become illusory. The man of vitarka counts the flowers, and the thorns become illusory. That’s why Patanjali says, “Vitarka is the first element; only then is bliss possible. Through vitarka one attains heaven.” One creates one’s own heaven all around.
Your standpoint counts. Whatever you experience around you is your own creation – heaven or hell. Patanjali says, “You can go beyond logic and reasoning only through positive reasoning.” You can never go beyond through the negative because the more you say no, the more you find things to be sad about, negative, denied. By and by, you have a constant no inside – a dark night with only thorns, and flowers unable to blossom in you, a desert.
When you say yes, you find more and more things to say yes to. When you say yes, you become a yea-sayer. Life is affirmed and you absorb all that is good and all that is true through your yes – beautiful. Yes becomes the door for the divine to enter you; no becomes a closed door. With your door closed, you are in hell; with all your doors open, existence flows in. You are fresh, young, alive; you become a flower.
Vitarka, vichar, ananda: Patanjali says, “If you are attuned with vitarka – a positive reasoning – you can be a thinker, but never before it. Only then does thinking arise.” He has a very different meaning of thinking. You also think that you think; Patanjali will not agree. He says, “You have thoughts, but no thinking.” That’s why I say that it is difficult to translate him.
He says that you have thoughts, vagrant thoughts like a crowd, but no thinking. Between your two thoughts there is no inner current. They are uprooted things, there is no inner planning. Your thinking is a chaos, it is not a cosmos; it has no inner discipline. It is like when you look at a rosary: there are beads held together by an invisible thread running through them. Thoughts are beads; thinking is the thread. You have beads – too many, in fact, more than you need – but no inner running thread. Patanjali calls that inner thread thinking, vichar. You have thoughts, but no thinking. If this goes on and on, you will become mad. A madman is one who has millions of thoughts and no thinking. Sampragyata samadhi is the state when there are no thoughts, but thinking is perfect. This distinction has to be understood.
In the first place, your thoughts are not yours – you have gathered them together. Sometimes in a dark room, a beam of light comes from the roof and you can see millions of dust particles floating in that beam. When I look into you I see the same phenomenon: millions of dust particles. You call them thoughts. They are moving in you and out of you. From one head they enter another and on they go. They have their own life.
A thought is a thing; it has its own existence. When a person dies, all his mad thoughts are released immediately and they start finding shelter somewhere or other. They immediately enter those who are nearby. They are like germs, they have their own life. Even when you are alive you go on dispersing your thoughts all around you. When you talk, of course you throw your thoughts into others. But when you are silent, you also throw thoughts around. They are not yours; that is the first thing.
A man of positive reasoning will discard all thoughts that are not his own. They are not authentic, he hasn’t found them through his own experience. He has accumulated them from others, they are borrowed. They are dirty, and have been in many hands and in many heads. A man of thinking does not borrow, he likes to have fresh thoughts of his own. If you are positive, and look at beauty, truth, goodness, flowers; if you become capable of seeing even in the darkest night that the morning is approaching – you will become capable of thinking.
You can then create your own thoughts. A thought that is created by you is really full of potential; it has a power of its own. These thoughts that you have borrowed are almost dead because they have been traveling – traveling for millions of years. Their origin is lost. They have lost all contact with their origin. They are just like dust floating around. You catch them – sometimes you even become aware of it, but because your awareness is such, it cannot see through things.
Sometimes you are sitting somewhere, and suddenly you become sad for no reason at all. You cannot find the reason why. You look around, you can find no reason; nothing is there, nothing has happened – you are just the same and suddenly a sadness takes over. A thought is passing; you are just in the way. It is an accident. A thought was passing like a cloud – a sad thought released by someone. It is an accident, and you are in the grip of it. Sometimes a thought persists – you don’t see why you go on thinking about it. It looks absurd, it seems to be of no use. But you cannot do anything, it goes on knocking at the door. It says, “Think about me.” A thought is waiting at the door, knocking. It says, “Give me some space. I would like to come in.”
Each thought has its own life; it moves. It has such power and you are so impotent because you are so unaware that you are moved by thoughts. Your whole life consists of such accidents. You meet people, and your whole life pattern changes. Something enters in you, you are possessed, and you forget where you were going. You follow this thought, and change your direction. This is just an accident. You are like children.
Patanjali says, “This is not thinking. This is the state of absence of thinking; this is not thinking.” You are a crowd. You haven’t a center within you which can think. When one moves in the discipline of vitarka, right reasoning, by and by one becomes capable of thinking. Thinking is a capacity; thoughts are not. Thoughts can be learned from others; thinking, never. Thinking you have to learn yourself. This is the difference between the old Indian schools of learning and the modern universities. In modern universities you are receiving thoughts; in the ancient schools of learning – wisdom schools – they were teaching thinking, not thoughts.
Thinking is a quality of your inner being. What does thinking mean? – it means to retain your consciousness; to remain alert and aware, to encounter a problem. When a problem presents itself, you face it with your total awareness and an answer arises, a response. This is thinking.
A question is posed, you have a ready-made answer. Before you have even thought about it, the answer comes automatically. Someone says, “Is there a God?” He hasn’t even uttered it before you say, “Yes.” You nod your wooden head and say, “Yes, there is.”
Is it your thought? Have you thought about the problem right this minute, or do you carry a ready-made answer in your memory? Someone gave it to you – your parents, teachers, society; someone has given it to you. You carry it as a precious treasure, and this answer comes from that memory.
A man of thinking uses his consciousness freshly each time there is a problem. He encounters the problem, and a thought arises within him which is not part of his memory. This is the difference. A man of thoughts is a man of memory; he has no thinking capacity. If you ask him a new question he will be at a loss, he cannot answer it. If you ask a question he knows the answer to, he will answer immediately. This is the difference between a pundit and a man who knows, a man who can think.
Patanjali says, “Vitarka, right reasoning, leads to reflection, vichar; vichar, reflection, leads to bliss.” Of course, this is the first glimpse, and it is a glimpse; it will come and it will be lost. You cannot hold it for long. It is going to be just a glimpse. It’s as if lightning happened for a moment and you saw all the darkness disappear – but the darkness returns again. It is as if the clouds disappeared and you saw the moon for a second – again the clouds return. Or, on a sunny morning near the Himalayas, you have a glimpse just for a moment of Gourishankar – the highest peak. But then there is mist and clouds, and the peak is lost. This is satori. That’s why – never try to translate satori as samadhi. Satori is a glimpse. Much has to be done after it is attained. In fact, the real work starts after the first satori, the first glimpse, because then you have had a taste of the infinite. Now a real authentic search starts. Before it, it was just so-so, lukewarm, because you were not really confident, not certain of what you were doing, where you were going, what was happening.
Before
