Blue Mountain Articles

Wisdom Through Meditation

Meditation is training the mind: teaching attention to stay on a single focus until the mind becomes as concentrated as a laser, able to penetrate deep into consciousness without effort. This kind of absorption is not as alien as it may sound. All of us get absorbed in a hobby or activity we enjoy greatly – so absorbed that we don’t hear the cars outside or the dog barking or a call to dinner; we forget financial and family problems; we may even forget our body and our surroundings. At such times we are completely happy, though we may be aware of it only afterwards.

Again, everybody gets concentrated when going through an emotional upheaval. That’s why we can’t attend to things outside very easily, can’t pay attention to other people. That is what concentration does when it is compulsive.

These are important clues. The reason we are happy, the Gita would say, is that we have forgotten ourselves – if only for a short time, while we hold the outside world at bay. And the reason we are miserable in an emotional crisis is that we can’t get our attention off ourselves; all we can think about is our problems. What we do in meditation is free attention from all conditioning so that we can direct it where we choose, and then turn it inwards so that instead of getting absorbed in what we like or caught in what we dislike, we lead attention deeper and deeper until it becomes absorbed in the Self:

Little by little, through patience and repeated effort, the mind will become stilled in the Self. Wherever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the Self. (6:25–26)

Until we learn this art, however, the problem with attention is that we have virtually no control over it. The mind is like a television set that does whatever it wants. We are compelled to watch what it puts before us; it chooses its own channels and virtually never turns itself off. And we say, “Isn’t that wonderful? Our TV is spontaneous. Why should we try to control it?”

The Supreme Adventure

Mastering the mind is an adventure that should appeal to anyone with daring who wants to make a contribution to life. Meditation is an extremely difficult discipline; it cannot be mastered easily or in a short time. How many years does it take to become a world-class athlete or pianist or ballerina? It is the same story with meditation: it calls for sustained enthusiasm, unflagging initiative, and the capacity to keep meeting higher challenges with greater endurance.

To illustrate with a bit of science fiction, I have read that when Einstein was a boy, he wanted to ride on a wave of light. I’ve always enjoyed the thought of little Albert straddling a beam of light as if it were a Harley-Davidson, racing along at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Similarly, we can imagine meditation as riding on a wave of thought from the surface level of awareness right through the preconscious and the personal unconscious and then breaking into the collective unconscious, leaping chasm after chasm until coming to rest on the very seabed of the unconscious with the mind completely still. But this isn’t really science fiction. It has been done, and the adventure is timeless, open to everyone today as it was thousands of years ago.

No adventure worth the name is without dangers, and meditation is no exception. I used to say this right at the outset when teaching meditation on the Berkeley campus. One student who had all the requisite daring came and asked if he could attend my class. I had heard reports about him from his friends, so I warned him, “Yes, you will be able to learn to meditate. But I don’t think you will be able to stay with it.” I knew the division in his consciousness. When he reached a critical juncture in meditation and had to choose whether to resist his problems or hold on to them, he stopped meditating and left town.

One more requisite for meditation should be mentioned: determination. St. Teresa put this right at the top of her list, and Sri Ramana Maharshi was partial to his British disciples because of what he called their bulldog resolve to stick it out whatever happens.

Soon after I came to this country, an international team of mountain climbers set out to scale Mount Everest. As differences emerged, people from various countries started falling out with each other, and one by one they withdrew from the expedition before they were halfway up. The only two who stayed on were the British. This is the spirit that is required in meditation too, not for conquering mountains but for mastering the mind.

Grasshopper Minds

The purpose of meditation is to make the mind what the Gita calls “one-pointed”: completely focused on a single point. Most of us have grasshopper minds, constantly jumping from subject to subject, from worry to worry, from fear to fear. That’s the nature of the mind. Our job is to teach attention to remain on a single focus, not in the world outside but within consciousness, which will “lead it to dwell on the Self”:

Those who aspire to the state of yoga should seek the Self in inner solitude through meditation. With body and mind controlled they should constantly practice one-pointedness, free from expectations and attachment to material possessions. (6:10)

Verse after verse like this tells us that meditation by itself is not enough. We can’t train attention in meditation and then let the mind do as it likes the rest of the day. Imagine training a puppy that way! Training the mind is an all-day job, and all classical methods of meditation are part of a set of supportive disciplines – in Sanskrit, sadhana – to be followed during the day.

These disciplines are universal: in addition to meditation, they include keeping the mind one-pointed, reading the scriptures, protecting the senses from unnecessary stimulation, reducing self-will, voluntary simplicity, and selfless service. The program I follow has eight such points; it is essentially based on the regular practice of meditation and expresses itself in self­less service.

You may remember my saying earlier that the movement of the mind is the mind. When the mind stays on a single focus and does not wander, so that the flow of attention is as smooth and unbroken as oil poured from one vessel into another, the activity of the mind quietly dissolves and the mind becomes still, as limpid and transparent as the still waters of a crystal-clear lake. This is the goal of meditation:

With senses and mind constantly controlled through meditation, united with the Self within, an aspirant attains nirvana, the state of abiding joy and peace in me. . . . Through constant effort, aspirants learn to withdraw the mind from selfish cravings and absorb it in the Self. Thus they attain the state of yoga. (6:15, 18)

It is significant that here (and elsewhere) the Gita uses the same word that the Buddha chose: nirvana, literally the blowing-out or extinction of all self-centered thought. I like to put this positively: it is in forgetting our small self that we awaken to our real Self, in which we and others are one.

Training Attention

The method of meditation I follow is inspired by the passage from the Bhagavad Gita that I just quoted. I will draw my illustrations from this method since it is the one I know and teach, but these comments should apply equally well to any other classical method that follows the Gita’s guidelines. My approach uses universal passages from the scriptures or the world’s great mystics as a focus, rather than something external, so that attention is drawn deep inwards, away from the world of the senses.

To be appropriate for meditation, such passages should be positive, practical, inspiring, and universal. And they should express our highest ideals, because we become what we meditate on. My own first choices were from the Gita, but wisdom is universal, and I have found it helpful to have a repertoire of passages with universal appeal drawn from all the great religions. Meditation is a skill, not a ritual; it belongs to no religion and has nothing to do with doctrines or metaphysics or theology.

Meditation involves sitting quietly while keeping attention on your chosen focus and not letting it wander. In the method I follow, this means going slowly through the words of a passage such as the second chapter of the Gita, trying to give full attention to each word or phrase.

For a long time, it is inevitable that distractions will come in; that is the nature of the mind. It has got to keep moving, from thought to thought, from desire to desire, from feeling to feeling, from memory to memory; that is simply the way it works. We are trying to teach it to stay put, but the problem is that resisting distractions like these as they arise simply gives them more attention and makes them stronger. A more effective strategy is simple: instead of resisting distractions, just give more attention to what you are meditating on. It is almost like training a dog: you bring it back, calmly and patiently, until it learns.

Distractions

Actually, in meditation, any kind of discursive thinking is a distraction. No matter what the mind turns to, it is not staying where we put it; it is doing what it wants instead. We call this thinking, but most of the time it is just yak-yak-yakking, the mind talking to itself. As your mind becomes one-pointed, you will find this kind of thing quite bothersome. For me, this has gone to such an extent that when I go to the movie theater, I like to sit far away from people who bring in those big tubs of popcorn; it reminds me of the mind, munching, munching, munching all the time.

We had a woman in our village who had a genius for discursive thinking. She would talk without a break, jumping from one subject to another almost sentence by sentence – a hundred subjects in the course of one hour. She would ask my mother, “Do you know what happened to Raman?” and by the time my mother could say, “No, what?” she would be talking about Shankaran instead. It was an extreme case of a grasshopper mind. In most of us this is not so obvious because it doesn’t spill over into speech, but once we start meditating and glimpse what the mind is really up to, we are likely to discover that our thoughts too are jumping all over the place.

In meditation, therefore, whenever your mind wanders away – to the movie theater or the swimming pool or the restaurant or the boutique – don’t get angry; just tap your mind on the shoulder and say, “Please come back.” Every time. It’s a dull, difficult discipline. The mind may wander thirty times in thirty minutes – a very conservative estimate. But even a little practice of this during meditation brings immediate benefits during the rest of the day. Many problems that we take for granted are not really necessary; they arise from attention getting distracted and caught without our consent. For example, all of us are familiar with the toll negative memories can take. When they come up, they simply won’t let us alone. They claim our attention, and dwelling on them only makes them stronger. The mind gets upset until finally the body begins to suffer. But if you can turn attention away, just as you do in meditation, the memory will gradually lose its emotional charge. The memory itself is not lost; it simply loses its compulsive hold on you.

Again, when a friend has offended you, it is not your friend that causes the agitation; it is dwelling on what happened. Attention is caught, and the mind cannot stop thinking about it. When you go to the theater, you can’t pay attention to the film. When you go to bed, you can’t stop thinking about what happened, so you toss and turn all night. Dwelling on resentment or hostility or any other negative emotion magnifies it; the answer is to turn attention away.

One benefit of this deserves special mention. I said earlier that happiness comes when we forget ourselves, and misery when we can’t think about anybody else. This is essentially a problem of attention getting trapped. One of the greatest benefits of meditation is that it releases the precious faculty of redirecting our love and attention from our little selves so it can flow towards other people. It’s an exhilarating experience, because most of us have no idea the capacity for love we have imprisoned.

Stay in the Driver’s Seat

You can get a glimpse of how powerful a distracted mind can be by seeing how it can affect others. Haven’t you seen people who, when something happens to them, take it out on their partner, their children, their colleagues, even their dog? All right, the Gita would say, you had a mishap, but confine it to your own lane. Why weave off into other people’s lanes and cause collisions there too?

When I am out on the freeway, I sometimes see a driver weaving all over the road. The mind drives like that, darting from lane to lane for no apparent reason. In meditation, when you start to see what the mind does when it thinks no one is looking, it’s almost like watching one of those Hollywood chase scenes where cars careen through traffic at breakneck speed until they jump off the road and crash into a tree. Why should we let ourselves be driven about like that? Meditation is getting behind the wheel and getting the mind under control. At first we may not be able to stay in the same lane all the time; we still get angry or afraid. But instead of getting really angry, we’ll get half angry – instead of throwing things, we’ll be able to take them up, make a gesture, and then put them down. It’s a beginning. Gradually we reach the point where the mind is tuned like a Ferrari and completely under our control. Then we set out for our destination and cruise along in one lane – unbroken, effortless concentration. Distractions may be weaving about, trying to get our attention, but that doesn’t mean we have to look.

Sometimes, even in the early years, waves of emotion can sweep over us in meditation. This too is a distraction: not always negative, but a distraction nevertheless. We are letting the mind grab the wheel. The emotion might be fear; it might be a profound catharsis that brings a flood of tears. At other times a great wave of love or gratitude may threaten to overwhelm us. Whatever comes, that is the time to concentrate more and not pay attention to the emotion by trying to analyze it or bask in it, which Catherine of Siena compares with a bee caught in its own honey. When we are able to concentrate even more on the passage during a wave of emotion, concentration is strengthened enormously, bringing great benefits during the rest of the day – and protecting us from the inevitable emotional plunge when the mind swings the other way.

Deeper Meditation

Training the mind like this in meditation calls for immense patience, but with practice, the great day will come when the mind does not wander at all. Then you will be able to give complete attention to anything you choose, which is the mark of genius in any field. Not only that, it is the secret of effective work and lasting personal relationships. With people, at work, everywhere, by not letting the mind get pulled and pushed about by circumstances, you are making yourself unshakable – less and less fickle, and therefore more and more real, because what is real never changes. When concentration is complete like this, personal sorrow comes to an end:

But when you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Self. (2:64–65)

Distractions often seem small, but they pack tremendous power. All that energy is consolidated and harnessed as the mind becomes one-pointed. To get a sense of what power the mind has, when you have a powerful sexual desire, just try to sit down and write an essay on the benefits of yoga. The same test is equally effective with anger or fear. If you find it difficult to control a strong sexual drive even for a minute, imagine the power that can flow into your hands as your meditation deepens.

It takes a while, of course, even to get below the surface of consciousness in meditation. One of the surest signs that this is happening is a confidence that your life is coming under your control, that circumstances can no longer hold you hostage. This brings a wave of hope which time and practice will turn to certitude. It is not that you expect life to go your way, but you know that in some deep sense, as Julian of Norwich said beautifully, “All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well.”

Yet challenges do come. When you reach a certain level in meditation, for example, there is a real danger that you will encourage your mind to wander. Sri Ramakrishna, comparing meditation with flying a kite, calls this letting go of the string, which can happen when we come across something in consciousness that we don’t want to face.

For some people, the easiest way of resisting going deeper in meditation is simply to fall asleep. Others get so restless in meditation that even if mentally they are making a good effort, physically all that effort is neutralized. If you are able to keep your body reasonably still for half an hour of meditation, it’s a good sign that the mind is becoming still as well, which means that meditation is deepening.

After some years of practice, when you have been making good progress, you reach the top of a peak thinking that you have reached the goal and everything is finished. Then you look and see an abyss, beyond which rises an even higher peak. Now how do you proceed? There is no path, not even any ground to walk on; there is nothing you can do. Eventually there is no choice but to leap, and however brave you may be, if there is a fear lurking in your mind at that time, consciousness will split and you won’t be able to make it. Fortunately, simply reaching this point means that you do have the capacity to make the leap.

When the Mind is Still

In the early stages of meditation, concentration requires effort because so much attention is still on the activities of the day. You have got to sweep all that under the rug and then put the broom away, which takes a bit of time. Eventually, however, as your desires get completely unified, you reach a stage where no more effort is necessary. I don’t know how to explain that; you can call it effortless effort. It isn’t even concentration; it has gone beyond concentration because you are not really there. Attention is unbroken, which means there is really no movement at all:

When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place. In the still mind, in the depths of meditation, the Self reveals itself. (6:19–20)

It’s beautiful poetry. Look at the flame of a candle unruffled by the slightest movement of air; it will burn like a hot gem.

At this point, with concentration one-pointed, the mind is almost completely still. Some kind of whispering does go on in the corners of consciousness, but the chattering that passed for thinking has grown quiet. This brings such profound peace in your heart that it spreads to everyone around you. The highest happiness comes to you – happiness that cannot be captured; it comes to you unbidden. With no agitation in your mind, you are always able to give. And there is a loveliness about your life, your face, your eyes, all reflecting the peace in the depths of consciousness.

At this depth in meditation, your mind is so concentrated that there is hardly any movement. Instead of chatter, wisdom wells up that needs no words. There is no compulsion, no conditioning, just a continuous stream of pure awareness. All consciousness has been withdrawn from the senses into the mind, so the eyes and ears don’t register; the sensory world has been left behind. You are at the level of pure energy, the same energy that flows through all of life, untouched by time, by age, by death. It is by repeating this experience over and over again that you come to realize the words of the Gita:

You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. (2:20)

Once you realize this truth, the Gita says, there is nothing more the world can offer. You cannot be shaken by the heaviest burden of sorrow. This is yoga, which breaks the connection with suffering.

Perhaps the most amazing development in the final stages of meditation is the disappearance of the barrier between the world within and the world without, which means the barrier between yourself and others has fallen. Once that barrier falls, how can you be jealous? How can you be afraid? How can you be angry? In the language of the Gita, you will be seeing everyone in yourself and seeing yourself in all, which is the consummation of unconditioned love.