Only you remain...

This sutra says: MEDITATION IS THE SEED.
On your great journey, your quest for life, your pilgrimage to the temple of truth, meditation is the seed. What is meditation? Why is it so valuable -- so valuable that if it flowers you will become God, and if it rots you will rot in hell? What is meditation? Meditation is the state of no-thought consciousness, where you are fully conscious but thoughts are absent. You are, but the mind is not. The death of the mind is meditation.
At present, you are not. There is the mind and mind alone. It should be just the opposite: there should be only you, without any mind. Right now the mind consumes all your energy. All your life-energy is being sucked by the mind.
Have you ever seen the air plant? the amar-bel? It is a parasite that attaches itself to a tree and lives off of it, sucking its energy. The tree ultimately dries up and dies. It is called amar-bel, the immortal creeper. It is just like the mind. It has no roots. It needs no roots, for it lives off the parent plant. It sucks the tree dry as it nourishes itself. The Hindus have given it an apt name, the immortal creeper.
Your mind is also an immortal creeper. It does not die. It lives on indefinitely. It follows you for countless lives. What is interesting is that it has no roots, no seeds. Its existence is rootless. It should be dead, but it lives on you.
Your mind envelops you. You are completely smothered by it. All your life-energy is sapped by the mind. You are almost dried-up. Your mind lets you have just enough to keep you alive. The parasite does not kill its host tree outright; the host is allowed to retain enough for its most basic needs. A master treats his slave similarly: the slave is given just enough to stay alive.
Your mind gives you just enough to permit your survival. It gobbles up ninety-nine percent of your energy and allows you just one percent so that you can maintain the body. In a non-meditating state, the mind is ninety-nine percent and you are one percent; in a meditative individual the individual is ninety-nine percent and the mind only one percent. If you become one hundred percent and the mind is zero, that is the state of samadhi.
Then you are completely liberated; the seed has developed into a full-grown tree. There is nothing left to be achieved now. All that was to be attained is already attained. All potentiality has turned into reality; all that was hidden is now manifest. Then existence becomes filled with your fragrance; then the music of your dance is heard in all corners of the earth, and even far away in the moon and the stars. It is not that you alone are thrilled -- the life-stream of all existence throbs within you. Then existence becomes filled with celebration. Whenever a Buddha is born all of existence celebrates. All of existence yearns to see your seed turn into a spreading tree.
Meditation means: where the mind is as good as gone. Samadhi means: where the mind is completely void and only you remain.

This sutra of Shiva says: MEDITATION IS THE SEED.
Therefore we have to start with meditation. Right now, in sleeping and in wakefulness, in consciousness and unconsciousness, the mind has you in its grip. Thoughts invade you in the day and dreams in the night. All the twenty-four hours the mind argues and debates and the most amazing thing is: it all leads to nothing. What have you attained by all your reasoning and thinking? Where has it taken you? What goals have you reached?