Meditation Insights from the Bhagavad Gita
by Hardik Kathuria, Meditation Trainer, M. Sc(Environmental Management)
Know the one ‘Who’ Meditates
If I ask you for your introduction, you’d begin by speaking your name and then your credentials. But if I ask you, did you exist before you were given this name? You’d spring up in the affirmative. That means your name is an adopted identity. It does not define you.
Let’s try another experiment. Slow down for a moment and try to feel from within your body parts. Whose limbs and senses, are they? You’ll say without hesitation, ‘This is my hand, my stomach, my leg, my body.’ This is similar to speaking ‘My watch, my shirt, my shoe’. We don’t say ‘I heart, I belly’, essentially speaking, we are the proprietors of the body but not the body itself. Then who are we?
Vedic scriptures emphasize that we are spirit souls, whose symptom is consciousness. Spirit souls come from the Supreme Soul who is the Supreme Consciousness. The soul lives inside and carries this body. Unbeknownst, we identify ourselves to be this body, thereby always living in bodily consciousness.
How Meditation takes you beyond — Positive and Negative?
Living in this world, we experience all sorts of tribulations and dualities — happiness, distress, heat, cold, honor, dishonor, fame, infamy, justice, injustice to name a few. Since we think we are this body, anything spoken/announced to our name or experienced by our body disturbs and agitates us. And as we get affected by these conditions, we become morose.
Meditation helps us to raise our consciousness from a bodily level to a raised platform. Just like how big trees seem insignificant like ants when viewed from an airplane flying up high. Similarly, raising our consciousness with the help of meditation can make our problems, either big or small, appear childlike to us.
The characteristics of a meditator are mentioned by Lord Krishna in Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, Verse 56. This happens through gradual practice and training the mind.
Control that Wanderer Mind
Meditation is a forceful process. We have to do a lot of effort, in the beginning, trying to control our mind. Still, the mind is not easily convinced.
The mind travels on a different plane. Thoughts rush in our minds just like racing cars whizzing past spectators in an F1 race. Every car that passes by excites and entertains us. But if we try to chase after every car that rushes past us, we will definitely end up tired and frustrated. Because we will not be able to catch hold of any car if we simply keep switching cars as they rush past us.
Don’t you think a similar thing happens to us? The mind is bombarded with an uncountable number of thoughts moving at unimaginably high speed in all the different directions, and in our pursuit of satisfying the senses and mind by obeying each thought, we end up tired, morose, and even angry.
Meditation helps us by giving us the required peace of mind. We understand that we don’t require to run after each and every thought that comes by our mind. Meditation teaches us the art of restraining ourselves and not getting involved in everything that provokes, excites, anger, and saddens us. By learning that we have a separate identity from these thoughts and that we are not these thoughts, our internal peace is restored and serenity prevails.
Meditation is not only about getting away from these troubles. Because we need some higher engagement to leave the lower one. By changing our perspective and focussing on God, His names, form, qualities and activities, we can experience unending and unparalleled bliss.
Why focus on God and His names?
Training is troublesome, time-taking, and not at all pleasing. But gradually, it brings positive results. By training the mind through the proactive process of meditation, we can gradually bring it to a state of minimized restlessness — a condition where the monkey mind’s activity of jumping on different branches of past and future is significantly reduced.
Once the mind starts experiencing the taste of comfort through this process of meditation, it will be tamed and will come under our control. Then it will be possible for us to engage the mind in the area of our work or interest rather than being engaged in what the mind instructs us to do.
The fruit of meditation will ripen when the mind starts enjoying the process. The journey is not easy though, because the mind throws a lot of thought bombs in the process to slow us down or to deviate us from our goal.
How to deal with thoughts during meditation will be the subject of our next article.
