Meditation is watchfulness.
Meditation involves being attentive to the process of thinking and analysing, exploring it with full awareness and step-by-step in order to uncover the ways of the self. Through self-discovery, the mind is able to break free and discover truths about life, death, sorrow, fear, anxiety, laziness, habits, etc.
Meditation is not the repetition of a formula or a set of words, as these practises are immature and detrimental to understanding the truth. Without a thorough understanding of both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind, any form of meditation can be counterproductive, acting as a form of self-hypnosis and escapism.
Meditation is not something that exists apart from daily life.
If you find yourself feeling lazy, it’s possible that you haven’t been eating well. Perhaps you’ve been working too much, walking too much, talking too much, or engaging in other activities that are wearing you out. It’s natural for your body to feel lazy when you wake up in the morning after a day of poor self-care. And most people discipline their bodies and minds, which is immature. We are not machines that function based on beliefs and principles.
Contrarily, if you pay close attention while speaking with someone at the office, even for just five minutes, that is enough. Be attentive while eating and avoid stuffing yourself with a variety of foods or eating too quickly. You’ll then observe that your body becomes intelligent on its own. It will decide whether or not to get up on its own without your help or forcing it.
As you learn to be more aware and attentive in your daily life, you’ll find that you can do your daily activities without feeling as if you’re fighting yourself. It’s because one has not wasted energy but is using it totally all the time—and that is meditation.
Meditation begins with paying attention to the entire movement of a relationship.
Do you see what I mean? Meditation is not the same as what is commonly practised around the world. Repetition of words, adopting a certain posture, breathing in a particular way, and endlessly repeating slogans or mantras, indeed, can make the mind stupid and dull. This kind of practise leads to a sense of silence, but it is a false sense of silence, achieved through self-hypnosis. It’s important to understand that this is not true meditation. In fact, it is the most destructive way to meditate.
However, true meditation demands attention to what you’re saying and doing in your everyday life. Pay attention to the way you speak to your spouse, your children, your employees, and your boss. But paying attention is not the same as concentration, which is often an ugly and forced act. Concentration is easy to fake, and it does not lead to peace and silence in the mind.
Concentration is an exclusion. When you concentrate on something, you deliberately exclude other thoughts or distractions. This can lead to resistance and a sense of pushing away unwanted things. In contrast, attention allows you to be present with every thought and movement without judgement or exclusion. This way, there is no such thing as a distraction because everything is part of the present moment. This is the state of meditation.
Meditation is clarity.
Meditation can bring marvellous clarity, and through it, one can attain silence. This silence is a natural process that can discipline your life without requiring any self-discipline on your part. By paying attention to every word, gesture, feeling, and motive without passing judgement, you can achieve inner silence. From this silence emerges discipline, which is effortless and timeless. Such a person becomes joyful, free of hatred and unhappiness.
Life can only be understood through meditation, not collective thought. Be your own light.
Meditation is understanding life and freeing oneself from all the battles, not in the future but immediately. This requires being a law to oneself, a guide to oneself, and not relying on external sources such as political leaders, books, or priests. To truly understand life, one must live it and stand alone, inwardly completely alone, without fear. Through this kind of understanding, the nature of fear, death, and love, a mind that is active but completely still can emerge. Do you understand what is being said?
Meditation is not about sitting in a corner and repeating words to mesmerise oneself, which is nothing but self-hypnosis. Instead, it is about freeing oneself from sorrow, fear, and death—not verbally or theoretically, but actually. Meditation is about being your own light and understanding life, not relying on collective thought or external sources to provide you with the truth. The truth has no path; it’s pathless.
Meditation is self-knowing.
Meditation is self-knowledge, and there is no meditation without self-knowledge. Without complete awareness and consciousness of one’s daily activities and reactions, sitting in isolation and meditating in front of an image is merely a means of escaping from the present, which is one’s life. True meditation requires self-knowledge and right thinking, which are essential for meaningful actions, regardless of how noble one’s intentions may be. Therefore, prayer holds no significance in the absence of self-knowledge. However, self-knowledge leads to the right action.
Meditation is emptying the mind of the past.
Meditation is emptying the mind of the past as a result of understanding the structure of the mind, which is shaped by past experiences, rather than as a mere practise or ideology. This necessitates a nonjudgmental awareness of one’s conditioning, behaviour, and thoughts. A completely quiet state of mind can emerge by being aware of one’s conditioning, such as brutality and violence, without condemnation. To comprehend this quietness, it is crucial to understand sorrow since most people live with it and have never put an end to it. Sorrow becomes like a shadow that is always present.
In the Still Mind Is Bliss
The state of the mind is still bliss. Sorrow arises from one’s own emptiness and loneliness. Sorrow and other self-pity concerns keep the mind from becoming still. The mind becomes still in the presence of love and beauty, which cannot be separated from each other. Beauty is not external and superficial or based on one’s point of view and judgement; it is the outcome of an orderly mind.
No one or nothing outside of you can give you these qualities. You have to find them within yourself by learning about your daily life, thoughts, motives, and actions. Unless you can bring about a complete transformation in yourself, you cannot know the stillness of the mind, which is essential for discovering truth. The mind that is still is free of ideas and wants, and it can feel the bliss that goes beyond words. Only a still mind understands what the truth is.
Eat when you’re eating.
Is being attentive in daily life unimportant, and should something else take its place? No.
Be attentive to the present moment and give your full attention to the activity you are currently engaged in. The importance of being completely present and attentive, whether it be during a meal, a walk, or reading a book, is to give your total attention to the task at hand rather than constantly thinking about what else needs to be done. In essence, the importance lies not in the activity itself but in the ability to give it complete and undivided attention. Because complete attention is a complete action, there is no “I should be doing something else…”
The cup is useless unless it is empty; problems are resolved in silence.
The cup is only useful when it is empty. Most of us have a cluttered mind, full of pleasant and unpleasant experiences, knowledge, patterns or formulas of behaviour, and so on. It is never completely empty. And creation can occur only in a mind that is completely empty.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed what happens when you have a problem, whether mathematical or psychological. You think about it a lot, and you worry about it a lot. Then you leave it alone, walk away from it, and the answer appears out of nowhere. So, how does this happen? Your mind was very active about that problem within its own limitations, but you didn’t find an answer, so you set the problem aside. The problem is resolved in that stillness and emptiness as your mind becomes somewhat quiet, somewhat still, and somewhat empty.
In the same way, when a person dies every minute to his or her inner environment of commitments, memories, secrets, and agonies, there is an empty space in which only something new can happen.
The Still Mind
Truth, love, and freedom don’t come from being disciplined. Instead, they come from an empty, still mind. This mind is capable of comprehending the essence of creation. However, to find something beyond the constraints of time, it is essential to have a deep state of stillness within the mind. This stillness is not synonymous with a dead or inactive mind, but rather with a mind that is dynamically active and operates at the highest speed while remaining quiet. In contrast, a dull mind is always anxious, fearful, and worried, and it can never know what stillness is.
Only a mind that is completely still can bring peace to the world, which is the responsibility of each person, not just politicians, soldiers, lawyers, businessmen, communists, socialists, or any other group. Everyone is responsible for making peace happen, and the first step is to live a peaceful life without hate, envy, power-seeking, or competition. This freedom allows love to flourish, and only a loving mind can truly live in harmony. Meditation is the key to unlocking this stillness within the mind.