A Million Thoughts: Learn All About Meditation from a Himalayan Mystic

by Om Swami

This is the most fundamental law of nature, of creation and destruction: everything must return to its source.

No pleasure or relationship can offer you permanent fulfillment because we are all on a vacation, and we are missing home.

Meditation is going home. It is going back to your source, where you belong, so that you are no longer what people tell you who you are, or what the world has made you to believe, or even what you think of yourself. Instead, it is to discover yourself, to get to your primal source from where bliss, happiness and joy flow constantly. It is to discover your original home, without the furniture of jealousy, covetousness, envy, hatred. A home with no walls of ego and anger. A place where your soul rests in peace, where consciousness flows unimpeded like the gentle Ganges murmuring on a sunny day.

Vedic

usurped

prana,

The reason man is unhappy is because his thoughts, speech and actions are not in harmony,” Shiva continued, “Anything that is not in harmony in the play of nature is either eliminated completely or forced to align. Suffering is alignment.”

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.

atone

Thoughts are never a problem until you act on them.

When we cling to a thought or follow its track, we are performing a mental karma, and that, in turn, is the seed of all physical actions.

ephemeral

This is the ultimate state for a meditator – not only understanding the nature of thoughts and rising above them, but living in complete awareness.

there are no calming thoughts really, just like there are no stable waves.

The lifespan of every thought, however good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, is exactly the same. It emerges. It manifests. It disappears.

Thoughts that you do not let go leave an imprint on your mind. That imprint is the residue. Meditation is the process of washing away that residue. It is the cleaning of your slate and keeping it that way. When we fail to abandon our thoughts, they assume different forms. They can become desires, expectations or emotions.

When we are mindful of our thoughts, actions and desire, they subside on their own.

A lingering thought destabilizes your mind, disturbing your state of tranquility like the ripple in a still pond.

You envisage a pleasant outcome from the fulfillment of these ones. Such anticipated pleasure prompts you to hold onto the thought of satisfying your desire. As a result, your actions, emotions and intelligence work together to attain that fulfillment. These desires can be insatiably active or eternally latent in you, or sometimes both. Whatever you enjoy through the body is basically sense gratification. Most people expend their whole life satisfying these ones. They experience everything through the body, live for the body and die for it. They remain faithful, obedient and unquestioning servants of the body. Their life revolves around the body’s needs for food, clothing, copulation, comfort, care and so forth. Fulfillment of physical desires is fundamentally linked to a body’s well-being. Human body, however, continues to deteriorate and many work incessantly hard to maintain it.

It is not wrong to fulfill physical desires. It’s just that everything we pursue has a price. If you are willing to pay that price, by all means you are welcome to go after these desires. Fulfillment of physical desires, however, rarely ever leads to everlasting happiness. There’s transient pleasure that fades as quickly as the skies clear after a heavy shower. When we continually work to feed our senses, driven by our physical desires, our emotional desires too multiply automatically. And this leads me to explaining the second type:

these desires impel you to look outside for fulfillment. You need ‘somebody’ for companionship, sharing, hand-holding and so on. Since you search outside for inner fulfillment, you set out on a quest comparable to ranging the universe from one end to the other. Till your last breath, you continue to play a puppet to this quest – forever trying to please the other person, to keep him happy, to keep craving for love and so on.

On the path of meditation, emotional desires arise when you forget your true nature, when you lose sight of the fact that you are already complete in every sense of the word.

The term ‘emotional needs’ is a misnomer. Emotions are a product of the conditioned mind and as such mind has no needs. The sight of a slaughterhouse may trigger a negative emotion in you, whereas it may be positive for the business owner and neutral for the machine operator. It all depends on how you are conditioned.

Good meditation teaches you how to drop your thought. The

moment you drop your thought, desire vanishes in thin air like a dewdrop upon sunrise.

Expectations are those desires you believe you have the right to see fulfilled. Due to our own conditioning by numerous factors, we develop expectations. They are the primary cause of all grief and stress. When we expect, we place a burden on ourselves as well as the one we expect from.

Why are we sometimes forced to behave in a manner which is contrary to our nature? It may seem that external circumstances propel us. The truth is we imagine our life a certain way and when things don’t pan out how we envisaged, we feel sad, frustrated or depressed.

Imagination is nothing but pursuit of a train of thoughts.

A sprinter running a race has no time to sit down and see what others are doing. He’s too busy getting to the finish line. Similarly, a mind engaged in reckless pursuits has no time to reflect on its own actions.

No matter how miniscule an action, eventually it will impact everyone in the world.

had you not uttered anything while eating that apple, it would be much easier for you to forget about the apple. Why? Because you left no psychic imprint beyond the taste and sight of the fruit.

Had you dropped the thought of the apple at the very moment it emerged, you would not have gone through the grind of mental karma.

Memory plays a pivotal role in correct meditation. When you are able to retain only a part of your memory – that is, the object of meditation – you move towards achieving the tranquil state. However, memory is also your greatest hurdle in meditating correctly. Primarily because your memory is an accumulation, a storage tank, of your psychic imprints. Simply put, memory is the residue I’ve talked about.

Watch what you do, say, and think, transformation will begin automatically.

What I mean to say is that the bliss promised from meditation cannot come from just meditation alone. It is not a substitute for love, compassion, humility, empathy and other virtues. Meditation is simply one of the methods to mould yourself into the person you wish to be, a process that can help you discover your primal state of peace and bliss.

This is the only way meditation affects the lives of those around you. Gradually, the light in you starts to transform you. The way you think, act or react changes and that change, often (not always) brings a change in those around you.

This is meditation if you ask me. It is your ability to retain your virtues in the face of all adversities.

Meditation is about knowing and feeling that you are complete, perfect, whole.

askance

A stage three meditator can easily sit unmoving for three hours.

extant,

The golden rule of meditation is: you cannot not think about something by thinking about it.

The ability to direct your attention and keep it yoked to the object of meditation is fundamental to good meditation.

four hours of tranquillity can keep you calm for days at end without the slightest ripple of mental disturbance.

elucidate

aphorisms,

Then alone, you’ll truly feel that this body is an instrument, it is supposed to serve you and not the other way round.

make it a point to sit like a rock, like dead wood.

The act of meditation will become more joyous and the rewards will come quicker. I cannot overstate the importance of correct posture. I could not stress it enough.

But let me tell you, the day you master four hours of stillness, you will be no less than a living Buddha, a siddha in flesh and bones. Anyone who can sit still for that long with full awareness becomes a fountain of super-knowledge. Your thoughts gain so much power that whatever you sincerely desire starts to manifest in your life without a doubt.