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spirituality - lesson 10: meditation

when we are young it is a delight to be alive, to hear the birds of the morning, tosee the hills after rain, to see those rocks shining in the sun, the leaves sparkling,to see the clouds go by and to rejoice on a clear morning with a full heart and aclear mind. as you grow older life encloses you, life becomes hard. you hardlylook at the hills, a beautiful face or a smile. without feeling affection, kindness,tenderness, life becomes very dreary, ugly and brutal. and as you grow older,

you fill your lives with politics, with concern over your jobs, over your families.you become afraid and gradually lose that extraordinary quality of looking at thesunset, at clouds, at the stars of an evening. as you grow older, the intellectbegins to create havoc with your lives. I do not mean that you must not have aclear, reasoning intellect, but the predominance of it makes you dull, makes youlose the finer things of life.

our brain is conditioned to have problems. all our life from the moment we areborn practically till we die, the brain continues to live in problems; because wehave been educated, cultivated, and the whole system of comparison,examinations, rewards, punishments and so on has made the brain not only to

receive problems but to have its own problems. it is conditioned that way.

silence can strike terror in the hearts of men. people get nervous in silence andfeel the need to fill it quickly with awkward chatter. silence seems to make peoplefeel exposed and vulnerable. this fear is probably why we all like to plug into multimedia so much and why increasingly people are unable to be alone in a roomwith out putting on the tv, stereo or calling someone on the phone. the thought ofsimply being alone and facing emptiness is terrifying to some. silence meansfacing ourselves. meditation is that silence; the expression of the inexpressibleand the acceptance of oneself.

can the brain be free from its conditioning to live with problems? it is not merely a

way of escaping reality but an exercise. so we are faced with this problem: how isa mind that is so controlled, shaped by environment, conditioned by variousinfluences, by the education that one has, by competition, aggression, violence,all that how is such a mind to free itself, so that it is totally free and sane?

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you see, unfortunately, we do rely on someone else, because we say, 'I dontknow, I dont know how to solve this problem. it is too complex. I havent givenenough time to it, I havent really thought about it. and somebody has given time,gone into it greatly, and I will accept what he says.' so you make him into theauthority and are therefore living a second-hand life. this is not a second-handissue, it is your issue; you have to solve it, not through somebody else, not byhaving faith in something. meditation is a means to discovering divinity byrealising it resides within oneself.

when the cloud of dust settles all becomes clearer. likewise meditation strives todo the same thing. all the mechanical and automatic functions of the brain have ahabit of restricting clarity. our proliferation of sensory stimulation are oftendistractive and mask reality or underlying meaning.

meditation is not to sit in a corner repeating a lot of words (mantras) or to think ofa picture and go into some wild, ecstatic imaginings. and meditation is not asearch, it's not a seeking, a probing... meditation really is a complete emptying ofthe mind. as an act, meditation is when one enters a calm and vacant statewhere one listens to the silence. when you try not to think, when you observe

your thoughts without identification. every decision to control only breedsresistance, even the determination to be aware. meditation is the understandingof desire, not the overcoming of one desire by another. desire is the movement ofsensation,which becomes pleasure and fear. this is sustained by the constant dwelling ofthought upon one or the other. freedom is not the act of decision but the act ofperception. the seeing is the doing. what creates conflict is thought identifyingyourself with one of your thoughts, the 'me', the self and the various divisions inthat self.

there is no need for the self at any time. we said, it is an exercise and thistechnique takes much practice and perseverance before a state of real'emptyness', real meditation is reached. it is not a self-introspective analysis, it iscertainly not the training in concentration which includes, chooses and denies. it'ssomething that comes naturally, when all positive and negative assertions andaccomplishments have been understood and drop away easily. to understand thewhole process of your thinking and feeling is to be free from all thought, to befree from all feeling so that your mind, your whole being becomes very quiet.

one has to enquire, if one is interested in all this, what is desire? do not suppressdesire, as the monks and the indian sannyasis do, suppress desire, or identifydesire with something higher - higher principle, higher image, and so on. one hasto understand if one wants to find out what is meditation, one has to inquire into

desire.

scientifically speaking meditation has some obvious benefits. it restores energy,aids concentration and some people have even claimed that they need lesssleep. it has been reported that the brain actually works differently during periodsof meditation; neuronal firing patterns synchronise and change brainwavepatterns. scientist have found that it ends up increasing the thickness of thebrain's cortex in areas that contribute to attention and sensory processing. the leftside of the brain becomes more active.