The fourth question:
Question 4
DURING THE MEDITATIONS, MY MIND STILL GOES FIVE HUNDRED MILES PER HOUR. I NEVER EXPERIENCE SILENCE, AND WHATEVER WITNESSING HAPPENS IS VERY SHORT, LIKE FLASHES. AM I WASTING MY TIME?

YOUR MIND IS MIGHTY SLOW. Five hundred miles per hour, only?! And do you think this is speed? Mighty slow you are. Mind knows no speed it goes so fast. It is faster than light. Light travels 186,000 miles is one second. Mind is faster than that. But nothing to be worried -- that is the beauty of the mind, that is a great quality! Rather than taking it negatively, rather than fighting with it, befriend the mind.
You say: "During the meditations, my mind still goes five hundred miles per hour" -- let it go! Let it go faster. You be a watcher. You watch the mind going around so fast, with such speed. Enjoy this! enjoy this play of the mind.
In Sanskrit we have a special term for it; we call it CHIDVILAS -- the play of consciousness. Enjoy it! this play of mind rushing towards stars, moving so fast from here and there, jumping all over existence. What is wrong in it? Let it be a beautiful dance. Accept it.
My feeling is that what you are doing is you are trying to stop it -- you cannot do that. Nobody can stop the mind! Yes, mind stops one day, but nobody can stop it. Mind stops, but that is not out of your effort. Mind stops out of your understanding.
You just WATCH and try to see what is happening, why this mind is rushing. It is not rushing without any reason. You must be ambitious. Try to see WHY this mind is rushing, where it is rushing -- you must be ambitious. If it thinks about money, then try to understand. Mind is not the question. You start dreaming about money, that you have won a lottery or this and that, and then you even start planning how to spend it, what to purchase and what not. Or, the mind thinks you have become a president, a prime minister, and then you start thinking what to do now, how to run the country, or the world. Just WATCH the mind! what mind is going towards. There must be a deep seed in you. You cannot stop the mind unless that seed disappears.
The mind is simply following the order of your innermost seed. Somebody is thinking about sex; then somewhere there is repressed sexuality. Watch where mind is rushing. Look deep into yourself, find where the seeds are.
I have heard:

The parson was very much worried. "Listen," he said to his verger, "somebody has stolen my bicycle."
"Where have you been on it, Rector?" inquired that worthy.
"Only round the parish on my calls."
The verger suggested that the best plan would be for the rector to direct his Sunday sermon to the ten commandments. "When you get to'Thou shalt not steal', you and I will watch the faces -- we will soon see."
Sunday came, the rector started in fine flow about the commandments, then lost his thread, changed his subject, and trailed off lamely.
"Sir," said the verger, "I thought you were going to..."
"I know, Giles, I know. But you see, when I got to'Thou shalt not commit adultery' I suddenly remembered where I had left my bicycle."

Just see where you have left your bicycle. The mind is rushing for certain reasons. The mind needs understanding, awareness. Don't try to stop it. If you try to stop it, in the first place you cannot succeed; in the second place, IF YOU CAN succeed -- one can succeed if one makes perseverant effort for years -- if YOU CAN succeed, you will become dull. No satori will happen out of it.
In the first place, you cannot succeed; and it is good that you cannot succeed. If you CAN succeed, if you manage to succeed, that will be very unfortunate -- you will become dull, you will lose intelligence. With that speed there is intelligence, with that speed there is continuous sharpening of the sword of thinking, logic, intellect. Please don't try to stop it. I am not in favour of dullards, and I am not here to help anybody to become stupid.
In the name of religion, many people have become stupid, they have almost become idiots -- just trying to stop the mind without any understanding about why it is going with such speed... why in the first place? The mind cannot go without any reason. Without going into the reason, in the layers, deep layers of the unconscious, they just try to stop. They CAN stop, but they will have to pay a price, and the price will be that their intelligence will be lost.
You can go around India, you can find thousands of sannyasins, mahatmas; look into their eyes -- yes, they are good people, nice, but stupid. If you look in their eyes there is no intelligence, you will not see any lightning. They are uncreative people; they have not created anything. They just sit there. They are vegetating, they are not alive people. They have not helped the world in ANY way. They have not even produced a painting or a poem or a song, because even to produce a poem you will need intelligence, you will need certain qualities of the mind.
I would not suggest that you stop the mind; rather, that you understand. With understanding there happens a miracle. The miracle is that with understanding, by and by, when you understand the causes and those causes are looked into deeply, and through that looking deeply into those causes, those causes disappear, mind slows down. But intelligence is not lost, because mind is not forced.
What are you doing if you don't remove the causes by understanding? You are driving a car, for example, and you go on pressing the accelerator and at the same time you try to press the brake. You will destroy the whole mechanism of the car. And there is every possibility you will have some accident. This cannot be done together. If you are pushing the brake, then leave the accelerator; don't push it any more. If you are pushing the accelerator, then don't push the brake. DON'T do both the things together, otherwise you will destroy the whole mechanism; you are doing two contradictory things.
Ambition you carry on -- and you try to stop the mind? Ambition creates the speed, so you are accelerating the speed -- and putting a brake on the mind. You will destroy the whole subtle mechanism of the mind, and mind is a very delicate phenomenon, the most delicate in the whole of existence. So don't be foolish about it.
There is no need to stop it.
You say: "I never experience silence, and whatever witnessing happens is very short, like flashes."
Feel happy! Even that is something of tremendous value. Those flashes, they are not ordinary flashes. Don't just take them for granted! There are millions of people for whom even those small glimpses have not happened. They will live and die and they will never know what witnessing is -- even for a single moment. You are happy, you are fortunate.
But you are not feeling grateful. If you don't feel grateful, those flashes will disappear. Feel grateful -- they will grow. With gratitude, everything grows. Feel happy that you are blessed -- they will grow. With that positivity, things will grow.
"And whatever witnessing happens is very short."
Let it be very short! If it can happen for a single split moment, it is happening; you will have the taste of it. And with the taste, by and by, you will create more and more situations in which it happens more and more.
"Am I wasting my time?"
You cannot waste time, because you don't possess time. You can waste something that you possess. Time you don't possess. Time will be wasted anyway whether you meditate or not -- time will be wasted. Time is rushing by. Whatsoever you do, do anything, or don't do anything, time is going. You cannot save time so how can you waste time? You can waste only something which you can save.
You don't possess time. Forget about it!
And the best use you can have of time is to have these small glimpses -- because finally you will come to see only those moments have been saved which were moments of witnessing, and all else has gone down the drain. The money that you earned, the prestige that you earned, the respectability that you earned, is all gone down the drain. Only those few moments that you had some flashes of witnessing, only those moments are saved. Only those moments will go with you when you leave this life -- only those moments can go, because those moments belong to eternity, they don't belong to time.
But feel happy it is happening. It always happens slowly, slowly. But one drop by one drop a great ocean can become full. It happens in drops. But in the drops the ocean is coming. You just receive it with gratitude, with celebration, with thankfulness.