Sunday, October 24, 2010

Meditation & Mind

Meditation can happen 24 x 7. But our mind is the barrier for happening this. Meditation is a state of mind. The barrier is due to the way our brain is programmed; may be an equal programming by our past generations since the beginning of creation and by us from our birth to until now. Unless one crosses this barrier, meditation cannot happen within mind. The whole content of this blog is about understanding this barrier.

Unless we know, how it looks like or feel like, we may not intend to aspire for meditation. But it may not be possible to express meditation as it is. That could be the reason that any expression about meditation or God is poetic in nature. Most of us are not capable of understanding poems, except mere words. Hence we depend heavily on the interpretations by those who never allowed meditation to happen within them. Due to this fact, in most of the cases, what we hear about meditation is not actually about meditation- they are just the mental images of those who interpreted those poetic languages – with out any understanding of what is meditation.

Then, what could be the way out? One possibility may be by understanding it by ourselves- Allowing our mind to question. The question itself create the necessary understanding, unless we fall into some easy traps like belief etc. In our current life style, unless we face some real problem, we never question. Questioning is never encouraged in our education/Social system. Our social system just fix a target of self development and encourage to achieve it in any way. As long as the social system stops teaching and enforcing belief systems or teaching the limitations of belief systems along with the belief systems or encouraging the questioning of belief systems itself, society as a whole cannot question the content of its own mind.

For a logical mind, meditation can happen only after the avalanche of questioning is transcended or, may be partially transcended. For a devotional mind, there may be alternatives. Unfortunately, seldom there is any devotional mind in society due to the very fact of completely materialistic lifestyle for more than few generations. Those who call themselves as devotee, the possibility is that they are caught with in the trap of their own mind. Of course, there are exceptional devotees still available in the society. But with in the general social structure, they are very, very few and hence ignorable count, compared to the logical minds with in the society. Even one to touch the devotional part of one’s one mind, the logical layer of the mind must be transcended. If not, the logical part of mind cannot allow functioning its own devotional part, due to the very nature of this logical structure within mind. Once the logical layer of mind is transcended, depend on the composition of individual’s brain, devotion or rituals or kiryas or any other means, which can stimulate the mind positively, can prepare the mind for meditation to happen. Unless the logical layer of mind is not transcended (It is about transcending logical layer – not escaping or killing the logics of mind), any Kiryas, or rituals or devotion or any other type of physical brain stimulation may take the mind into the traps of illusions, which is not easy to recognise.

If we are following any religion – any religion has at least one mind as its origin that experienced the state of meditation, for sure there must be enough resources in that religion about experiencing such state of mind. Possibly, the crowd that intended to spread that religion to enforce their authorities might have suppressed this part of religion from the mainstream religion. But if we intend to go deep into our own mind, the reasons for deep journey is available with in our own religion irrespective of which religion are we following. But our intention is just to have authority or to follow authority, there is no need for taking trouble on this counts, because the crowd is already doing that and numerous methods are available for such things with in any religion.

In other words, meditation must be the central foundation stone of any religion as all religions are built on at least one meditative mind. We all belong to one or the other culture and all culture have a strong root within religion. The core of any culture must be a meditative mind and if we belong to that culture, we are built around a meditative mind. The purpose of any religion is to reach its core or to reach a state of meditativeness. Meditation is nothing but revealing the very core of our mind – possibly the mind of creation itself!