MIND is very serious, and meditation is absolutely nonserious. When I say this you may be bewildered, because people go on talking about meditation very seriously. But meditation is not a serious thing. It is just like play – nonserious. Sincere, but nonserious. It is not something like work; it is more like play. Play is not an activity. Even when it is active, it is not an activity. Play is just pleasure. The activity is not going anywhere; it is not motivated. Rather, it is just pure, flowing energy.
But it is difficult, because we are so involved in activity. We have always been so active that activity has become a deep-rooted obsession. Even while asleep we are active. Even when we are thinking about relaxing we are active. We even make relaxation an activity; we make an effort to relax. This is absurd! But it happens because of the robotlike habits of the mind.
So what to do? Only nonactivity leads you to your inner centre, but the mind cannot conceive of how to be nonactive. So what to do?
I have devised a means. And the means is to be active to such an extreme that activity simply ceases; to be so madly active that the mind that is hankering to be active is thrown out of your system. Only then, after a deep catharsis, can you fall down into inactivity and have a glimpse of the world that is not the world of effort.
Once you know this world, you can move into it without any effort. Once you have the feeling of it – how to be just here and now, without doing anything – you can move into it at any moment; you can remain in it anywhere. Ultimately, you can be outwardly active and inwardly deeply inactive.
Cathartic methods are modern inventions. In Buddha’s time they were not needed because people were not so repressed. People were natural, people lived primitive lives – uncivilised, spontaneous lives. So Vipassana – vipassana means insight – was given by Buddha directly to people. But now you cannot go into Vipassana directly. And the teachers who go on teaching Vipassana directly don’t belong to this century; they are two thousand years backward. Yes, sometimes they may help one or two persons out of one hundred persons, but that can’t do much. I am introducing cathartic methods, so that first what the civilisation has done to you can be undone, so that you become primitive again. From that primitiveness, from primal innocence, insight becomes easily available.
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