CHENNAI: Sleep is as important as keeping awake, perhaps more so. If during the day-time the mind is watchful, self-recollected, observing the inward and outward movement of life, then during the night, meditation comes as a form of benediction.
The mind wakes up, and out of the depth of silence there is the enchantment of meditation, which no form of imagination can ever bring about. It happens without the mind ever inviting it: it comes into being out of the tranquillity of consciousness - not within but outside of it, not in the periphery of thought but beyond the reaches of thought. So there is no memory of it, for remembrance is always of the past, and meditation is not the resurrection of the past.
It happens out of the fullness of the heart and not out of intellectual brightness and capacity. It may happen night after night, but each time, if you are so blessed, it is new - not new in being different from old, but new without the background of the old, new in its diversity and changeless change. So, sleep becomes a thing of extraordinary importance, not the sleep of exhaustion, not the sleep brought about through drugs and physical satisfaction, but a sleep that is as light and quick as the body is sensitive. And the body is made sensitive through alertness.
Sometimes meditation is as light as a breeze that passes by; at other times its depth is beyond all measure. But if the mind holds one or the other as a remembrance to be indulged in, then the ecstasy of meditation comes to an end. It is important never to possess or desire possession of it. The quality of possessiveness must never enter into meditation, for meditation has no root, nor any substance which the mind can hold. We have no light within ourselves: we have the artificial light of others; the light of knowledge, the light that talent and capacity give.
All this kind of light fades and becomes a pain. The light of thought becomes its own shadow. But the light that never fades, the deep, inward brilliance which is not a thing of the market place, cannot be shown to another. You can’t seek it, you can’t cultivate it, you can’t possibly imagine it or speculate upon it, for it is not within the reach of the mind.