So you want to know about meditation? Very good this is an intelligent decision. This shows that you are different from the other laymen. Then, what made you to wish to do meditation? Is this because of one of those family problems? Or missing a chance for promotion because of a rude manager? Or else are you disgusted with the set-up or a strange sense of restlessness that is not clearer? Above all, is it because of a chronic illness?
Whatever there as on, the very desire is a right step. What prompted you to do meditation is immaterial. But, remember friends! The very meditation involves overcoming of all desires and disappointments. Including paradoxically, the desire to meditate. Otherwise, even if you learn meditation well, that “learning” is futile. Like a huge tree in a painting, it gives no shade.
All of us have restlessness built in our genes. There is the physical dimension aggravated by real or imagined illness. Then, is the impatience to achieve the goals, self-imposed and frustrated by that very self itself. These goals are easy to identify. These goals are: status, money, power, and position, satisfaction through the body, the feelings and emotions. Above all these, the necessity for a sense of belonging.
But there is another intangible but very much felt restlessness. You can call it by any name. Realizing the self, god, spirit, etc. Restlessness here cannot be put to an end by the physical means. Even our everyday experience proves this. You can buy the most expensive meals but you cannot buy hunger. You can go in for the most comfortable bed but even tranquillizers may not cause you sleeping.
There is a hunger which affluence cannot appease. This is the hunger to know the secret of why we behave in the way we usually do. Our bodies obey our minds, by and large. But our mind itself does not respond to our mind. I give it an order to sit calmly for about fifteen minutes. It does not. The situation is so complex that one minute of concentration would go into the guinness book of world records! We wonder why our mind does not take the orders which we ourselves give.
Meditation is to become aware of this paradox. The accent here is on awareness and not on the paradox itself. Here a necessary step is to look at the nature of desire or want itself. Remember that desire means that you do not have the thing, which you have been longed for. Hence, you strive to get the thing, which satisfies the want of you. Desire, thus, has its counterpart in the object or experience that satisfies the desire.
There is also a curious puzzle. We do not want a thing if it is already in our possession. On the contrary, things which we possess that we may really don’t want. This situation triggers the need to check the nature of desiring and wanting. Here, we come up against the curious nature of the meditative process. In its method, motivation and process, meditation is not described to satisfy the desires.
Note the word “meant”. It draws a distinction between the primary and the marginal effect of meditation. Recurrent engagement with our own mind may suppose reduce our stress levels. We may gain time not only to stand and stare, but to sleep and snore. Health may be improved and illness be minimized, even a terminal disease may extend its terminal period. Even our family may feel happy that we appear more relaxed as, “daddy is so cool, these days”! Our colleagues may find us less insufferable. Though not completely lovable.
Here are contexts to check. If these are the benefits we wish to get from meditation, we are taking only the fringe benefits and not the real wealth that meditation generates. Moreover, if it is only stress- reduction, we need not take the trouble. Even, a little practice shows that meditation, in fact, increases stress. Since it uncovers all the filth which we gather in the mind alone. For want of better word only, we can call it our mind.
For many of us, the unexamined mind is like a pool choked with mud and mire. When we start to stir it, the stench is unbearable. Even the die hard freudians would draw back in horror the skeletons unearthed from our seemingly civilized self. In the beginning stages, increase in restlessness is a tell-tale sign that all is well with your wish to do meditation.
All of this should tell us that meditation is not akin to any other kind of activity propelled by desire. All desires involve more desire, more desperate inquiry for fulfillment. To put it drastically: to think of the meditative mind as a way to any other end than itself (which is awareness) is as mistaken as to equate sex with samadhi and drug-induced experience with instant nirvana. Do intensify the desire to do meditation, but alongside learn to do discriminate, to de-link this process in its structure, content and consciousness from any of the ordinary objectives which guide our life.
As the great text, the bhagavad gita, says, “the afflicted, the curious, the affluence-seeker, and the truth quester” – all these people seek to know the truth of meditation. But tits total truth is exploited only by the one whose goals are high. The one who wants to learn the exquisite art of balancing experience and analysis, knowledge and wisdom, the flesh and the spirit can squeeze the maximum from the fruit of meditation. Meditation is like a mulch coq, kamadhenu, which gives infinite milk of nourishment of enduring value.
The cow is a good image. It is fed on fodder and other things. The end product is not fodder itself but something different from the input. That difference is nature and its processes. It involves recycling which changes the very materials which are put in.
Moreover, the cow yields its milk to others and is incapable of storing it. Perhaps the cow is a natural denouncer. It is thyaga of the highest kind. All this is true but if we do not know the art of milking skillfully, it will kick us in the face in the traditional way of milking. In another words, the input, the recycling, and the milking are processes which apply with equal validity to the art of maximizing the meditative potential.
Whatever there as on, the very desire is a right step. What prompted you to do meditation is immaterial. But, remember friends! The very meditation involves overcoming of all desires and disappointments. Including paradoxically, the desire to meditate. Otherwise, even if you learn meditation well, that “learning” is futile. Like a huge tree in a painting, it gives no shade.
All of us have restlessness built in our genes. There is the physical dimension aggravated by real or imagined illness. Then, is the impatience to achieve the goals, self-imposed and frustrated by that very self itself. These goals are easy to identify. These goals are: status, money, power, and position, satisfaction through the body, the feelings and emotions. Above all these, the necessity for a sense of belonging.
But there is another intangible but very much felt restlessness. You can call it by any name. Realizing the self, god, spirit, etc. Restlessness here cannot be put to an end by the physical means. Even our everyday experience proves this. You can buy the most expensive meals but you cannot buy hunger. You can go in for the most comfortable bed but even tranquillizers may not cause you sleeping.
There is a hunger which affluence cannot appease. This is the hunger to know the secret of why we behave in the way we usually do. Our bodies obey our minds, by and large. But our mind itself does not respond to our mind. I give it an order to sit calmly for about fifteen minutes. It does not. The situation is so complex that one minute of concentration would go into the guinness book of world records! We wonder why our mind does not take the orders which we ourselves give.
Meditation is to become aware of this paradox. The accent here is on awareness and not on the paradox itself. Here a necessary step is to look at the nature of desire or want itself. Remember that desire means that you do not have the thing, which you have been longed for. Hence, you strive to get the thing, which satisfies the want of you. Desire, thus, has its counterpart in the object or experience that satisfies the desire.
There is also a curious puzzle. We do not want a thing if it is already in our possession. On the contrary, things which we possess that we may really don’t want. This situation triggers the need to check the nature of desiring and wanting. Here, we come up against the curious nature of the meditative process. In its method, motivation and process, meditation is not described to satisfy the desires.
Note the word “meant”. It draws a distinction between the primary and the marginal effect of meditation. Recurrent engagement with our own mind may suppose reduce our stress levels. We may gain time not only to stand and stare, but to sleep and snore. Health may be improved and illness be minimized, even a terminal disease may extend its terminal period. Even our family may feel happy that we appear more relaxed as, “daddy is so cool, these days”! Our colleagues may find us less insufferable. Though not completely lovable.
Here are contexts to check. If these are the benefits we wish to get from meditation, we are taking only the fringe benefits and not the real wealth that meditation generates. Moreover, if it is only stress- reduction, we need not take the trouble. Even, a little practice shows that meditation, in fact, increases stress. Since it uncovers all the filth which we gather in the mind alone. For want of better word only, we can call it our mind.
For many of us, the unexamined mind is like a pool choked with mud and mire. When we start to stir it, the stench is unbearable. Even the die hard freudians would draw back in horror the skeletons unearthed from our seemingly civilized self. In the beginning stages, increase in restlessness is a tell-tale sign that all is well with your wish to do meditation.
All of this should tell us that meditation is not akin to any other kind of activity propelled by desire. All desires involve more desire, more desperate inquiry for fulfillment. To put it drastically: to think of the meditative mind as a way to any other end than itself (which is awareness) is as mistaken as to equate sex with samadhi and drug-induced experience with instant nirvana. Do intensify the desire to do meditation, but alongside learn to do discriminate, to de-link this process in its structure, content and consciousness from any of the ordinary objectives which guide our life.
As the great text, the bhagavad gita, says, “the afflicted, the curious, the affluence-seeker, and the truth quester” – all these people seek to know the truth of meditation. But tits total truth is exploited only by the one whose goals are high. The one who wants to learn the exquisite art of balancing experience and analysis, knowledge and wisdom, the flesh and the spirit can squeeze the maximum from the fruit of meditation. Meditation is like a mulch coq, kamadhenu, which gives infinite milk of nourishment of enduring value.
The cow is a good image. It is fed on fodder and other things. The end product is not fodder itself but something different from the input. That difference is nature and its processes. It involves recycling which changes the very materials which are put in.
Moreover, the cow yields its milk to others and is incapable of storing it. Perhaps the cow is a natural denouncer. It is thyaga of the highest kind. All this is true but if we do not know the art of milking skillfully, it will kick us in the face in the traditional way of milking. In another words, the input, the recycling, and the milking are processes which apply with equal validity to the art of maximizing the meditative potential.
