For Lovers of Meditation

Purposes of Meditation

by Shiv Mathur
(Mumbai)

Meditation may be done for various purposes. The most common one is to help focus your mind, control your mind, avoid mind chatter, remove negative thoughts, think better and have peace in the end. Most of us start meditating when we encounter problems in life or when we start realising what is going around us is not right.

I should put it in short that meditation is basically an introspection as well and then it moves to higher levels where you work on controlling your mind and ultimately look for eternal bliss, eternal peace which is not what we get from this material world.
Most meditative techniques are mechanical in nature and have a limited purpose of calming the mind as stated in my initial paragraph. Mechanical in the sense they teach you to try to focus on something like breathing so that you can start blocking and forgetting other negative or troublesome thoughts. Most people practice this kind of meditation.
I never meditated but in sub conscious mind I was working on to understand life over a period of last few years. Though there will be events in life which will make you think what life is and what gives real happiness. It basically starts with introspection. Doing introspection in a natural surroundings helps focus better where there are no distractions. That is why sages in India go deep inside the mountains to meditate. In short isolation from the material world makes one realise fast and easy.
We
are all made of energy from the cosmos and our mind is also a center of energy. Energy as we know will have positive and negative forms, so the whole idea is to possess positive energy and remove negative energy. Effectively, it is about removing and ultimately not allowing negative energies to enter one's body and mind.
Now how do you achieve this - This requires introspection about all the qualities a human being possesses. We are no less than a gadget which is judged by some basic parameters. We too have various parameters like speaking truth or lies, greedy or not greedy, jealous or not jealous, generous or non generous, loving or hating, caring or non caring, desires or no desires,etc etc. So if we start analysing ourselves for each and every quality a human being is supposed to possess and start understanding where do we need to correct and understand the meaning of each in the true sense and start imbibing the reality, at one stage you will be able to remove all the conflicting thoughts out of one's mind.
Basically it is pretty close to reaching realisation of life. Then one can be in a state of higher consciousness all the time and then there is no need to sit and meditate.
I am treading this path and hoping to explore more. I visit Rishikesh in the Himalayas often and it helps me tread the right path. I will pen more if people find it interesting.

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