is eternal, that is who we are! And we are here to little by little realize our true nature and get rid of pain and suffering.
-Excerpt from Reno Center Sunday night meeting, March 15, 2020.