We need to meditate, starting yesterday!

I have often thought about writing about Meditation. But the truth is that I barely understand the concept myself. For so long meditation used to bring images of monks seated in saffron robe who have given up on the luxuries of life. And I didn’t want to give up any luxuries, hence I couldn’t meditate. The logic seemed simple enough: to meditate you need to let go of all your Wifi and Kindle etc. But turns out that’s not the case.

So I started with wikipedia and asked it What is Meditation? Here is what I got: Meditation is a practice where an individual trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness, either to realize some benefit or for the mind to simply acknowledge its content without becoming identified with that content, or as an end in itself.

The term meditation refers to a broad variety of practices that includes techniques designed to promote relaxation, build internal energy or life force (qi, ki, prana, etc.) and develop compassion, love, patience, generosity, and forgiveness.

 

That definitely didn’t sound like no WiFi or iPhones. As I have come to realize, Meditation refers to any and everything you might do to train your mind. Your mind grows every single day and it generally grows in all directions like a forest full of wild trees. Meditation is the art to create a garden from that forest.

The second thing I had to ask myself was: Why? Why do I need to meditate? Why do I care about a forest or a garden? I love chaos so why am I trying to train my mind? The answer to this came in a different form. One Thursday evening, after a grueling work week, I sat down with a beer and wondered why do I have 10,000 things on my mind. I am gonna die! I cannot manage so much information.

There I had an eureka moment. It is 2017, the amount of information passing through the Internet keeps increasing  exponentially and so does the amount of information that is being thrown at us, at our minds (or brains). We are dealing with more information and more chains of thoughts than any previous generations before us.

So our minds have this barrage of information and chains of thoughts criss-crossing and we are unable to deal with it. It leads to frustration, anger and at times sorrow. Your mind starts shutting down as a way of controlling this flow of thoughts and information. But that doesn’t really solve the problem.

Hence the need to train the mind, slowly but surely, to handle information. To handle thoughts. To slowly take each thought in the mind and examine if it truly worthy of your time and action. However the first and kind of most important thing about trying to meditate is this: The first part of meditation is acceptance. You have to forgive yourself. Your mind is wild and it is hard to tame. You cannot develop super-powers on Day 1. So meditation is about going in for the long haul. You start somewhere and keep walking down the path until meditation becomes a part of daily life.

There is one more reason I think of meditation as absolutely necessary. When we continue to spend all of our mental energy in dealing with the various competing thoughts in our minds, we hardly have time for anything new. We continue tackling the daily issues and never allow new ideas to develop. It is hard to imagine without trying it: but the first time I found myself with a somewhat still mind, a moment where I had run out of thoughts, I actually had an interesting idea pop up.

An analogy that explains this is Vacuum Energy. Vacuum energy is an underlying background energy that exists in space throughout the entire Universe. One contribution to the vacuum energy may be from virtual particles which are thought to be particle pairs that blink into existence and then annihilate in a timespan too short to observe. I like to think that ideas are formed like or by these virtual particles and annihilate in too short a time. If our minds are too busy trying to figure out how will I finish that Excel report, there is never going to be a chance to observe this thought that popped up. Having a trained mind or a mind that is even learning to be ordered, allows you to examine these thoughts as they come and file them into the relevant categories.

To sum it up, I feel that the simple concept of meditating regularly can bring a lot of order in our lives, help reduce some of our angst and allow for new ideas to form. If even one of these happen as a by-product of meditation, I think it is worth the 15 minute of your time investment daily.