20/02/2020
Meaningful Meditation, Greater Understanding
by Acharya Mahapragya
Equanimous thought is balanced thought. Any kind of superiority or inferiority complex results in perverted thinking. The criterion for wholesome thinking is to determine whether thought is born of equanimity or not.
Two kinds of feelings dominate your life: like and dislike; craving and aversion. Totally unconditioned thinking is rare. Someone dear to us says something and we appreciate it; but the same thing uttered by an adversary and we feel contempt or fear. Why?
All action is conditioned or motivated by passion or disgust, approbation or disapprobation, attachment or indifference, attraction or revulsion.
On the one hand operates an attachment: "This is my family, my son, my wife; may they be happy! Let there be a bigger house, more money, no lack whatsoever". On the other hand, aversions prevail. Like and dislike go together.
A man shops for the best quality food; he does not want his family to consume adulterated foodstuffs. All because he is greatly attached to them. And yet the same person sells adulterated medicines to others, because he is indifferent to their fate; because he is not attached to them.
Due to lack of affection, he indulges in corruption. This feeling of attachment or unattachment powerfully affects one's approach and all perversions in thought and action originate from there. Without equanimity, all thought becomes shabby and the contradictions therein can never be resolved.
True meditation helps you go beyond like and dislike, craving and aversion, to awaken in you a state of dispassion. Meditation which fails to develop equanimity is no meditation.
Often, when you go out of the meditation centre, you continue as before, there is no change the same world, and the same mischiefs. This kind of meditation is sorely limited by time and space. Even a naughty child is quiet in sleep, barring some involuntary spasmodic movements. While sleeping, no one quarrels.
In the state of sleep, all appear to be virtuous. Of course, the evil-doer continues to harbour evil inside, but outwardly at least he does no harm while asleep.
Meditation is meaningless if it does not bring about a complete transformation, if it does not purify your thought or alter for the better your whole approach. If, once outside the meditation centre, there is no change in your conduct, then such meditation is no more than sleep or unconsciousness.
Meditation should awaken, rousing inner consciousness. The conscious mind becomes inert, but the inward becomes so active and expands so much that it transcends all conditioning. It remains steadfast and unchanging.
If a meditator keeps tranquil enough in the meditation hall, but on returning home continues fighting and quarrelling, his family would rightly look upon such a person and his meditation with misgiving.
If religion today holds little attraction, it is because it has been divorced from meditation. Religion is no longer allied with inner consciousness. Mere outward conformity to meaningless rituals has rendered religion insignificant. Buried under ashes, the spark loses its power.
Only when the ashes are shed is the flame reignited. Meditation is a process of shedding the ashes. Light manifests itself in a man who succeeds in removing the ashes and his thinking is mature and responsible, like gold purified of all dross, imparting a glow to his whole life and conduct.
The approach is all important. And inculcating the right approach, you must go into what thought is and what transcends thought.
