Master your thoughts.
Any thought goes on inside your mind. Watch for a few minutes and you will be surprised: the mind seems to be crazy! It jumps from one thought to another thought for no reason at all. Just a dog starts barking in the neighborhood and your mind takes the clue from it—and you remember the dog that you used to have in your childhood, and the dog died—and you start feeling sad. And because of the death of the dog you start thinking about death, and the death of your mother and the death of your father. And you become angry because you were never at ease with your mother; there was always conflict. The dog is still barking, completely unaware what he has done. And you have traveled so far!
Anything can trigger a process in you. This is a kind of slavery. You are at the mercy of accidents. This is not mastery. And a sannyasin, a seeker, should be a master. He thinks only if he wants to; if he does not want to think he simply puts his mind off. He knows how to put in on and how to put it off.
You don’t know how to switch it on, you don’t know how to switch it off; it goes on and on. It starts working in the childhood and goes on working till you die. Seventy years, eighty years, continuously working—so much work, and then you cannot expect anything great out of it because it is utterly tired. It has not much energy left; it is leaking from everywhere. If you can switch off… that’s what meditation is all about: switching the mind off, the art of switching the mind off. If you can switch off, it will gather energy.
If for a few hours every day you are without the mind, you will gather so much energy that that energy will keep you young, fresh, creative. That energy will allow you to see reality, the beauty of the existence, the joy of life, the celebration. But for that you need energy.
