Meditation: Going Beyond Logic
“If you want to perceive the nature of your life, you must be willing to look beyond the limitations of the logical mind. Otherwise it is going to be one long, endless, fruitless struggle. It can never get you to a solution.”
—Sadhguru
In this featured article, Sadhguru elaborates that logic, while useful for handling external circumstances, will not enhance the quality of life. To still be effective and go beyond the rigors of logic, is the essence of meditation.
Sadhguru: The mind is always about the past that you have accumulated; it is never about what is happening now. It is a useful tool to handle the materialistic aspect of life but if you employ it to handle your whole life, then it’s a total mess. If you look at it logically, even getting out of bed in the morning will look like a huge feat. Then you have to brush your teeth, eat, work, eat, work, eat, sleep; again tomorrow morning the same thing. For the rest of your life you have to do the same thing over and over again. Logically is it worthwhile? Not at all, isn’t it? If you look at your life’s experience, maybe you saw the sunrise and it’s worthwhile. Maybe you saw the birds in the sky, the flowers blooming in your garden or your child’s face, then maybe it’s worthwhile. But if you look at it logically, moments of extreme logic are moments of suicide.
If you become extremely logical you will become depressed and self-destructive. Right now with a logical mind you are trying to perceive the nature of life. You can try as hard as you want, it is not going to happen. If you want to perceive the nature of your life, you must be willing to look beyond the limitations of the logical mind. Otherwise it is going to be one long, endless, fruitless struggle. It can never get you to a solution. It can only increase the complexity of the problem.
This logical mind which is the fundamental instrument through which you are trying to do everything is only equipped to handle the duality of the existence. If you as a being become dual, you become a constant struggle. Once you create this tension, and the more you logically think about it, the more tense you become.
All the sadhana, all the meditativeness that is prescribed on the spiritual path is fundamentally to handle this logical mind which is building up a certain level of tension within you. If it is constantly strung tight, then the very life energy in you will become weak and lose its intensity and vibrancy over a period of time.
There is a very beautiful incident in the life of Aesop, the fable writer. He was actually the slave of a Greek king and one day he was playing bow and an arrow with a few children. Aesop just loved to play with children. A serious looking wise man looked at this and said, “What a waste of time for a grown up man to be playing with children like this! What is the purpose of wasting your life playing with children?” Aesop wanted to convey the message, so he took a bow which was strung, unstrung it, put it on the floor and said, “This is the purpose.” The wise man said, “I don’t get your message.” So Aesop said, “If you keep your bow constantly strung, over a period of time it loses its strength and intensity and then it will be a no-good bow. If you want to retain the strength and intensity of your bow, you must unstring it sometimes. Only then it will be ready for use when you want it.” So that’s all it is. That’s mediation, to unstring yourself.
Unstringing yourself of the tension the logic is creating within you. Every kind of logic builds a certain tension. Once there is logic, there is room for argument, isn’t it? If you become extremely logical, you become horribly argumentative about everything in your life. So meditation is a way of unstringing this. Letting the mind just be there without employing the logical distortion. If your mind learns to just simply be there, it becomes like the piece of a mirror. The beauty of the mirror is, a mirror has no face of its own. Logic has a face of its own. Everybody has their own kind of logic. Why two people can argue endlessly about the same issue, simply because everybody’s logic has its own face. However, a mirror has no face, in this little piece of mirror, you can reflect the whole mountain. You can contain the whole mountain in a tiny mirror; you can contain the sun in the little mirror. Once the mind goes beyond the duality of logic, it becomes like a mirror which can contain the whole existence; the creation and the creator. All the sadhana is just towards this.
Fundamentally all sadhana is aimed at ironing out the logical mind, so that you become like a piece of mirror. Once you become a piece of a mirror, you can reflect anything. If God comes here, he can also be contained in you. The sun comes here, it can also be contained in you. Anything can be contained in you because you have no face of your own. Spiritual sadhana does not mean you making yourself into something other than what you are. Spiritual sadhana simply means erasing the false faces that you have created for yourself, so the mind becomes like a plain mirror which reflects everything just the way it is, without any distortions.
