Swami Chinmayananda

When the mind drops its perceptions of sense objects and stops identification with its thought dances, at that stage in meditation, the mind is no-mind. Thoughts gush in to flood the mind with angry bursts of self-riotous compulsions mainly from two sources: the past and the future. Some thoughts stem from the past, dragging along with them memories of the good and bad done in the days gone by. These confuse the individual with regrets and sorrows, joys and pleasures raised by his memory from the stinking tombs of the past, forcing him to relive the dead. 

We do so when we waste our energies in unproductive and wasteful regrets over things we have already committed. The more we remember them those very vasanas are getting more deeply fixed into our personality structure. When we are not engaging in the regrets of the past, we are wandering in the fairy castles of our fancied future, peopled with ugly fears, horrid dreams, unnerving hopes, and perhaps, a thousand impossible expectations.

  In short, the mind, when it is not engaged in the worldly objects that are right in front of it, can choose its own private fields of agitation by dragging up the buried corpses of the past or by bringing up vivid pictures of a tragic hopelessness as the sure possibility of the immediate future! In either case the mind of the individual at meditation can get sadly disturbed. 

Therefore, the rishis advise us: “Moment to moment engage the outgoing mind to live in the present. Completely reject the past. Renounce the future totally. Then, in such a bosom, the agitated mind shall reach the state of mindlessness.” This state of mind is called no-mind.

The content of the present moment, divorced from all relationships with the past and future, is the absolute fullness of the Infinite. Eternity is experienced at the sacred depth of the present moment. To live in the present, independent of the past and the future, is to experience samadhi, the revealing culmination of meditation. Seek it yourself. Nobody can give it to anyone else. Each will have to reach there all by himself, in himself, with no other vehicle than himself.