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

The seers realized this thousands of years ago and figured out that, by the same logic, if someone meditated on compassion, he would become an embodiment of compassion and that those who contemplated only on the negative aspects of their life keep attracting and manifesting more negativity. Mind does not understand good-bad, right-wrong, moral-immoral. These are the definitions we have fed into our conscious mind. At its root, mind only creates, understands and reacts to a thought.

Unlike concentrative meditation, contemplative does not require you to go through the rigours of perfecting your posture. Having said that, a perfect posture is a great aid any day. With superior concentration and stillness, you are able to do contemplative meditation lot more effectively.

Contemplative meditation leads to remarkable insight into the true nature of things, the realities of different planes of existence and into many things beyond words.

The term acala vipāśayanā is used in meditation texts. It means the insight devoid of mental activity. Yasyaka, a Vedic scholar who lived before the eminent Sanskrit grammarian Panini in 700 BCE, defines vipāśaya as unfettering, or without a trace. And this is the key: when no trace of conditioned mind is left, you gain an insight rising above your intellect and calculations of the conditioned mind. This transcendental knowledge, true insight, comes from within. It is not the product of some conditioning, cogitation or deliberation. It is not some information you’ve gained from any book. Instead, this is the output of contemplative meditation. It springs forth from the primal source within you.

In truth, meditation is doing away with all labels and conditioning so the real you may rise to the surface.

Imagine your name is Hamish and someone in the market calls out your name. “Hamish!” you hear. Naturally, you will stop and look to see who called you. If they had shouted some other name, say Monica, you won’t even look in that direction because you are not Monica, because you don’t think of yourself as Monica. Similarly, when people direct their wrath or emotions, they are doing so at a label you have been assigned and not at you. For example, if someone says that all men are jerks. At that moment, if you identify yourself as a man, you may feel the urge to react. If, however, you see yourself as the divine soul, or as a compassionate person, if you do not consider yourself as one of the men in the “all men are jerks”, you won’t experience any surge of emotion at the statement.

Contemplative meditation helps you identify yourself with your truest nature, above all labels and conditioning, so that you no longer think of yourself just as a man or a woman with a body, or as a spouse, a citizen, a brother, a sister, a Hindu, a Christian and so on. Rising above these labels, you first learn and then realize that you are way beyond these constricting labels. You are independent of the labels society and even you have imposed on yourself.

The primary method of contemplative meditation is done by way of self-enquiry which is further divided into two types.

Self-Enquiry: Who Am I?

It begins with the fundamental question, “Who Am I?”

The goal is to understand that the true you, the real you, the indestructible you is beyond the labels and temporary nature of this world. Are you a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, a brother, a husband, a wife, a friend, a manager, a CEO, a young person, an old person? Who are you? Perhaps you are some of these things, but these are mere labels, they are temporary.

These are the roles you play in the world but they only reflect your transient aspects. You were not a manager when you were born and you will cease to be one after you retire. Besides, these labels are dependent. Not only someone else has given them to you, they don’t apply without the existence of some other entity. For example, you can’t be a husband unless you have a wife, you can’t be a CEO unless there’s a company, you can’t be a father unless you have a child and so on. Most people identify themselves with these temporary dockets and when these tags are removed, they feel they have lost their identity.

You may ask what is beyond these worldly labels anyway. A child thinks he or she is a child, a youth thinks he’s a youth but that is temporary again. A child graduated out of infancy to become a toddler, a youth graduated out of childhood to be a youth, an old person is no longer the youth he once was. Are you a man, a woman? Are you the body? When someone causes you grief, who feels hurt in you – your body or your mind? Where is the mind? Once you negate everything perishable, all transient elements, all temporary labels, you are left with the purest element that defines you – the highest consciousness, the soul, the spirit – you may call it whatever name you wish to give.