If you don’t believe in rebirth then this book will be of little use to you. As I said earlier, meditation to me is the most powerful tool to harness and channelize the restive and other tendencies of the mind we’ve been carrying with us over lifetimes.
Sometimes we act like wolves, at times like a lion, meek as a cow sometimes, soft as a deer, restless as a monkey or lazy as a lizard. We’ve been all that at some stage.
Yogic scriptures state that we simultaneously live in three types of space. They call it bhuta-akasha, physical space, citta- akasha, mental space, cidda-akasha, the space of consciousness.
The state of our mind, our mental space, determines how we perceive the physical space around us. If you are happy even average food tastes sumptuous and if you are grumpy even the best food feels tasteless. We are willing to make a lot of compromises when we are happy. But what causes our happiness? What makes us feel light and full of life, and what makes us feel nothing is right even when there’s no change in our circumstances? The answer is our state of consciousness.
Fluctuations in consciousness bring about an immediate change in our emotions and thoughts. Unless we experience freedom at all three levels, our happiness will always be temporary and incomplete. Such transient state of happiness will repeatedly throw us back into the throes of suffering.
Meditation is your way to silence the fluctuations in consciousness. To really feel, and put to use, your immense potential, you have to go beyond the incessant chattering of the mind. You have to clean the slate before you can inscribe your sacred existence on it. Meditation is the path – a systematic, methodical, scientific and artful path – to reach that bliss and potential. You have milestones to guide you along the way and a set of practices to help you produce the right conditions for effective and definitive results.
Each one of us is a master of infinite possibilities at a universal scale. Meditation is to experience your own magnificence, it is to live your potential. It is a state where joy and peace flows from every action you perform, every word you utter, every thought you contemplate. There are no shortcuts. The only way to taste the fruits of meditation is to do it right, to do it properly.
The ultimate bliss and beauty you experience upon reaching the final stage of meditation has been given various names including the awakening of the kundalini, samadhi, nirvikalapa- samadhi, even nirvana, and so on. I’m not interested in these labels, I never was. My sole focus is to shed light on the path of meditation as I walked it; complete with its trials and tribulations, rewards and outcomes. Must you go to the Himalayas to realize your potential? I would hold off answering this in a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for now. Walk with me and you’ll know the answer by the time you finish absorbing my words written herein.
There is the ordinary path and the extraordinary path. I will lay out both for you. Based on your own preferences, goal and ambition, you pick the one you like. Regardless of the nature, regime and system of your meditation, I can tell you one thing – meditation is the most scientific endeavor you can undertake to take yourself to a level unimaginable for the ordinary mind, to elevate your consciousness to the universal level, to experience how you are not the body but way beyond. The keyword here is ‘experience’.
Without further ado, let’s begin our journey of meditation by understanding the nature of mind. For, we ought to know the proverbial nature of the beast before we can devise the ways of taming it.
The Nature of the Mind
Once upon a time, there was a lioness. She died during the course of giving birth to her cub. A small girl who had never seen a cub happened to be in the woods at the same time. She picked up the cub and brought it home. The cub was fed goat’s milk and was made to live with other goats. They all grew up together. The lion started to feed on grass like the other goats and was treated no differently. Living like the cattle, it forgot its true nature.
One day, while grazing along with the herd, the lion got separated and found itself lost in the shadows of the jungle. As he attempted to navigate his way back, he went even deeper in the woods. He felt scared in the loneliness and unfamiliar territory. Just then, he saw a wolf from a distance. The lion, unaware of his own ferocity and out of ignorance, started running for life. However, much to his surprise, all the other animals started running away when they saw him approaching. The panting lion stopped to make sense of what had just witnessed. An eerie feeling took him over; there was more to it than what met the eye. The lion began pondering over the incident and decided to explore the matter further.
He moved around a little more freely and a little less scared. Wherever he went, he saw the same reaction: all the animals would start scrambling. It went on like this before he saw a group of lions feeding on a freshly killed bull’s gore. A latent desire to partake of the meat aroused in him. His surprise elevated to the level of shock. As if automatically, he felt a strong desire to make his own lunch. Driven by his urge he hunted down a calf.
The joy he discovered in the hunting and feeding on the game far exceeded any other he had ever experienced. Moreover, an innate sense of fearlessness emerged. He felt the jungle was his home and that no one around could dare to kill him. In no time, from a meek grass feeding goat, he became the king of the jungle.
You are a lion as well, your intrinsic nature is bliss and fearlessness. But, the lion in you has started behaving like a goat. This is called conditioning. From the moment we are brought up, we are fed with beliefs and information about ourselves and others. We are constantly made aware of our shortcomings. Somehow, we are made to believe that in order to be happy we have to constantly strive for something else, we have to do better, we have to be like someone else.
We have been conditioned, inadvertently or otherwise, by the society and other evolutionary forces. Our conditioned soul is a product of the collective intelligence of the world. We, as individuals, however, are a product of our karma and our desires.
This conditioning comes to us in the form of religious, social, familial and moral values. Since eons, preceding generations have accepted such standards, mostly unquestioningly, passing them onto the successive ones.
Our conditioning makes us feel we are inadequate, lacking something. As if we must constantly improve and strive for something. As a result, a perfectly beautiful life starts to feel inadequate as we start seeking external affirmations and approvals. You would think that your dress is amazing, or that you’ve got good grades, or that you sang really well. But if your peers and loved ones feel differently, you’d suddenly feel deflated like a balloon. Somehow, their disagreement would matter to you. Somewhere you would feel that our self-assessment is not as valuable as others’ approval of you. This starts pretty early on during our childhood when we are constantly compared and ranked against others. At school, in college and then at work some third person is telling us what to or what not to do.
This leads to a mind that is eternally tossed between happiness and suffering, between pleasure and pain. The more we try to gel with the world outside and please others, somehow believing that others’ acceptance of us is a validation of our own potential, the more we start to distance from our true nature. The transmission of signal by our soul becomes weaker and weaker as we continue to move away from our true self, our real nature. Increasingly, the lion starts to think, believe and behave like a goat.