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

Eventually, we want to take a route where the toddler doesn’t get to see the candy shop in the first place, or the toy store, or the swings. If he does not spot those, he will continue to be a happy child while you shop. No candies, no tantrums.

Dullness

Raghu Swami, one of my foremost disciples, once shared his life in a certain ashram where he lived for more than seven years. The ashram had a strict routine.

“We had to get up at 4 AM and be ready in the meditation hall by 4:30 AM,” he said enthusiastically. “And from 4:30 till 6:30, it was the best part of my day. Truly divine.”

I was anticipating he would share some insight about his meditation but he just kept smiling.

“Why was it the best part of your day?” I asked.

“Because I would always fall asleep,” he replied with his lips curling upwards in a big smile, “I could never sleep so deeply while on my bed as I did in the morning meditation.”

We both had a hearty laugh.

The primary difference between Raghu Swami and numerous other meditators I’ve met is that Raghu Swami was forthcoming in his confession. Even advanced meditators routinely fall prey to the second most common defect in meditation, laziness.

Laziness is of two types. Let us say that you have decided to meditate for 45 minutes every day. That is your resolution. The first type of laziness makes you want to skip your meditation. Your conscious mind gives you excuses because it does not enjoy being tamed, it wants to go its own way dragging you along. Purity of discipline is paramount in executing any plan, be it meditation or any other routine. The only way to encounter laziness of this type is to not listen to your mind. If you sit down and vow to meditate no matter what, your conscious mind will eventually understand that you are the master and that you have no plans of showing any laxity when it comes to following your discipline.

The second form of laziness, is what we are concerned with over here. It is the one you encounter during your meditation.

As you sit down to meditate, motionless, still in one posture, you enjoy the first few minutes. In the beginning, you are aware of the restless nature of the conscious mind. You work hard to channelize your thoughts, you exert to concentrate and you try to stay focused. When you do that, you experience restlessness. Such restlessness may prompt you to move, engage in thoughts or abandon your session of meditation altogether. The best way to overcome such restlessness is to relax at that point in time.

As you relax, however, you run the risk of losing sharpness of the mind. Such relaxation, if unchecked, can lead to inertness, inattentiveness, stupor or torpor. Above all, it robs you off the clarity of your visualization. A meditation that lacks lucidity is as good as sleeping. If you are meditating by way of mental visualization for example, the image you were holding mentally dims and disappears. If you are meditating on a mantra, it becomes a superficial exercise of just mentally chanting the mantra and you are no longer hearing it, let alone becoming one with it. Basically, your meditation has lost its lucidity, its crispness and has now become a mostly useless activity of sitting still pointlessly.

Laziness during meditation can take the form of dullness of the mind or lethargy of the body. If your mind experiences dullness or sluggishness, the clarity of the object of meditation disappears. A session of meditation that is not clear, crisp and lucid, will not allow you to experience even a relaxed state of mind, much less its natural one.

You will get up from your meditation feeling quasi relaxed, the type you feel after a nap. Often an overwhelming number of meditators mistake that for good meditation. Good meditation is not about putting your conscious mind to sleep, it is clearing it. Such clearing brings bliss and sublime sensations with it. If a meditator gets into the habit of meditating incorrectly without actively working towards clearing the hurdles, it becomes extremely hard to get rid of such flaws later on.

Lazy Mind – A Slow Elephant

A lazy mind in various meditational, yogic and tantric texts has been compared to the slow moving elephant. The hurdle of dullness is as big as the elephant. It is for this reason that many meditational deities are shown holding a goad, the weapon used to prod an elephant. The esoteric meaning behind such implement is to always hold the goad of attentiveness and alertness to control the elephant of sluggishness.