Findings on the road to self transformation -meditation is a miracle.
Finding 15: Meditation is not the ability to create an absence of thought but the power to observe and examine any thought and eventually transcend it.
“You have to move from being a creation to becoming the creator itself”. Sadhguru.
Humans have forgotten that their source is infinite intelligence that is always present inside them, all they have to do is wake up and realise that. Look inside . Sense organs are survival organs. If you want to survive then these organs are sufficient . But if you want to thrive you have to learn to look inside. Yoga teaches us how to do that.- Sadhguru.
Meditation was not a new word for me. It was something I had been doing on and off for a few years before I really understood it. I began my practice rather unconventionally by meditating to the sound of Jupiter.
I discovered the sound of the planets on You tube and found the sound of Jupiter quite calming and soothing. In those days my reason to meditate was more to switch off from the noise in my mind and I believed that meditation was the antidote.
I had no idea that real meditation in its most powerful form is a way to wake up and switch the light on inside our mind and investigate.
Thanks to Sam Harris I woke up to the power of meditation and then grew this practice with his Waking Up App for which I will remain forever indebted. I made some spooky and sublime discoveries in this short steep learning curve.
I was a firm believer until recently that I had free will. That I could control my thoughts.
Not true.
I have no control over the source of my thoughts. Where do they come from and where do they go is still a grand mystery of science that is instantly apparent to all of us every time we meditate. Through the practice of meditation I discovered that while we may have no freedom of thought but with practice we may develop the power to observe our thoughts as they arise and before we get lost in thought and get identified with them — the freedom to choose how to use them.
I am as Sam Harris calls us — a process instead of a person.
We are layers of energy that behave like multiple selves inside us. Each layer of our self is like a song . We sound a certain way when we become a husband; or another way as a father or a boss or a friend. Each one of our selves is a bundle of thoughts and emotions and ideas that we most associate with each layer of our selves.
With time each layer of who we are gets tied into a set of habitual vibrations and we call that us. But to make life simpler we create a super layer of self that coordinates these processes and layers that makes we are and label it our identity or ego.
And this ego slowly but surely became my nemesis.
In my case what stood in my way was my enormous, protective, life sustaining ego.
The belief that we have someone riding inside our heads that defines who were are and decides right from wrong and congratulates us for our wins and crushes us for our defeats.
That person/thing I have come to discover through meditation is an illusion.
Its just a bunch of thoughts pretending to be a person. Its just a bunch of emotions wrapped on some thoughts masquerading as a sense of self. All a bloody illusion.
My ego is an imposter!
The ego is a habit, it’s a default mode network setting of our brain that keeps us safe and protected. It’s what we use to sense friend and foe in the world.
Alan Watts used the metaphor of the ego being like a radar signal on our ship that looks out and warns us of oncoming enemy and threat. That is all that is good for. Its not the ship.
But if we think we are the radar signal then we live in constant threat and see everything in our life on the spectrum of threat and fear.
I can compare my ego to a weed that grows in our outdoor plants. You take them out and then they reappear. The difference is that now I can tell them apart from the plants and know I have to uproot them .
And what I had to do was to slowly and very painfully at times, very attentively, carefully but surely uproot and dissolve this ego and gain the conviction that the ego is an illusion and the source of all suffering in our life.
I make it a practice to pay attention to not be led and identified with my egoic bundles of thought and emotion. I know that the real me is deeper much deeper than my body, my mind and my thoughts. It’s the field of energy that underlies all these .
Meditation is a great tool to look inside ourselves.
I see meditation as an essential life enhancing skill. Its like brushing my mind …like i brush my teeth.
It’s the useful ability and time given to observe the mind while its not be used for thinking. It’s the ability to observe that our mind gives rise to thoughts incessantly.
Meditation has the tools to then go one step further to be able to still the mind The ability to give attention to bring it back to something that stills it. Could be the breath or sounds or a sensation.
I find meditation powerful not because we fail continuously to still our mind and observe its activity but the recognition of how often we fail…that makes meditation so powerful. And the humility to start again.
It allows the mind to be observed by something beyond the mind.
Meditation has shone a light of awareness in us that is always present. (Eckhart Tolle calls it presence.)
Meditation is the act of discovering our presence, even if for a moment, the gap between our thoughts, the stillness behind the sensations.
J. Krsihnamurthy spoke these profound words…
“Our Brain is conditioned by thought, time and knowledge. Our brain has slowly evolved over millions of years and only in the last 60,000 years or so has become a human brain. So it has been around for a long long time. We have inherited it with its constraints and conditions. Its fears and traumas and triggers deeply entrenched in the folds of our grey matter and our DNA . It can only act in a specialised way .
If and when the brain realises its limitation and conditioning. It becomes free and quiet. Then the mind contacts the brain and not the Brain contacting the mind.
If there is such a thing as unconditional love and compassion then there such a thing as a mind with pure intelligence.”
Meditation is the only way to quieten the brain connect with pure intelligence and awaken.
