Learning All The Time

Photo Credit: Love Messages

 

Learning All The Time

It is said that we are learning right since the time we are born. If learning stops then progress stops! The only thing that is constant is change – so as we pass through different stages of life our learning continues and helps in changing our perspective about life with the passage of time. The hidden message in this statement is – remain in the present moment!

In spirituality we should not deny anybody just because he or she follows or doesn’t follow a certain path. Ultimately, we are all learning.  If anyone is interested in knowing what practices you are doing, talk about it; explain how you have benefited, but don’t try to persuade another to do the same thing.

Today, meditation is needed more than ever before. Meditation is needed to such an extent that it has almost become a matter of life and death. In the olden days it was a luxury that only a few people enjoyed – a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna – only such people were interested in it. In those days the population density was not as high as it is today and people led a simple life as life moved on silently. Today, due to the high population there is a lot of thought pollution, where one doesn’t even know whether the thought in one’s mind is one’s own!

Now the change is so tremendously fast that even the most intelligent of people are incapable of adapting to it. Everyday life is different, and one needs to learn again – one has to learn and learn again and again. One can never stop learning, as it has become a never-ending process with rapid change in technology where one has to continuously keep adapting – or stagnate and wither away! One keeps on learning till the time death comes calling else without learning, one would feel lost. There is so much pressure, that learning has no alternative. One will have to deliberately slow down from this fast pace, and the only way to do this is by being meditative in every moment, else neurosis could set in.

If one does not meditate for at least half an hour every day as Swamiji says, then neurosis will not be accidental; one will create it oneself. For half an hour every day, one should disappear into one’s inner world – if possible, half hour in the morning and half hour in the evening – that would be ideal. If you get a like-minded group of meditators at least once a week, then that is icing on the cake. During this meditation one should be totally with one’s self – no thoughts, no memory, no imagination – nothing but one hour of pure emptiness in one’s consciousness. This rejuvenates and fills one with fresh energy and one returns to the material world, younger, fresher and with more wonder in one’s eyes, with more awe in the heart – just like a child.

The modern mind is super-loaded and has no time to digest information and assimilate it into one’s own being. That is where meditation comes in and becomes more significant than ever – not giving time for meditation, we repress all information without absorbing it and that is the problem. Learn, meditate, assimilate and live in the moment!