Meditation – To Unstring Yourself
— Sadhguru, Isha Foundation
SADHGURU: The logical 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, 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.
All the Sadhana, all the meditativeness that is prescribed on the spiritual path is fundamentally to handle this logical mind. 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 arrow with a few 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 meditation – to unstring yourself.