We could talk through morality and the virtue of compassion purely in a religious form, but to understand in a technical way how these things work in our body-mind complex, I often choose a scientific way. In the ultimate analysis, science and wisdom are not two different things. It is only the terminology we use to explain them that makes them look scientific or religious. It is not simply a matter of forgive and let go and be compassionate; the other person will have no plank to stand on to fight with you. If he or she still does fight, that is where they will learn the lesson. If they could not learn by your neutrality, by the force of compassion, they can only learn through suffering; there is no other choice, whether it is you or me. So if we make peace, at least within ourselves, slowly we come to being one-pointed. In that one- pointedness we are getting a deeper insight or wisdom of anything we focus on. This gradually makes us conscious Being. It awakens. In Tantra we say the kundalini begins to rise, makes you lighter, brighter, more cheerful and peaceful. You begin to come out of the dross and sins get dispelled. You get freer and freer. You become elevated. And that is the unperturbable state: Enlightenment. Wisdom is the insight, the knowing of a thing you concentrate upon. It reveals what it is rather than what you think it is, and when it reveals, you have no questions left because you are seeing as it is. This is Consciousness, seeing with the Light of Consciousness: no questions, no discussions, no debates, no doubts, no reservations, no back thoughts, no afterthoughts. Throughout these one million things, the common base factor is Consciousness Itself, which reveals to you in so many details.
      This is how, when you know yourself you know everything; when you know the basic Substance, you know the whole universe. The substantial Consciousness, when you merge into That, everything is revealed to you. But before that, you have to use the very apparatus with which you have created the mess. There is no use blaming the garbage can that holds the garbage you keep in it. You have to use the same garbage can to throw away the garbage. In other words, to make itself totally free, the mind has to vanish into Consciousness.

      One-pointedness is not the ultimate destination but it is necessary in order to get to wisdom. And this onepointedness cannot be achieved without relaxing the mind, making it peaceful, and compassion is a golden virtue for that. Even when someone does wrong to you or troubles you—leave aside when they are right and you are wrong—at that time use compassion and you will see that at least you will be in peace. But if you are agitated and trying to hammer something into somebody’s head, then in the evening when you want to be one-pointed you will have a hard time! Don’t forget that there are a hundred thousand ideas. We are in a zoo. You may say “But they’re in a cage and we are not.” We are. Our minds are cages. So how to come out of the cage? Dhyana—meditation or Zen—says you have to come out the way you went in. If you are trying to come out of the cage differently, it will be a very uphill task. You may not succeed.
      Any time you do something and it is obstructing you, whether in meditation or in action or dealings, ask yourself which way this started. Go back out of it the same way. Our mind has a difficulty there; it avoids being humiliated. It wants to come out in some other dignified way. Because if you come out the same way, you are going through the problems of mind—your vicissitudes—and that is what you want to avoid. You want to come out a way in which you are not the culprit. That is a non-Zen method. If you go out the same way, you are going to accept defeat which, in ordinary language, means surrender. When we use the word surrender on the spiritual path, many, at least in the west, have resistance to it because it is associated with defeat. But on the spiritual path the true sense is release. When you surrender you are released; you are releasing yourself. The very defeat you are avoiding is defeating you because you are maintaining your tensions. When we lose peace and happiness, we are defeated. So the very exercise to avoid defeat leads us to defeat.