Meditating: Being Aware of Your Mind
The art of meditating involves much more than calming your mind and paying attention to your feelings. Isolating yourself in a peaceful place, developing meditation as a habit, and concentrating on learning how to meditate has no real meaning if you’re not capable of integrating it into your daily life.
Meditation goes beyond setting aside time to practice it and learning how to concentrate. It must become a habit that you incorporate into your life, to create an internal change, with the true intention of being a better person towards your surroundings, towards nature, and towards all of the beings that inhabit the earth.
Your knowledge and beliefs prevent you from achieving a state of mind that’s clear, innocent, and sensitive to everything around it. Meditation brings you to a state of mind that’s free from distortion and mental noise, and leads to an awakening that makes you more conscious of how all of this can influence your relationships and your behavior.
“Jogging, dancing, swimming – anything can be a meditation. My definition of meditation is: whenever your body, mind and soul are functioning together in rhythm it is meditation.”
-Osho-
Learn to get to know yourself
Meditation involves more than just the mind. When your mind is calm, you arrive at a state of clarity that makes it easier to eliminate prejudices and preconceived notions that distort your thoughts. This is how you can train your mind to be more sensitive and intelligent.
“One has to be aware of disorder within oneself, aware of the contradictions, the dualistic struggles, the opposing desires, aware of the ideological pursuits and their unreality. One has to observe ‘that which is’ without condemnation, without judgment, without any evaluation.”
-Krishnamurti-
When you get to know your inner self and pay attention to how it acts and influences you, observing it will make it start to disappear, and when it’s gone your mind will put itself in order. And it will do so paying attention to your present experience, increasing the possibilities of potential learning.
Have you ever noticed how your experience was contaminated by your thoughts? If you can keep your mind calm, you’ll be able to experience things without restrictions and accept things the way they are without pretensions.
Meditating puts you in contact with your true nature
Meditating isn’t a technique to practice or a skill that you acquire with your mind, but it also doesn’t require effort. Meditation is above any mental activity; rather, it’s capable of observing this activity. Meditation starts at the limits of the mind.
We use our minds to learn and achieve goals, but through meditation we arrive at our true nature. We acknowledge our purest state of being, which persists despite any experience or circumstance. This is how you arrive at the integration of what you are beyond your actions and personal achievements. You come into contact with your true nature through meditation because you find your true self.
“Meditation is a state of clarity, not a state of mind. Mind is confusion. Mind is never clear. It cannot be. Thoughts create clouds around you — they are subtle clouds. A mist is created by them, and the clarity is lost. When thoughts disappear, when there are no more clouds around you, when you are in your simple beingness, clarity happens.
-Osho-
The aim of meditation is getting to know yourself
Getting to know yourself through meditation involves paying attention to all your mental activity in the form of thoughts and feelings. You act as an observer of the whole experience, and that’s how you discover yourself.
When you understand your mental activity, you allow your unconscious to surface spontaneously. That’s how you can free yourself from the noise that confuses you and invades your conscience. You peel away the layers that cloud your vision and capture the world around you more clearly.
“Control implies resistance. Please follow this a little. Concentration is a form of resistance, the narrowing down of thought to a particular point. And when the mind is being trained to concentrate completely on one thing, it loses its elasticity, its sensitivity, and becomes incapable of grasping the total field of life.”
-Krishnamurti-