Acharya Ji, why don’t you suggest meditation techniques?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, why don’t you suggest meditation techniques?

Acharya Prashant (AP): When you were in the Ganga, were you querying about what water is? The fish asked the ocean, “So when am I going to be schooled about water?”

Since four days, what else have you done except meditation? But you have images of meditation, right? Somebody with his head buried in the sand and legs trying to shoot down the sky, that is meditation?

You are meditative right now. If the fish feels that she does not know water, then she suffers a punishment. The punishment is that she comes out of the water to search for water. If you will not know that this is meditation, then you will break out of this and go into non-meditation.

To look into your life, to be honest about your experiences, what else is meditation?

But this meditation is dangerous because it doesn’t spare any corner of your existence. You have to be continuously watchful, you have to look at everything and everybody. So, this meditation is a very inclusive meditation. This meditation is a very continuous meditation. You don’t even want to call it meditation because it will consume your entire life. It will burn down the ego to ashes. So, you don’t even want to call it meditation, right?

You’d rather call that meditation which is practiced in a corner of your being, in a corner, and for a limited time. You devote one corner of your house to meditation and one hour of your day to meditation, and that you safely and confidently call ‘meditation’. And that is not meditation at all, that is a dirty escape from the ‘innate meditativeness of life’.

Q: Acharya Ji, sitting in meditation and watching the breath isn’t good for relaxation?

AP: Why are you pushed to a point where you need to relax? Why are you living a life that tires you down so much that you need to relax? And by pursuing this method of relaxation, are you not protecting that needless life? Physical exhaustion is understandable. If you work physically hard throughout the day, the body is tired. But when you talk of these methods of…