The mystery of the Mind!

Man's mind is wonderful. It holds the mystery of the world and of liberation. Sin and virtue, bondage and liberation, hell and heaven reside within it. Darkness and light are its own creation. Birth is in it and death too is in it. It alone is the door to the external world, it alone is the ladder to the internal being. When it ceases to exist, we transcend both worlds. The mind is everything. Everything is its own imaginative creation. If it disappears, all imagining ceases to exist.

Yesterday I said this somewhere. Someone came forward to ask, "The mind is very unstable and fickle. How to lose it? The mind is polluted. How can it be made pure?"

Then I told a story.

After Buddha had become old, one afternoon he stopped to rest at the foot of a tree in the forest. He felt thirsty, and Ananda went to a nearby mountain stream to fetch water. But just before, some carts had crossed the stream, and the water had turned muddy. Rotting leaves and scum had begun to float on the surface. Ananda returned without water, and said to Buddha, "The water in the stream is not clean; I shall go back to the river and bring water from there." The river was very far off, and Buddha asked him to fetch water from the stream. After a short while Ananda returned again empty-handed: the water did not appear to him fit to bring.

But Buddha made him go back once more. On the third occasion that Ananda reached the stream, he was amazed. The stream had now become completely clear and unpolluted. The mud had settled and the water had become pure.

\

I find the story very interesting. The state of the human mind is just the same. The traffic of life comes and stirs it up. But if one goes on watching it, sitting in silence and patience, the impurities settle and a natural clarity returns. In this clarity of mind, life renews itself. It is only a matter of patience, silent awaiting, and without doing anything the impurities of the mind settle.

One has only to become a witness and the mind becomes pure. Our task is not to make it pure. All difficulty arises because of doing. Simply watch it, just sitting on the bank -- then see what happens!