It’s very important to understand meditation. But before understanding what meditation is, it even more important to understand what meditation is not.
Meditation is not concentration. When you are concentrating, you are focusing your mind at a single point. All your attention is completely focused on a very specific area of thought and all other areas disappear. Concentration is a tool that is used by scientists. They are completely focused on their own subject matter and all other things almost don’t exist. You hear a lot of stories of great scientists being very absent minded in their day to day life. It is because all of their attention and intellect is focused on their own subject matter.
Meditation is not contemplation. Contemplation is spreading your focus on a much wider area than concentration. You contemplate on beauty, or love. It is a tool used by philosophers. You will find volumes and volumes of books on subjects like poetry, beauty, love, death, life, religion etc. You allow your mind a lot more movement than when you are concentrating.
In both these cases, the mind is still present. Meditation is a state of no-mind. When your attention is focused on nothing, or everything. You can look at it either way. You are not focused on anything at all. Your attention is allowed complete freedom. There is no movement within.
Mind means movement. Mind is made up of thoughts. It is not a real entity. It doesn’t really exist except as a bundle of thoughts. Just like how a crowd is just a bunch of people collected. The moment all the people disperse, the crowd vanishes. It doesn’t really exist. The mind is exactly like that. Anytime you are thinking, you are engaging with a thought. This engagement leads you to another thought which you engage yourself again with. You jump from one thought to another. This jumping of thoughts is what keeps the mind alive. Till you keep jumping and engaging with a thought, a new thought is going to be readily available for you to jump into.
The mind is a collection of all possible thoughts that it has collected over your entire life. Your entire past is stored within the mind in the form of thoughts. The mind will never run out of thoughts to give you. That’s why you can keep on thinking and thinking. And as long as you are engaged in thinking, the mind is present. The moment your thinking stops, the mind stops existing as well because no new thoughts are required to be provided.
That is the state of meditation. It is not an activity. It is a state. It would be wrong to say that you are meditating and more correct to say that you are meditative. You can be meditative but you cannot meditate as an activity because it is the lack of all effort. It is pure witnessing. A completely non-verbal way of experiencing everything. It is not a skill that can be developed. It is a knack. It cannot be perfected because it has no levels. You are either meditative or not meditative. Just like you are either dead or alive. You can’t be both together and you can’t be anything else. If you are alive, you are not dead. There is no such thing as half-dead or half-alive. Similarly, you are either in a meditative state or you are not. There is no meditating as such.
Now, there are techniques that can help you reach a meditative state but understand that these are just a boat to take you the other shore. Don’t get too attached to the techniques. Look at the state it takes you into. Notice the silence behind the noise. Notice the no-mind behind the mind. It has to exist.
For noise to exist, silence has to first be there.
For a diseased body, a healthy body has to be there. The disease is added on to a healthy body.
If the content is there, a container has to be there.
If all this thinking is happening within you, means that there is a space within you where no-thinking is happening. An emptiness.
Every time you are connected to this emptiness, you are in a meditative state.
Every time you remember you are this emptiness, you are in a meditative state.
Every time you are free from the flow of your thoughts, as if you are watching them flow by you like a river, unaffected, you are in a meditative state.
You are present and conscious. Aware and alert about nothing in particular. For no reason but just for the sheer joy of being in the herenow, fully. It is like squeezing the juice out of the present moment to the fullest without any effort. You do not add any of your narrations to the reality around you. You are not projecting any of your thoughts on reality. You are experiencing reality as if you are a baby, with no prior thoughts. The only difference between you and the baby is that the baby is not conscious about it and you are completely conscious.
And you can be in this state all the time. Because it is your natural state. You were doing all the time when you were a new born child. Your mind was completely clean because there were no thoughts accumulated. So deep down, you know how to do it. You have just forgotten it. It just needs a little remembering. Its a knack just like how swimming is a knack. Balancing is a knack. Walking is a knack. Running is a knack. You just know how to do it. You can’t explain how you know. You just know that you know it. It’s not like you can ever forget walking once you learn the knack of it. Meditation is just like that. It’s a knack.