From ‘Beyond the Mind’ by Dada Gavand

Freedom From Time

Life has gathered Dust on the Way

During Her Centuries of Travelling Time.

Particles of the Dust

Have Developed into a Mountain

Which calls Itself ‘I’ – The Mind.

This Dusty Mold

Of Millions of Yesterdays Past

Is an Imposition and

Burden upon Life Energy.

Freedom from this

Dusty Mountain of Past

Is the Purification and

Liberation of Life.

Life Fulfills Itself

Through It's Own

Liberation.

- Dada

- Pacific Palisades - 1976

NANCY: (Pleadingly) Tell me ….. How can I start to discover the spirit
DADA: ………
You start when you begin to see within yourself the constant pursuits of various desires, fears and hopes.
You start when you become conscious of these subtle desires working all the time without stopping.
You start when you see how your actions are the reactions of a biased and wishful mind, and that there is never a fresh action from life within.
You start when you realize how you spend your entire life energy trying to fulfill the unending ambitions of the mind in all directions.
You start when you recognize that you are never reaching a point where you remain fulfilled.
You start when you see that you never attain these imaginary goals created by the mind.
You start when you discover that your do not really know what you want in life beyond food, shelter and a few necessities.
You start when you see that the mind is not interested in peace, but only in it's own pursuits.
You start when your perceive and recognize that this mind is nothing but the burden of bygone memories.
You start when you see and understand clearly how this so-called mind is an imposition of unfulfilled experiences of the past.
You make a real clean start when you begin to watch every incoming thought and understand how the past is trying to continue at the cost of the present, calling itself “I”.
Discovery of the deceptions of I the mind, is the beginning of a journey toward the spirit.



DADA: First you have to see your constant false activity and understand these mad movements. Understanding quietens all of that. Look into yourself calmly, with sharp attention. To see what is happening in oneself is important. Watch every idea and desire that comes into the mind. Such observation is the beginning of quieting down this activity. Then you discover that you can look at yourself without any motive or expectation. Usually the mind immediately starts to name, describe, moralize and compare whatever it sees. But through unmotivated and unbiased looking within, you can step out of the field of thought. Just keep watching, and you will discover a new quality of sensitivity which is not a thought activity because there are no desires, motives, hopes or fears involved in that watchfulness.


….. Be conscious of the thoughts coming again and again. Se that it is so, that is all. This attention becomes a new vital point, an impersonal flow of energy. The mind is a personalized and conditioned energy. You have to discover unbiased and unconditioned energy.

Proceed quietly, and then you will discover what meditation is. Attention without thought is meditation. Slowly through watchful attention you step out of the field of mind without any struggle. As your sensitivity increases, you will be able to act without the promptings of thought and desire. As you discover freedom from thought you will be in the present – in the now – to act. This is not an intellectual process; it is something that you have to sense and experience.



….. As you move along, this watchfulness will broaden and intensify, gathering all the energy that the mind is now using. The more energy you will have for this watchfulness, the less there will be for thought activity. See the beauty of gathering his energy in watchfulness and attention without a thought. Then that energy will move on it's own.



Can we look at a rose with our whole energy, our whole attention, and without any expectation, desire or description? Can we see a sunset without thought? Can we be sensitive without any movement of thought or desire? With this sensitivity, any experience is full and complete. When one is totally accepting, there is no mind left to create a disturbance in the energy. Right action will come instantaneously. Such action does not come through desire or negation but through acceptance. In total acceptance there is no mind trying to change anything. Action which comes out of such acceptance is creative, and often you are not aware of it. But still, the energy acts in the right direction. Then it is not a partial activity of thought but a total action of whole energy.

From ‘The Flute Calls Still’ by Dilip Kumar Roy

… Raman Maharshi ….to a western seeker: …… ‘…… why this frantic desire to help others when you can’t help even your helpless self? I would rather solve my own problems first if I were you, for then we would stand a far better chance of solving the intricate problems of the world and helping humanity with our nostrums’



…. What Sri Ramdas said to a devotee:

“The signs of a man who has realized the Truth are six: (1) He is conscious that he is immortal, not subject to birth, growth, decay and death. This knowledge abides with him at all times. (2) He has no fears. Fear comes only when we think we are the body. When we know we are the Immortal Spirit, then fear leaves us automatically. (3) The sense of sin is absent in him … (4) He feels he is reborn in the Spirit and a new life has dawned in which there is only Peace, Bliss and Immortality ….. (5) He has no reason to be unhappy on any account … Bliss will be pouring out of him. (6) He attracts everybody towards him. He is ever gentle, cheerful, loving and smiling.”

And he went on to qualify his statement thus: “This is only the external sign. The other five signs are known to him only.”

From ‘Intuitive Intelligence. A Play: Within and Without’ by Dada Gavand

Like an autumn tree

That sheds all it's leaves.

When the mind

Stands denuded and empty

Of all it's fluttering leaves

Of desires and dreams,

It becomes ready

To receive the heavenly showers

When the consciousness is tranquil, serene, and clear as a placid lake or fresh as a sparkling dew drop, it reflects the intrinsic truth and the beauty of life spontaneously. There remains no barrier, no qualitative difference between consciousness and the creation. Thus, the feeling of separation between oneself and reality is eliminated and the experience of unity with life is established.

Such transformation of the consciousness into a crystal clear and immaculate energy, gives an experience of the timeless and the mind force dissolves to become a part of the reality itself.

When the primordial energy drive is watched,

Impersonally perceived and understood,

Witnessed in it's entire manifestation

Without any involvement,

It begins to move inwards

And rise upwards

He who tames and channelizes

This wild primordial energy,

Becomes the intuitive wise one.

Man’s only challenge is to rise to the level of alert, attentive inwardness so that the benediction from the cosmic energy field will be able to strike like lightning:

Feeling without thought
A longing without desire
Experiencing without an idea



Such a unique state without the thought-mind, like the evening cloud that remains just sensitive, attentive and receptive, is a hope for mankind. He, who is aware, inward and humble will absorb and reflect the cosmic wisdom which will transform him and uplift him unto his own glory.




To catch a rabbit one has to travel faster than the rabbit to overtake it. To capture the mind, one has to be dynamically aware of it, intensely vigilant over it, and attentive and alert in the present moment. This sensitive attentiveness unfolds Intuitive Intelligence. Such dynamicity of the intuitive faculty can take one beyond oneself and give the touch of that benevolent unknown.

The mind begins to grow old and rigid and the mortal body has a limited number of years in which it lives in a healthy state. Therefore one has to travel faster to fulfil the objective of life-energy before it becomes too late.

From ‘Journey to Unknown India’ by Walther Eidlitz

Thoughtfully Shri looked up at the ants and the colorful birds. “Nothing but atmas.”


….. a citation from Buddha I never forgot:

‘He scorned me, he beat me,
he conquered me by force
If you make room for this thought
you cannot be free of hate.
For through this hate,
there will be no peace upon earth
Only by not hating can hatred find peace.



“ ……… You know that I value the social endeavor of the West very highly. Yes, welfare institutions for the old and the sick, the right of all to have work and education – it is excellent, all of it. Protection for children and those who are ill, weak, or persecuted, this must exist. In our days it is, in fact, almost the only thing that distinguished humans from animals. But when I think of all these efforts at making the corruptible, changeable world pleasant for humans, it often seems to me to be as if somebody had fallen in the water and was in danger or drowning. Then another comes running to help him and manages to rescue his clothes, his hat, and his spectacles. The drowning man himself, the Atman, is allowed to go under.”

His eager, forced speech often hurried far ahead of his thoughts. It sometimes seemed as if he wanted to seize the divine secrets with a crowbar.

Sadananda wrote on the blackboard the syllable ma. “The word maya comes from the Sanskrit root ma ….. Ma means to measure. As long as we egotistically measure the things about us, value them according to the measure of joy or pain they give us, we are in the power of Maya, who hides God from us.

From ‘The Golden String. An Autobiography’ by Bede Griffiths

The most radical change which has taken place has been in the understanding of the temporal and historical character of the Bible and the Church. The Bible, instead of being regarded as a fixed and final revelation of God to man, is seen as a historic process in which the Word of God is being revealed under changing historical conditions, shaped by the historical, psychological and cultural circumstances of a particular people


Shakespeare’s despairing cry in King Lear


As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,
They kill us for their sport



….. three other books ……. The Bhagavad Gita, the Buddha’s Way of Virtue (a version of the Dhammapada) and the Sayings of Lao Tzu (a version of the Tao Te Ching) …… the influence of these books upon my life was later to be immense, and I still look on them as the three greatest books of spiritual wisdom outside the New Testament …….. their doctrine seemed to me practically identical with that of Christianity as I understood it. From this time the Buddha and Lao Tzu took their place in my mind with Socrates, Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius, along with Christ of the Sermon on the Mount, among the great spiritual leaders of mankind.



The constant aim of Greek culture, as of the Chinese and the Indian, had been to keep the power in the hands of the “wise man”, the philosopher, the Brahmin or the Mandarin, and after him with the nobleman or aristocrat, and by this means the character of their culture has been preserved. In Greece as in Rome and in modern England, the rise of a plutocracy had transferred the power to the merchant, and the decline of culture into material civilization had followed.



……. Now I was made to renounce my own will, to surrender, the inmost centre of my being. Each renunciation had been dragged out of me painfully against my own will. I had struggled against it and felt it as an invasion of my being by an alien power. There was indeed something terrifying in this power which had entered into my life and which would not be refused. It had revealed itself to me as love, but I knew now that it was a love which demanded everything, and which was a torment if it was resisted. Once the surrender had been made, that power took over the direction of my life. I had been striving to come to terms with it, to allot it a certain place in my life but it had shown me that it would accept no compromise. I had wanted to keep my own will and to direct my own life; but now I had been forced to surrender. I had placed my life in the hands of a power which had been infinitely beyond me and I knew from this time that the sole purpose of my life must be to leave myself in those hands and to allow my soul to be governed by that will.

I could never doubt after this that behind all the accidents of this life, behind all the pain and the conflict, there was a definite power at work which was shaping human destiny. The pain and the conflict arose from the resistance of the human will to this power, and this resistance in turn was due to our blindness. We were held captive by the material world, the world of reason and common sense; only when we had broken with the illusion of this world and faced the reality which was hidden in the depths of our being could we find peace.



… from a Christian point of view the importance of Indian philosophy can hardly be over-estimated. It marks the supreme achievement of the human mind in the natural order in it's quest of a true conception of God.

The idea of God which is found in Sankara, the great doctor of the Vedanta, is almost identical with that of St Thomas. According to him God is sacchidananda, that is, absolute Being (sat), absolute knowledge (chit), and absolute bliss (ananda). He is eternal, infinite, unchanging, incomprehensible, the One “without a second”. ……. Before this inexpressible mystery we can only say, “Neti, Neti”, “Not this, Not that”. And yet, and this is the very starting point of all Indian thought, this absolute, incomprehensible mystery of Brahma is one with the mystery which lies at the heart of our human life. Brahma is the Atma. He is the true Self of every man; each of us can find his true being only in God.

And so the whole movement of Hindu philosophy culminates in the practice of Yoga, the search for “union” with God. It is not like Greek philosophy primarily a speculative theory; it is, …… a way of salvation. It's purpose is not merely to know about God, but to know God as God knows himself, to participate in the divine nature.



…… the Indian concept of the Atma is the Chinese idea of the Tao. The word Tao simply means the “way” …….. it came to be used absolutely for the Principle which governs the universe. It is the beginning and end of all things, at once transcendent and immanent, sustaining and directing all things by it's inherent power and yet so utterly beyond them that it cannot even properly be named.



If we are ever to find peace either in ourselves or in the world we shall have to learn again that ancient wisdom which alone can give man peace with nature and with God, and which was summed up by Dostoevsky in the words of the Prior of the monastery in which the Brothers Karamazov met: “Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of divine love, and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf and every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

From ‘The Last Talks’ by J.Krishnamurti

When you do not know what is the cause of suffering, how it can be ended – you don’t know, right? So remain in that state and find out. …… don’t try to find an answer, but find out if you have understood the question – the depth of the question or the superficiality of the question or the meaninglessness of the question. ……. Then you will find that the question itself has a tremendous energy.



What is life? What is the origin of all this – the marvelous earth, the lovely evening and the early morning sun, the rivers, the valleys, the mountains and the glory of the land which is being despoiled? If you say the origin of all this is ‘God’, then it's finished; then You can trot along quite happily because you’ve solved the problem. But if you begin to question, doubt, as one should, all gods, all gurus – I don’t belong to that tribe – if you begin to question all that man has put together through a long evolution down the corridors of history, you find this question asked: What is the beginning? What is the origin? How has all this come about?