A Million Thoughts: Learn All About Meditation from a Himalayan Mystic

God! How I hate confronting her. Why can’t she dress like that girl? We’ve only been married two years and she looks like my mother.

Heck, she even sounds like my mother. My married life sucks…

“I tell you what, we’ll worry about meditation later. Let’s check out that phone. You might even see the same girl again… meditation can wait.”

This is the story of most people when they try to meditate. The moment you answer back to your mind and begin communicating with it, the voice in the head wins.

The truth is that the mind is always talking. It is never silent. On the path of meditation the transformation of mind from a restless monkey to a docile cow happens in four stages. Experience of sustained and deep silence is not simply about feeling the bliss of quietude. It’s much more than that.

One of the most amazing things you discover is a radical change in how you see the world around you – nothing provokes you any longer. This is one of the greatest rewards of right meditation – a state of no provocation. People, their statements, their responses, your own thoughts, reactions, emotions and desires – none of it will be able to provoke you.

You become spontaneous like a child but you never lose your mindfulness. It sounds paradoxical but only when you go through the four stages of mental quietude, you will know what I mean.

Imagine you live in a metropolitan city and you have taken a sabbatical to spend some time in peace in a far off location – in a small, quiet, countryside town close to a seashore. Your journey involves a long drive and your goal is to get away from the hustle-bustle of the city life to the peaceful seaside. That calm seaside is the ultimate stage of meditation – infinite, expansive, oceanic. However, before you settle in such state and beyond, you will invariably go through the following four stages:

Constant Activity – The Motorway

This is the first stage. Mind is always talking and most people remain unaware. When they want the mind to be quiet, like before sleeping or when they are depressed, and it does not shut up, that is when they realize how talkative mind is. There is constant activity going on in the mind. During this stage, when a meditator sits down to meditate, his mind does not quieten beyond sporadic short periods lasting no more than a few seconds. All that the meditator hears is chatter. The more he tries to quiet the mind, the louder it becomes. Thoughts from everywhere continue their onslaught, discouraging the practitioner. At the end of their 30-minute long session, they get up more drained and tired. Some mistake it for relaxation but in reality it is no more than a short nap.

In a way, this is one of the most critical stages. Those who do not work with great vigilance in this stage, end up becoming average meditators. They may increase their meditation from thirty minutes to two hours but it will be no different. It will not yield greater results. Earlier they were doing 30 minutes of bad meditation and now they are doing two hours of it. That’s the only difference. It is like having a bad cook. He may cook one dish or fifty, if his culinary skills aren’t great, and he’s doing nothing to improve his situation, he will continue to cook tasteless food. Something’s got to change.

The first stage of mental stillness is like the traffic on a major highway. Traffic is always flowing in both directions. The meditator is on the highway of thoughts. When you are on a highway, you have no control over the traffic around you. There are multiple lanes, there will be cars in front, in the left lane, in the right lane, behind you. Some are going slower than you, many are going faster than you, others are at the same pace as you. There is traffic flowing in your direction and in the opposite direction. People are not honking so nothing abruptly disrupts your cruise mode or distracts you, but you are aware of the traffic around you and you know this is normal on the freeway. You have to drive carefully, you cannot afford any mistakes while changing lanes. A meditator in the first stage has no control on the flow of thoughts. They are on a motorway and it is the peak hour. The only thing you can do is drive with utmost caution and eventually you will get off the freeway.

Everyone, absolutely every single meditator goes through this stage. No matter if you are an introvert, extrovert, outspoken, the silent type, a believer, non-believer, a socialite or a saint, regardless of how well versed you are in the scriptures and yogic texts, if you are getting into the practice of meditation, you will go through this stage. The good news is if you persist, you will jump across it. Eventually the motorway will give way to the suburban road, the second stage of mental stillness.