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

Once upon a time, there was a lioness. She died during the course of giving birth to her cub. A small girl who had never seen a cub happened to be in the woods at the same time. She picked up the cub and brought it home. The cub was fed goat’s milk and was made to live with other goats. They all grew up together. The lion started to feed on grass like the other goats and was treated no differently. Living like the cattle, it forgot its true nature.

One day, while grazing along with the herd, the lion got separated and found itself lost in the shadows of the jungle. As he attempted to navigate his way back, he went even deeper in the woods. He felt scared in the loneliness and unfamiliar territory. Just then, he saw a wolf from a distance. The lion, unaware of his own ferocity and out of ignorance, started running for life. However, much to his surprise, all the other animals started running away when they saw him approaching. The panting lion stopped to make sense of what had just witnessed. An eerie feeling took him over; there was more to it than what met the eye. The lion began pondering over the incident and decided to explore the matter further.

He moved around a little more freely and a little less scared. Wherever he went, he saw the same reaction: all the animals would start scrambling. It went on like this before he saw a group of lions feeding on a freshly killed bull’s gore. A latent desire to partake of the meat aroused in him. His surprise elevated to the level of shock. As if automatically, he felt a strong desire to make his own lunch. Driven by his urge he hunted down a calf.

The joy he discovered in the hunting and feeding on the game far exceeded any other he had ever experienced. Moreover, an innate sense of fearlessness emerged. He felt the jungle was his home and that no one around could dare to kill him. In no time, from a meek grass feeding goat, he became the king of the jungle.

You are a lion as well, your intrinsic nature is bliss and fearlessness. But, the lion in you has started behaving like a goat. This is called conditioning. From the moment we are brought up, we are fed with beliefs and information about ourselves and others. We are constantly made aware of our shortcomings. Somehow, we are made to believe that in order to be happy we have to constantly strive for something else, we have to do better, we have to be like someone else.

We have been conditioned, inadvertently or otherwise, by the society and other evolutionary forces. Our conditioned soul is a product of the collective intelligence of the world. We, as individuals, however, are a product of our karma and our desires.

This conditioning comes to us in the form of religious, social, familial and moral values. Since eons, preceding generations have accepted such standards, mostly unquestioningly, passing them onto the successive ones.

Our conditioning makes us feel we are inadequate, lacking something. As if we must constantly improve and strive for something. As a result, a perfectly beautiful life starts to feel inadequate as we start seeking external affirmations and approvals. You would think that your dress is amazing, or that you’ve got good grades, or that you sang really well. But if your peers and loved ones feel differently, you’d suddenly feel deflated like a balloon. Somehow, their disagreement would matter to you. Somewhere you would feel that our self-assessment is not as valuable as others’ approval of you. This starts pretty early on during our childhood when we are constantly compared and ranked against others. At school, in college and then at work some third person is telling us what to or what not to do.

This leads to a mind that is eternally tossed between happiness and suffering, between pleasure and pain. The more we try to gel with the world outside and please others, somehow believing that others’ acceptance of us is a validation of our own potential, the more we start to distance from our true nature. The transmission of signal by our soul becomes weaker and weaker as we continue to move away from our true self, our real nature. Increasingly, the lion starts to think, believe and behave like a goat.

The world you see externally is merely a projection of the world within you. In fact, the world outside is an exact replica of the one within you. Your inner world is a product of your thoughts. Due to your forgotten nature, your inner world constantly gets affected by the world outside. If the inner world is in turmoil, the outer world appears just as listless and doomed. This fluctuation of emotions is a constant affair in an ordinary mind.

“Man’s mind,” said Confucius, “is more treacherous than mountains and rivers, and more difficult to know than the sky. For with the sky you know what to expect in respect of the coming of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and the alternation of day and night…”5