No Imagination: Don’t Imagine What May Happen in the Future
When you drop thoughts of the past and present with determination and alertness, your mind will conjure up all these images. You may start to think about the future or dream your life a certain way. If you remember that thoughts are empty in their own right, you’ll find it relatively easier to drop the thought. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself daydreaming while meditating. As soon as you find yourself thinking about the future, drop the thought and get back to the present moment.
No Examination: Don’t Analyze Your Thoughts
No matter what type of thought it is, don’t get into analysis. For example, a thought of you getting hurt or abandoned in love might arise. If you start analyzing why it happened to you or where did you go wrong or why did your partner do this and so on, before you know, it your concentration will be lost. While meditating no thought must ever be examined, unless you are doing contemplative meditation, in which case you train your mind to contemplate on a singular thought. For now, just be mindful that any examination or analysis will have an adverse effect on the quality of your meditation.
No Construction: Don’t Try to Create an Experience
Sometimes with persistent meditation, you experience beautiful sounds, fragrances, hues or even glimpses into different states of consciousness. One of the most common mistake meditators make is to crave for the same experience again. This deviates you from the path. If you find yourself longing for a certain experience or waiting for it, gently draw your attention to the present moment. Remind yourself that any desire for an experience is no more than a thought. And thought must be dropped at all costs.
No Digression: Don’t Wander; Simply Stay in the Present Moment
It is common to feel different emotions during your meditation. You laugh, you cry, sometimes you feel sad and elated at other times. While a beginner meditator can’t plug his emotions right away, it’s absolutely critical not to examine your emotions or try to find their cause (you can do that after your meditation if you like but not during the session). When you find yourself digressing from your meditation, gently draw your attention to the present moment. You could listen to your breath.
The greater effort you put in following the instructions above, the more you’ll gain from meditation. If you sit down to meditate and start to analyze or pursue your thoughts, you will not progress in gaining mental stability and calmness. The four primary hurdles of meditation continue to bother such a meditator.
In the joke that I used at the beginning of this chapter, Ron got distracted, engaged in recollection of the past, analysis of the present, examined what it meant, imagined a certain future and craved for an experience – all that out of nothing! Next time you are meditating and you want to recall the six principles, just think of this joke.
In a nutshelclass="underline" while meditating, don’t brood over, don’t resent and don’t repent your past. Don’t examine what’s going on in your present life. Don’t imagine any future. Don’t analyze any thought. When a thought comes, don’t run after it. It’ll disappear. It’ll wither away on its own. Don’t crave for any specific experience or else you’ll end up mentally constructing that experience, thereby jeopardizing your meditation. Don’t let your mind wander. Simply maintain your awareness with alertness. Just be here now, in the present moment and you’ll see the beauty of meditation soon enough. Let me show you how to meditate now.
Attention
Once upon a time, a man was taking a stroll in the market. He came across a jewellery shop and saw a gold ornament on display. He picked up a rock lying nearby and broke the glass with a powerful blow. Before anyone could realize, he was scurrying away with the jewel. But the security guards nabbed him in no time and he was presented before the magistrate.
“I’m surprised,” the judge said. “You attempted burglary in broad daylight, in the middle of a busy bazaar. What were you thinking?”
“It was the gold, Your Honor,” the thief said. “I couldn’t resist it. I got so blinded that I couldn’t see anything else. I didn’t see the guards or the owner, I didn’t see other people around either. All I saw was the gold.”
All I saw was the gold: it’s all about attention, more specifically, it’s about the art of attention. Before you feel anything, your mind thinks about it. It takes you back to the old memory, the person, the incident and a chain reaction kicks in. The mind is then bombarded with more memories of the same nature and before you know it, those thoughts have added up and they have brought about a complete change in the mood. You were fine a few moments ago but now your day is ruined because the thoughts have turned into feelings and the feelings have completely overpowered you. It happens in a fraction of a second but it’s enough to throw anyone off balance, for the power of a thought is as great as its speed.
If I’ve to sum up the act of meditation in a single phrase I would say ‘presence of mind’. That’s where meditation is different from sleep or other forms of relaxing activities. While you experience a suspension of consciousness in sleep, it’s the exact opposite in meditation – a razor sharp consciousness.
The moment you lose your presence of mind, you are most likely going to have an accident. A head-on collision with your thoughts. If you aren’t attentive, you’ll start listening to the blabbering of your mind and end up drinking when you shouldn’t be.
The ability to direct your attention and keep it yoked to the object of meditation is fundamental to good meditation. This is the singular most important instruction, the only way to keep your mind in the present moment. Think of a concert pianist playing a difficult piece, let’s say Chopin Étude Op. 10 No. 4. Her fingers move on the piano as if they are doing an effortless dance. The pianist seems to be enjoying playing this difficult piece. To reach this level of proficiency, however, she must have put in more than ten thousand hours of practice.
Learning how to meditate and channelize your attention is no different to learning how to play any musical instrument or sport. It’s easier to direct our attention when the activity is enjoyable, interesting or engaging. Meditation, in the beginning, is neither of these. It’s difficult and tiring and the word ‘boring’ may come to mind too. But only in the beginning. Your attention shifts from one thought to another. The more you try to tie it down, the louder it retaliates. Fortunately, there is a way to keep your attention alive and channelized.
No matter how short or long your session of meditation, your attention is going to experience nine different states. Yogic scriptures call it navaakaaraacittasthiti, literally for the nine forms of the mental state. Having spent years practicing meditation, I can tell you with utmost conviction that all great meditators, from absolute beginners to the finest of yogis, go through these stages. No one is born with the skill to meditate. It’s learnt like any other art.
Master Vasubandhu gives nine critical instructions on the art of settling your mind so that you may meditate. In his commentary on Sutraalankara, he says:
Stabilize the mind
Settle it completely
Settle it firmly
Settle it intensely
Clear it of obstacles
Pacify your mind
Completely pacify it
Channel the mind into one stream
Settle the mind in equipoise
Once you reach the ninth stage, you are ready to meditate. It seems hard work, it perhaps it is too. But if you are serious about meditation, eventually it will become effortless to you. Following the aforesaid nine instructions pushes your attention into a different state. Each state is progressively better than the preceding one. During the days of my intense practice, I used to remind myself of these instructions at least twice in a span of 24 hours.