Glimpsing through Meditation
Learning to train the mind
I was first introduced to the formal practice of meditation when I was in lower secondary school. After that, there were many instances of following spiritual schools and gurus for the sake of learning how to meditate. It was never consistent, and I was never consistent. In the past few months, I have consistently meditated just by myself. Without a teacher, however, learning the skill of meditation is not an easy task to undertake. After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to learn from a teacher who is trained and knows better and can teach. I came across this app by Sam Harris in which there are different courses and routes of meditation practice, including one for beginners. [Sam is generally known for his expression on politics, philosophy, and religion. But this is not my concern at the moment.] Today marks the 25th day of my regular practice of following a guided meditation. I would recommend it to anyone. With the practice, I have begun to realize those aspects of ‘myself’ that had gone unnoticed earlier or had been noticed in readings. I have questions about life and existence, about self and consciousness, more than ever before. Probably this also depends on what one seeks from meditation. Why do you (want to) meditate? Do you think that meditation is the remedy to all the problems in your life: stress, negative emotions, anger, and so on? Maybe this is not the right approach to meditation, I opine. I definitely do not qualify to make a seasoned claim. But gleaning what I have glimpsed recently and what I had learnt from my intermittent practice in the past is that meditation is not the means to attain those ends. Meditation, I think, is about being mindful of the existence — the existence of thoughts, emotions, feelings, and sensations in one’s conscious awareness. Realizing and observing that everything we experience in our waking hours (probably while we sleep too) is merely the appearance of those experiences in the field of conscious awareness. And we identify this experience as ‘self’, an illusory self. This realization, even if momentary in the beginning, is enlightening [I am not using the word ‘enlightening’ in the same sense used in different Buddhist and Hindu traditions.] I can’t say for sure if I am under an illusion that I have glimpsed it: there are instances during meditation when I have momentarily observed the non-existence of ‘self’; there is no ‘I’. This might as well be an illusion in the end. With time and practice, things will be clearer for me. After all, you can see how often the word ‘I’ has been used in this writing — the self is extremely dominant. And semantics does matter, doesn’t it?