A Million Thoughts

by Om Swami

  Laziness during meditation can take the form of dullness of the mind or lethargy of the body. If your mind experiences dullness or sluggishness, the clarity of the object of meditation disappears. A session of meditation that is not clear, crisp and lucid, will not allow you to experience even a relaxed state of mind, much less its natural one.

  You will get up from your meditation feeling quasi relaxed, the type you feel after a nap. Often an overwhelming number of meditators mistake that for good meditation. Good meditation is not about putting your conscious mind to sleep, it is clearing it. Such clearing brings bliss and sublime sensations with it. If a meditator gets into the habit of meditating incorrectly without actively working towards clearing the hurdles, it becomes extremely hard to get rid of such flaws later on.

  Lazy Mind – A Slow Elephant

  A lazy mind in various meditational, yogic and tantric texts has been compared to the slow moving elephant. The hurdle of dullness is as big as the elephant. It is for this reason that many meditational deities are shown holding a goad, the weapon used to prod an elephant. The esoteric meaning behind such implement is to always hold the goad of attentiveness and alertness to control the elephant of sluggishness.

  Just like an animal as large as an elephant, can obstruct your vision when in front of you, laziness of the mind obstructs your path of bliss and oneness. Think of the hibernating python or the one in deep slumber. It is still, calm but that does not equate to meditation. If you are lazy or restless, however still you may be sitting, it is not meditation. A meditation full of flaws is like a pot full of holes; just like the latter is unable to carry water, the former is unable to retain bliss.

  What Causes Laziness in Meditation?

  Imagine you are trying to move a big rock. You keep exerting your force. It is only natural that after a while you are going to feel exhausted and tired. Exactly the same thing happens with your mind. When you try hard to concentrate, and keep doing so even when you feel restless, there comes a time when you feel worn out and tired. If you are not attentive at that time, you will slip into stupor at that very moment. Such dullness compromises your meditation.

  In every likelihood, presuming you are physically fit, you will experience restlessness before feeling lazy. If you can take corrective measures at the time of restlessness, it becomes relatively easy to overcome laziness. Like an athlete who gradually builds his endurance, his physical strength raising his pain barrier, a good meditator steadily increases the duration of his meditation. At the peak of my own meditation practice, I used to meditate for a straight stretch of ten hours. It was not easy, but the results were astounding. I did not start sitting ten hours from day one, in fact, I started with multiple one hour sessions gradually increasing them over the course of many years.

  The Remedy

  The moment you realize you are losing sharpness of your meditation, you need to exert mentally. You must refresh your concentration, recalibrate your focus. If your laziness has resulted from physical exhaustion, you need to stop meditating.

  That can happen, if your meditation sessions are longer than 90 minutes each, or if you had a particularly stressful and tiring day. Under such circumstances, you should take a break, get up and inhale some fresh air, drink a little bit of water, walk around a bit and resume your session.

  If you experience dullness as a result of mental exhaustion, something that can happen even after the first 20 minutes of your meditation, you must not get up and break your session. Instead, try to visualize a bright light, or focus on the enchanting aspects of your object of meditation while staying in the same posture. Refresh and energize yourself without getting up or ending your meditation. Shift your attention elsewhere for the time being but do not engage in thoughts that are not linked to your meditation. As you feel fresh again, relax and resume your original meditation. You need not exert any longer. Let the mind stay in its natural state. If you keep exerting, you will feel restless.

  Balance is crucial. When you feel restless, relax; and, when you feel lazy, exert, concentrate. Restlessness and dullness repeatedly interfere with your meditation. They almost take turns. You need alertness to identify and correct both flaws. Hold short but lucid sessions and gradually increase the duration. Learn to meditate flawlessly for short periods first. When you learn to harness laziness and check restlessness, you are bound to make remarkable progress on the path of meditation.

  Stray Thoughts

  Even though I’ve used the term stray thoughts, the truth is that in meditation any thought that is not the one you are meditating on is a stray thought. It is one of the chief blocks and the hardest to overcome. All meditators, when they sit down and meditate, are bombarded by thoughts from all directions.

  Thoughts are inseparable from the mind just like heat from fire. The act of concentration requires you to make a conscious and exerting effort to focus only on the desired thought. The art of meditation is to be able to hold that thought with perfect ease, without any undue exertion, with a sharp and still mind free of dullness and stupor. An adept is able to hold his session of meditation for as long he wants whereas an aspirant is able to meditate under favourable circumstances only, such as, pleasant surroundings, calm mind, no major stress, good physical health and so forth. Stray thoughts act like rocks thrown in a still lake.

  Like the physical world outside, your inner world is interdependent and interconnected. For example, in the outside world, if there is no fuel, your car fails to move; if there is no road, there is nowhere to drive your car; if there is no energy, there is no way to run the fuel refineries; if there are no vehicles, there are no methods to transport the fuel, and so on. Everything is interdependent. No independent phenomenon exists in the outside material world. However exhaustive you may examine, you will get to the same conclusion. One thing links to another.

  This is exactly the case with your inner world of thoughts too. While meditating, if you fail to check the very first thought, be prepared to be bogged down by a thousand more. Let us say that you feel thirsty during meditation. Naturally, you think water, and from water maybe you think of an instance of buying bottled water, the shop, swiping the credit card. From credit card your mind may jump to an incident when you purchased gasoline with it, that may remind you of the gas prices, cost of living, your scarce resources, how you could or should have saved in the past. From savings, you may jump to future planning and on and on and on and on and on and on… Suddenly, you feel loss of focus, energy, and concentration. Had you gotten back to your object of meditation the moment you thought of water, you would have been saved from all the rest.

  Stray Thoughts – A Natural Hurdle

  The natural state of mind is like the quiet, expansive sea. Thoughts are like waves. They can be tidal at times. Restlessness can be compared to a sea storm. Laziness is like the floating ship that has its engines shut down and is simply moving in the direction of the wind. Just like a sea is not sea without waves, mind is not mind without thoughts.

  A conditioned mind’s natural tendency is to engage in thoughts. Anytime you pay attention, you will find yourself in thinking mode. During your meditation, as you become increasingly attentive getting past restlessness and sluggishness, you are met with the hurdle of thoughts. This is a catch-22 situation. Thoughts cause restlessness and when unchecked, they also make you dull and tired compromising your meditation. As you continue to strike a balance between relaxation and exertion during your meditation, you start to gain control over your thought flow. They keep pouring, though. You need not feel bad.

  This is natural. Thoughts have no intrinsic value or power. In the beginning, as long as you have an awareness, you will have thoughts. Eventually, with great practice, you learn to replace your thoughts with the only thought you are meditating on even if you are meditating on no thought, on emptiness.

  The Remedy

  It’s quite simple, do not react at any thought, ju
st drop it and get back to your point of meditation. Treat all thoughts with equal indifference. Do not examine or place any importance on any thought. Use mindfulness and alertness to detect the thought at the point of emergence and drop it that very moment. As you continue to practice your meditation with mindfulness and vigilance, thoughts not only become feeble but almost stop emerging after a certain point. In that supreme quietude, when you continue your meditation with awareness, you inevitably experience transcendental bliss.

  Random Images

  Flashing of random images present one of the subtlest forms of hurdles. After you have diligently worked towards pacifying your mind, the onslaught of the thoughts poses a great challenge. Once you are past restlessness, dullness and thoughts, random images with no connection to your current state of mind start appearing out of nowhere.

  Let us say you sit down to meditate with resolve and attentiveness. After a while you start to feel restless, you feel the urge to move or to end your session. After you check restlessness by calming your mind, a sort of lethargy and dullness blankets you. Many people erroneously term it relaxation or a good meditative experience. Good meditators, however, staying alert, apply mental exertion with attentiveness to overcome this hurdle. As you progress with a mind that is neither dull nor restless, the natural tendency to engage in thoughts spring up. Soon, you find yourself either pursuing a thought or actively engaging in it.

  For example, you might recall a conversation, an unpleasant one. Forgetting that you are meditating, you start to mentally pursue that conversation, you start to think how you should have said this or said that, or, how you should have responded in such and such manner, how the person was ungrateful, shallow, rude, wrong and so on. When you are mindful to not pursue a thought, the fourth hurdle still affects the quality of your meditation as random images start flashing in front of your inner eye.

  You may see a banana, with mindfulness you remind yourself not to pursue the thought and image of banana. You drop the thought, but then out of nowhere you may see a Ferrari or a beautiful sandy beach or something. Continuous flash of images means there’s an undercurrent of restlessness still present.

  In a way, this is the greatest and the subtlest hurdle because it is innate, a natural fabric of conditioned mind. It does not leave you even when you are sleeping, causing dreams. As you try to focus on your object of meditation, you find yourself battling with appearances, images stored in your memory. You are not engaging in any thought process or pursuing any mental conversation and yet you keep getting hit with the images of people, things, events, and so on. They severely impede your ability to meditate correctly.

  Images: The Flowing Wind

  In any place, even if empty of all existence, there always exists air. Further, there is always movement in the air, however inert that may be. So, in a way, wind is omnipresent. Only a vacuum maybe devoid of such phenomenon. A vacuum is an artificial construct though, it is not a natural state. Similarly, even when a mind is empty of all thoughts, restlessness and sluggishness, there still exists memory. In fact, it is the basis of your analytical skills and your intelligence. You may be a Nobel laureate in physics, or a genius in calculus, in an unconscious state, in the absence of memory, however, you are unable to count even up to three.

  What Causes Images During Meditation?

  Your memory is the source of all imagery. Anything you see or hear even once, always stays in your memory. Whether it is a giant ship or a needle sinking in the sea, it retains both, always and forever. It is not possible to erase your memory. It is, however, possible to cleanse it to the degree that the image flashing in front of you fails to trigger any subsequent thought or emotion. Over time, as you become indifferent to thoughts and images of the past, their impact on your emotional state wears off. And, anything that does not evoke an emotion in you of any nature is not detrimental to your state of peace and calm.

  The Remedy

  What do you do when you are in a windy area? You cannot battle or win against the wind. All you can do is cover yourself, to not face the wind, and accept it. In much the same manner, there is no need to react to the images. You simply cover yourself with a balance of alertness and relaxation, exertion and pacification. Soon, images start disappearing. As you continue to meditate, intentionally recalling only the object of visualization each time, other images start to fade away automatically. Further, leading a righteous life in line with the virtues spelled out earlier, you find yourself increasingly calm and strong. You recall less and less of disturbing, enticing or exciting images. Their impact becomes negligible and their recollection, faint.

  Other Hurdles

  A new disciple, after listening to his master’s sermon, approached him and asked, “Is it fair to say that God is one and that same God lives in all?”

  “If I say ‘Yes’, you will think you have understood without understanding,” the guru replied. “And if I say ‘No’ you will misunderstand.”

  Meditation insists on discovery of your truth based on experiential understanding and not conditioned beliefs. While growing up, we are told this is right and that is wrong, God is an idol or God is a holy book and so on. The path of discovering your true nature with meditation requires that we put aside all our beliefs, clean our slate and let our mind rest in its most natural state. The wisdom, insight and clarity we gain at that time leads us to the real nature of our truth.

  Until then, often we keep craving for experiences of a certain type. Shiva Samhita eloquently expounds on other hindrances that are neither physical nor mental, neither psychical nor emotional as such. No doubt all non-physical hurdles are mental obstacles in one way or the other but I specifically wish to list other hurdles separately so you get an idea of how a good meditator’s focus is on un-conditioning of the self. With each step you take in cleansing yourself of your tendencies, desires and bookish knowledge, you get closer to the dawning of realization.

  Hurdles of Gratification

  When you meditate, especially if your meditation is part of a solitary retreat, everything you have enjoyed in your past comes back to you. It is distracting. You feel tempted to go back in the world and start living a life of material enjoyment again, you feel restless during your meditation. You miss your pleasures, interactions and lifestyle. Solitude and meditation can become depressing at that time. They start to gnaw you like mouse at a rope. The easiest way of clearing hindrances posed by past memories or desires of enjoyment is to simply stay focused. Allow them to pass. Ultimately, they all are thoughts. If you don’t hanker after them, they will leave you so you can stay firmly established in your meditation and your meditative state.

  Shiva Samhita, an ancient yogic text, lists the following hurdles of gratification.

  Women, beds, seats, dresses, and riches are obstacles to Yoga. Betels, dainty dishes, carriages, kingdoms, lordliness and powers; gold, silver, as well as copper, gems, aloe wood, and kine; the Vedas and Sastras; dancing, singing and ornaments; harp, flute and drum; riding on elephants and horses; wives and children, worldly enjoyments; all these are so many impediments. These are the obstacles which arise from bhoga (enjoyment).54

  This list does not mean that a practitioner can never enjoy his or life. On the contrary, life must be lived to the fullest. Nor must this list be taken literally. What it does mean though is that someone who is at the beginning stage of his journey should keep his life as simple as possible. This reduces the number of distractions. As it is, meditation isn’t exactly a walk in the park. Once you have reached a certain stage in your practice, these hurdles will cease to be obstacles on the path. They don’t distract or affect an adept any more than a jasmine bud would hurt an elephant.

  Hurdles of Religion

  Often I meet people who are reluctant to adopt good practices just because they belong to a different religion. This is one of the hardest hurdles to overcome. From the moment we are born, we are fed with religious info
rmation in one way or the other. We form our concepts around God, realization, the nature of this world, good or bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral based on what our religion tells us.

  A good meditator puts his religious practices on hold during the intense practice of meditation. Most religions recommend certain actions to be pleasing to God or a ticket to heaven and they also label many acts as sins. Meditation is not one of them. It is not done to gain a place in heaven or to acquire any religious merit. The sole purpose is to wipe your mind clean of its inherent tendencies so you may write a new story. Anything that conditions the mind will eventually become a distraction in meditation. From that perspective, religion is but a hindrance for a serious meditator.

  The following are the obstacles which dharma interposes: ablutions, worship of deities, observing the sacred days of the moon, fire sacrifice, hankering after vows and penances, fasts, religious observances, silence, the ascetic practices, contemplation and the object of contemplation, and alms- giving, world-wide fame, excavating and endowing of tanks, wells, ponds, convents and groves: sacrifices, vows of starvation, Chandrayana, and pilgrimages.55

  Meditation in its purest sense has absolutely no connection with any religion. It does not insist in following any book, belief or God. As I wrote earlier, any thought (other than what you are meditating on), any emotion, any belief is simply a distraction. Sometimes, often in fact, our knowledge becomes a hurdle too.