Dialogue With Med Dr (Prof) Nirmal Gupta

A blog with its title at the end and a question.

Don’t we all live in a world that is moving a very fast pace? Earth itself moves at an incredibly fast speed of 1,600 km per hour roughly (460 meters per second) at the equator. Therefore, when it comes to living anywhere on the planet Earth, none have a choice but live in fast paced world. But that’s about our bodies and physical matters around us.

If someone had asked the question with regards to the pace of our minds? Well then, it would be practically impossible for the science (that we know) to answer this question because everyone’s mind is busy at a different speed.

Isn’t that we often notice some are with slower and some have a very fast mentation? But again, we are aren’t talking about mentation. Here, I’m talking about a very silent but amazingly powerful activity (both in creative and destructive sense) that takes place in our minds that we seldom care to notice about. Our minds pace is often frantic. It is always busy doing something, not allowing itself to take a moment of rest, not even during sleep (because it likes to dream). And what are we doing to help this busy companion mind of ours? Nothing, and nothing at all. In fact we are fighting stillness every step of the way. We are all, thinking, writing, marching, shouting, sermoning all the time----Keep Moving. Hahaha.

Several amongst us read books and newspapers in the bathroom, in trains and flights, even while walking on the office corridors, pavements and streets. They were paper books and newspapers earlier, now these books and newspapers are on our smart phones, tabs and pads.  The bottom-line is that we are all clamoring for more information, data and facts to extract more juice and fun for life.

Every movement of ours in this modern world is centered on our connectivity, its human being instinctual need. It could be physical, optical or electronic. Initially modes of faster connectivity (through land, water and air and now electronic) brought us all together by shrinking the world into a global village. However, before we could realize these modes of faster connectivity, which broke our physical limitations of boundaries have already shattered traditional joint family systems.  In the past villages and communities were formed by a dozen or even less numbers of family clans, each with 3-4 generations living together, but not anymore. Now sons and grandsons live either in separate house or in different place and our neighbor is an unknown similarly dislocated son or a grandson of a different village or city.

Real-time visual and voice connectivity at lightning speeds are taking this toll even further, where nuclear families have started getting disconnected to living and working apart and coming together only on weekends or whilst holidaying. To be happy, peaceful and to feel secure, every living creature needs proximity of its loved and related being; be it a human or an animal of land, underground, water or air.  Modern connectivity has failed to deliver “togetherness” -great necessity in today’s hyperlinked world, where we can know anything, at any time in several different ways and formats.

Most of us think that meditation is all about stopping/ controlling and even crushing our thoughts, in order to get rid of emotions. On the contrary it is not about controlling the mind or thoughts. It is something very different from it. It’s more like taking a pause in our fast paced lives, take step backwards, and trying to observe our endless thought process as calmly as possible. It’s about taking a role of an unattached witness, who observes thoughts coming and going — without judgment, attachment, joy or pain but with a fully relaxed but an alert mind.

The facts is distractions are everywhere. Many question, as seeker and some as skeptics; if meditation can improve ones creativity and focus? Maybe, but it depends on what kind of meditation one is engaged in. Some scientific explorations   have been undertaken in to various types of meditation methods; c.f. (a) focused-attention (in which ones focuses on own breathing) and (b) open-monitoring or Zen meditation (where participants observes internal thoughts as they come and go and external or bodily effects) and (c) Loving-kindness meditation. Researchers at Leiden University at Netherlands have obeserved that creative thinking can be positively influenced by two of the widely practiced methods; focused attention and open-monitoring meditation techniques. Meditating subjects after practicing mindful stillness demonstrated increased ability to generate new ideas and solutions to given experimental problems in the study¹.

There are many achievers who have found or enhanced their creativity in mindful stillness. John Lennon, George Harrison, Yehudi Menuhin and many other prolific singers, writers and fortune 500 company owners, CEO’s, celebrities and world leaders admitted to have gained in their artistic, literary and societal pursuits with less tension and resistance and with a more effective application of mind and aptitude. Acclaimed Rock n' Roll artist Leonard Cohen and Travel writer Iyer, chose stillness in their lives going nowhere for their creations and adventures. Obviously, in the stillness of No-where they could find something that they could not have found Any-where.

Obviously in “No-where of meditative stillness” they found a heightened state of consciousness of their mind, which was beyond their reach “Any-where”. Many proclaim that perform meditation but the fact is that “meditation is not an activity that one can perform, it’s a state  of mind that one has to be in”.

Unfortunately although meditation is very popular few know what meditation actually is. Most consider meditation as an exercise of mental concentration on a object, outside or within our mind or something. Rest feel that during meditation we need to imagine something to achieve a state of peace or satisfaction. In reality, it is a state of vivid awareness, where the mind is alert and aware, and yet thoughtless. For an uninitiated not practicing individual It is difficult to have no thought in one's mind, but Energy Chakra’s (Kundalini) in our autonomic system helps us to achieve this state, once awakened through Self Realization.

All methods of meditation have one goal in common to slow down with an near impossible aim to completely stop the unending thoughts coming and going through our minds. Thus meditation is a state of thoughtless awareness. It is not an act of doing - it is a state of mindful awareness. We either are in this state or we are not, regardless of the activity we are doing. In fact, one can be in the state of meditation while performing routine worldly activities as another can be very far from meditative stillness even when sitting with eyes closed for hours or days in a jungle or on the top of a mountain.

Many saints, prophets and enlightened souls have described the state of meditation. But the actual process of achieving it is still a mystery, the great unknown secret to the happiness and peace in life.

Reference:

1: Focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness meditation: effects on attention, conflict monitoring ,and creativity–A review Dominique P. Lippelt, Bernhard Hommel and Lorenza S. Colzato September 2014 | Volume5 | Article 1083 | Pages 1-5 |

Before I conclude, if I may ask-

What Do You Think Of Making Efforts To Be In Meditation At Least for 10 minutes, Everyday?