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

An amateur archer is unable to hit the bull’s-eye with the same consistency as a champion archer. An expert archer is even able to shoot down moving objects like a bird. The more trained he is, the more accurately he is able to hit the mark. In due course, with practice and focus, he is able to spot and hit farther objects, so far that an ordinary person may not even see the object. The range and accuracy of his shots increases dramatically with disciplined practice.

Alertness is the champion archer in meditation.

When you continue to practice correctly, there comes a time when you are able to detect the emergence of the thought even before mindfulness has to guard it from interfering with your meditation. Just like there’s a tiny-tiny fraction of second from the moment you press an electric switch to when the light comes on, there’s a gap between the emergence of one thought and the next. As you develop razor-sharp alertness, you are able to see the emergence of a thought long before it manifests fully in your mind. It’s like if you were standing on a very high mountain peak, you would be able to see sunrise and sunset before those who are on the plains.

Mindfulness and Alertness

When I first started with intense practice, I didn’t fully understand the difference between mindfulness and alertness. They sounded almost identical to me. But after practicing for a few thousand hours, something remarkable happened. I discovered that if you are able to detect a thought with alertness just before it forms fully in your mind, the thought disappears on its own,as if alertness actually shot it down. It frees up mindfulness to do its job better and your quality of meditation goes up dramatically.

When you naturally develop an all pervading mindfulness because alertness is doing its job, the effort in meditation disappears. This is the stage when meditation stops being an act. It becomes your second nature. And after a while, it becomes your state of mind.

During my time in the Himalayas, I started experiencing intense sensations in my entire body. Within moments, they would travel and establish firmly in my forehead. For the next few minutes, they would continue to build up and cover my entire head, the palate of my mouth and my cheeks. Sometimes they were distracting but most of the times they would help me slip into very deep meditation. This was so for the primary reason that these sensations would force me to focus automatically.

Imagine you are trying to write something but someone comes and tickles you. If you are someone who is tickled easily, your attention would automatically be drawn to the tickling.

This was the case with me too. The sensations would become so intense as if someone was kneading my brain inside (gently) and I couldn’t think of anything but be automatically focused on my object of concentration. I used to meditate on a mantra I was initiated into.

This phenomenon of intense (sometimes unbearable) sensations began when I realized that mindfulness and alertness were working in tandem, in perfect coordination. Initially, for the first one thousand hours of meditation, these sensations would subside when I stopped meditating. Admittedly, the period when I didn’t meditate was no more than 2 or 3 hours on most days. Yet, I could feel that those sensations were not there.

After a while though, it changed. The sensations would not stop even if I wasn’t meditating. No matter whether I tried to read, walk, eat, bathe or sleep, these sensations would not cease. Sometimes I didn’t want to be alert or be mindful. I just wanted to be restful but I’d hit a point of no return. The only time I get a respite from these constant sensations is when I go to sleep. Even then, it takes me one hour of careful meditation and a series of movements (where I change my body posture exactly three times in a certain way) to take these sensations to the peak and then bring them down in three stages before I can fall asleep.

The moment you learn (and it happens only with practice) to have your mindfulness, alertness and concentration flow together, you become a living Buddha. Positive and loving emotions continue to rise to the brim like bubbles do in carbonated water. Yogic texts, notably Buddhist sutras, give a wonderful name to alertness. They call it saṃprajñā. It means a state of even awareness. Saṃyutta Nikāya defines alertness as knowing both events in the mind and activities of the body as they are happening:

And how is a monk alert? There is the case where feelings are known to the monk as they arise, known as become established, known as they subside. Thoughts are known to him as they arise, known as they become established, known as they subside. Perceptions are known to him as they arise, known as they become established, known as they subside. This is how a monk is alert.