Meditation means getting out of the mind, looking at the mind from the outside. That`s exactly the meaning of the word `ecstasy`: to stand out. To stand out of the mind makes you ecstatic, brings bliss to you. And great intelligence is released. When you are identified with the mind you cannot be very intelligent because you become identified with an instrument, you become confined by the instrument and its limitations. And you are unlimited - you are consciousness.
I teach contentment. And the basic principle of contentment is to drop your ego. Don`t think for a single moment, "To be or not to be." Just not to be is the rule. What have you gained by trying to be? Just for a change try not to be, and you will be amazed. The moment you are not, there is contentment, there is silence, there is beauty, there is bliss. Meditation is only a methodology to make you aware that your only disease is your ego, and your only health is egolessness.
As meditation goes deep you will feel less and less desires, more and more contentment with whatsoever you have. There will be less and less desire for that which you don't have, and more and more contentment with whatsoever you have. As meditation goes deeper, a very contented consciousness evolves. Ultimately there is no desire, only contentment.
The more meditation goes deep, the more you will become master of your own thoughts. You will say, "Stop!" and the mind stops. You will say, "Move!" and the mind begins to move. Once this capacity comes to you, you will not fall down again. Unless this is achieved, if you discontinue meditation, soon every result will be washed away.
Except witnessing, I don't teach anything else. So just witness your mind and the meditation will be happening. And once you have got in tune with your being, you know the way, you know the how. Then it does not matter where you are. Alone or in the crowd, in the silences of the forest or in the noises of a marketplace, it is all the same. You can simply close your eyes and disappear inwards.
The man of meditation becomes the man of understanding because his energy accumulates. He is not wasting it. He is not interested in trivia; he does not put any energy at all into petty things. So whenever the time arises to give, he has to give. Energy is understanding. Be conscious of it and use your energy very consciously, and use your energy in such a way that you don't simply go on wasting it.
What is meditation? It is not your character, it is not what you do. It is what you are. It is not the character, it is the consciousness that you bring to whatsoever you do. The doing is irrelevant. Whether you are doing it consciously or not is the question, whether moral or immoral. Are you alert? If you are alert, meditation happens. If you are not alert, you live in sleep.
Buddhas can take you to the boundary line of meditation and samadhi. That is the only difference between meditation and samadhi. If your mind has become utterly quiet and silent, but only the master is there, then it is meditation. If your mind has become so quiet that even the master has disappeared, it is samadhi. The last barrier is going to be the master. He will take you out of the world, but one day you will have to leave him too. And the real master will always keep you alert that you have to leave him one day, at the final stage.
Because of watching your breath and thoughts you have come to know now that you are neither thoughts nor your breath, you are the watcher, the witness. This is awareness. This is what I call meditation. Once you have known this awareness you are unidentified with your body, with your mind. Now you experience a vastness inside you, in one sense utterly empty and in another sense overflowingly full. Because of its emptiness you will remain calm and quiet. And because of its overflowing fullness you will be creative.
Objects must cease, mind must become just a pure mirror - a mirroring, not mirroring anything - just a mirror without any object in it, a pure mirror. By dhyan, this purity of the mind is indicated. So first, no object should be in the mind. Mind must remain alone without thinking about anything - with no thought, just a consciousness, just an awareness, just an alertness. This alertness without any object is meditation.
Put your whole energy into meditation. Once you are centered in your being, once you know the inner path, then wherever you are you can manage to go to the center without any difficulty. Even when you are dying, it will not make any difference. You may be sick, it will not make any difference.
If you want to do Vipassana, or any silent meditation, Dynamic Meditation becomes absolutely essential, because Christianity having poisoned your mind, that poison has to be thrown out. You have to go completely crazy to throw it out; otherwise that craziness remains inside you, and won't allow you to get into a silent, watching, witnessing meditation.
So silently, peacefully, without hurry, without any tension, without any anguish, move into yourself instantly. It is urgent. Unless meditation becomes urgent to you, it will never happen; you will die before it. Put meditation on your laundry list as the most important, urgent... number one. But meditation in your life is just at the very end of your laundry list - and the laundry list goes on becoming bigger and bigger. And before you finish your laundry list, you are finished, so the time for meditation never comes.
By meditation we try to slow down the mechanism of projections. If the mechanism is slowed down and even for a single moment you begin to be aware of the gap - imageless gap of the screen - you have the glimpse. Suddenly you know that you have lived in the dreams of your own creation; and whatsoever you have known as the world was not the world really, it was YOUR world.
When you are in deep meditation you don't feel meditation, you feel bliss. When you are deep in meditation, when you are deep in awareness, you don't feel awareness, you feel bliss. When you begin to feel bliss, that means now you have begun to be aware. Awareness creates the situation in which bliss is felt.
Witnessing can be called the seed and enlightenment can be called the flowers. But begin from witnessing, and then it starts growing. Go on nourishing it, go on caring for it, go on watering it, strengthen it in every possible way - and one day it is going to blossom. That day will be the greatest day of your life.
My disciples are vegetarian not as a cult, not as a creed. They are vegetarians because their meditations make them more human, more of the heart, and they can see the whole stupidity of people killing living beings for their food. It is their sensitivity, their aesthetic awareness that makes them vegetarians.
Buddha has said to his disciples: Whenever you meditate, after each meditation, surrender all that you have earned out of meditation, surrender it to the universe. If you are blissful, pour it back into the universe - don't carry it as a treasure. If you are feeling very happy, share it immediately - don't become attached to it, otherwise your meditation itself will become a new process of the self. And the ultimate meditation is not a process of self. The ultimate meditation is a process of getting more and more into un-self, into non-self - it is a disappearance of the self.
Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual - communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong.
In the East we call this state meditation: no belief, no thought, no desire, no prejudice, no conditioning - in fact, no mind at all. A state of no-mind is meditation. When you can look without any mind interfering, distorting, interpreting, then you see the truth. The truth is already all around; just you have to put your mind aside.
Choose one meditation and then put all your effort in it. That effort has to be very regular because will is created only out of regularity. It has to be very persistent and a continuity has to be maintained. Even to miss for one day is to destroy much - and at least one hour every day has to be given to it.