Single-Pointedness

Saraha and the arrowsmith woman

Mind is so cunning that it can hide in the garments of its very opposite. From indulgence it can become asceticism, from being a materialist it can become a spiritualist, from being worldly it can become otherworldly. But mind is mind--whether you are for the world or against the world you remain encaged in the mind.

For or against, both are parts of the mind. When mind disappears, mind disappears in a choiceless awareness. When you stop choosing, when you are neither for nor against--that is stopping in the middle. One choice leads to the left, one extreme; another choice leads to the right, the other extreme. If you don't choose, you are exactly in the middle. That is relaxation, that is rest. You become choiceless, unobsessed, and in that state of unobsessed, choiceless consciousness, intelligence arises which has been lying deep, dormant in your being. You become a light unto yourself.

Saraha, the founder of Tantra, was the son of a very learned Brahmin who was in the court of King Mahapala. The king was willing to give his own daughter to Saraha, but Saraha wanted to renounce all--he wanted to become a sannyasin.

The king tried to persuade him--Saraha was so beautiful and he was so intelligent and he was such a handsome young man. But he persisted and the permission had to be given--Saraha became a disciple of Sri Kirti. The first thing Sri Kirti told him was: "Forget all your Vedas and all your learning and all that nonsense." It was difficult but he was ready to stake anything. Years passed and, by and by, he erased all that he had known. He became a great meditator.


One day while Saraha was meditating, suddenly he saw a vision--that there was a woman in the marketplace who was going to be his real teacher. He went to the marketplace. He saw this woman, young woman, very alive, radiant with life, cutting an arrow-shaft, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but wholly absorbed in making the arrow. He immediately felt something extraordinary in her presence, something that he had never come across. Something so fresh and something from the very source. The arrow ready, the woman closing one eye and opening the other, assumed the posture of aiming at an invisible target... And something happened, something like a communion.

Saraha had never felt like that before. In that moment, the spiritual significance of what she was doing dawned upon him. Neither looking to the left, nor looking to the right--just looking in the middle. For the first time he understood what Buddha means by being in the middle: avoid the axis. You can move from the left to the right, from the right to the left, but you will be like a pendulum moving. To be in the middle means the pendulum just hangs there, neither to the right nor to the left. Then the clock stops, then the world stops. Then there is no more time... then the state of no-time. He had heard it said so many times by Sri Kirti; he had read about it, he had pondered, contemplated over it; he had argued with others about it, that to be in the middle is the right thing. For the first time he had seen it in an action: the woman was not looking to the right and not looking to the left... she was just looking in the middle, focussed in the middle.

The middle is the point from where the transcendence happens. Think about it, contemplate about it, watch it in life.