Meditation Requires Effort - 2

 

Photo Credit: Pinterest

Meditation Requires Effort - 2

Then the corner will become charged and it will wait for us every day. The corner will be helpful to us, the milieu will create a particular vibration, a particular atmosphere in which we can go deeper and deeper more easily. That’s the reason why temples, churches and mosques were created. Just to have a place that existed only for prayer and meditation.

If we can choose a regular hour to meditate, that’s also very helpful because our body, our mind, is a mechanism. If we take lunch at a particular hour every day, our body starts crying for food at that time. Sometimes we can even play tricks on it. If we take our lunch at one o’clock and the clock says that it is now one o’clock, we will be hungry – even if the clock is not right and it is only eleven or twelve. We look at the clock, it says ‘one o’clock’, and suddenly we feel hunger within. Our body is a mechanism.

Our mind is also a mechanism. Meditate every day in the same place, at the same time, and we will create a hunger for meditation within our body and mind. Every day at that particular time our body and mind will ask us to go into meditation. It will be helpful. A space is created within us which will become a hunger, a thirst. In the beginning it is very good. Unless we come to the point where meditation has become natural and we can meditate anywhere, in any place, at any time – up to that moment, use these mechanical resources of the body and the mind as a help.

Fourthly, this meditation is chaotic because catharsis is needed. It will be difficult for us; we will feel awkward, embarrassed. Back with our family, back in our neighbourhood, we may feel, “What will people think?”

Don’t be too concerned with what other people think. If we are too concerned with other people and what they will think, we will never transform ourselves. Then we will just be a slave of other people’s opinions. And they will not allow us to move beyond them in any way. They can only allow us to be like them, never different from them. Once we think of transforming ourselves, remember, now we are going beyond the crowd, beyond the society. There is no other way. If we are interested in transforming ourselves, we are going beyond the mind of the crowd, beyond the collective mind. But this is only a problem in the beginning. People will start thinking that we are mad.

Wait for three to six months, and they will have to change their opinion. Then they will come to us for advice, because they are also mad and now, we are becoming saner; the madness is disappearing. Our eyes are changing; they have become more silent. Our attitude, our approach, our relationships, everything is changing. We are less angry now, less hateful, less jealous; more loving, more compassionate, more non-violent. They will feel it. And only this feeling will change their opinion.

Don’t be too worried about others. We can become an individual only if we go beyond the opinions of others, if we go on in our own way, without being worried about what others think. Only then will we become individuals. This word ‘individual’ is beautiful. It means ‘indivisible’. If we follow the crowd, we will always be fragmentary, divided. We cannot become a unity because the crowd is so big.

We are all individual, free units. We should remain true to ourselves, and sooner or later the crowd will recognise the change, the transformation, the mutation that has happened to us. Then they will follow us. Then they will ask for our advice.