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

The moment you step out and sit on the side, you see all these people in various baskets of the Ferris wheel. It looks funny that they are screaming and shouting in joy. You see the same baskets going round and round. One large swing and everything is just going around. But when you step outside, step aside, you don’t feel the same emotions. You become a bystander. You see how this is just a swing where riders are literally going around in circles.

Observant meditation is stepping aside. Rather than being in the Ferris wheel of your mind, you step outside and you observe it as a third party. You realize that all those rounds of emotions, passions, feelings, thoughts, desires and all that anxiety and excitement you’d felt at various times was only because you were riding the swing.

It’s a defining moment in the life of any meditator – the moment when you step out of your own mind, your own ego, your body and see the world for what it is, transient and illusory. You come to understand that you have other choices available than being on the ride. After all, no matter how exhilarating a ride, it gets tiring after a while.

Witness meditation rejuvenates you and makes you more mindful of your choices. You get to decide whether you to want to ride or just watch. You get to hop on and hop off the wheel at will (hopefully, you won’t do that when the wheel is moving. Meditate to stop it). This is the power of witness meditation.

Spirited Meditation

There was a time, only a couple of hundred years ago, when most people engaged in hard physical labor during the course of their daily lives. Everything required physical effort, from cooking a simple meal to procuring its ingredients. People would walk miles for simple things like fetching water, sourcing firewood, ploughing their fields and turning barren fields into fertile land. Blacksmiths, tailors, porters, cart-pullers, everyone had to do some manual work to earn their living. Shepherds would rear their cattle. The very act of living was a physically intensive, often a back breaking task.

Today, however, we have cars with automatic transmission and cruise control, even changing gears or stepping on gas seems like work. We barely perspire in climate-controlled indoor environments from our homes to shopping malls. We have dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines and tumble dryers. We turn on a tap and water comes swishing through. We turn on a knob and there’s fire for cooking. This has led to a precarious situation: we have excess of physical energy in us and we don’t know how and where to channelize it. The advent of television hasn’t helped either. There’s only so many calories you can burn in the gym or in clicking the TV remote.

It’s no rocket science that when we consume food, we produce energy. When we rest, we preserve energy. Our lifestyle today is driven by mental work (as opposed to physical). Unable to burn the energy our body stores, we experience chronic lethargy and sluggishness, a lack of freshness. As a result of which, more and more of us are restless. We try to keep our minds engaged so we may forget about this energy brimming in us. Thanks to video games, phones and social media, young adults today are busy staring at screens, which makes them only more restless, agitated and angry.

It’s like a mouse is trapped in a carton, let’s say a box of cake, and it’s trying to free itself, to find an opening when there is none. All you hear is commotion in the carton.

Mental activities can’t substitute the physical ones. Meditation is not a substitute for exercising. The physical fitness we gain from exercising can’t be replaced by the peace we experience in meditation. The yogis of the yore ate frugally because they knew their training demanded spending more time in meditation. Even during my days of intense practice, I never ate twice in one day, only one frugal meal in 24 hours. Other than that, I sometimes would drink a bit of water from my water-pot in between my meditation sessions (there were only one or two breaks in 24 hours).

Spirited meditation, also known as active meditation, is based on the premise that if I could devise a system of meditation, which, while keeping the virtues intact, allowed me to get rid of the excess physical energy in my body. I refrain from calling it active meditation because it may imply that the other five systems of meditation are passive and inert. Clearly, that’s not the case.

The fundamental difference between spirited and other forms of meditation is the use of physical energy. In this meditation, rather than sitting still in one posture, you do the opposite – you dance.