How can the mind know if it has found what it calls the ultimate, the immeasurable, the nameless, the most sublime? As it cannot possibly know that which is limitless, unknowable, that which cannot possibly be experienced, all the mind can do is to free itself from all categories of pain, anxiety, fear, and the desire that ultimately creates illusion. The me with all its images is the center which divides all relationship and therefore brings about conflict. If the mind has not brought about right relationship with another, mere inquiry into or seeking reality has no meaning whatsoever, because life is relationship. Life is action in relationship, and if that is not deeply, fully understood and established, you cannot go very far. Without that, merely to seek becomes a form of escape from the reality of relationship. Until the mind is deeply established in behavior that is righteous, order that is virtue, search or inquiry into what is real has no meaning, because a mind that is not free from conflict can only escape into what it considers to be real.
How can the mind – which is so conditioned, which is shaped by the environment, by the culture in which we are born – find that which is not conditioned? How can a mind that is always in conflict within itself find that which has never been in conflict? So in inquiring, the search has no meaning. What has meaning and significance is whether the mind can be free, free from fear, free from all its petty little egotistic struggles, free from violence, and so on. Can the mind – your mind – be free of that? That is the real inquiry. And when the mind is really free, then only is it capable without any delusion of asking if there is, or if there is not, something that is absolutely true, that is timeless, immeasurable.
You know, it is really quite important to find this out for yourself, because you have to be a light to yourself, you cannot possibly take the light of another, or be illumined by another. You have to find out for yourself this whole movement of life with all its ugliness and beauty and the pleasures and the misery and the confusion, and step out of that stream. And if you have, and I hope you have, then what is religion? All organized religions are a matter of thought building a structure, a legend around a person or an idea or a conclusion. That is not religion at all. Religion is a life that is lived integrally, wholly, not fragmented.
Most minds are broken up, fragmented, and what is fragmented is corrupt. So what is the mind, the brain, that can function in the world in the field of knowledge, and also live in freedom from the known? These two must go together in harmony. Inquiring into this deeply, one asks: What is meditation?