Do not meditate for peace, meditate in peace
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Is meditation required?
What is meditation?
is it like concentrating on the breathing?
To concentrate is to force the mind to a particular object, and the mind doesn’t like being forced. So, if mediation about concentration then the mind will never agree with meditation. Or, is meditation something else?
What is meditation?
The very action of a peaceful mind is called meditation.
Whatever you do in peace is meditation.
This is meditation. That is meditation. All is meditation.
Meditation does not bring peace, meditation begins in peace.
Peace is not the end of meditation; peace is the beginning of meditation.
You cannot meditate in order to be peaceful.
When you are peaceful, all is meditation.
And what prevents you from being peaceful?
The idea that you need to do something to get peace. So, the very effort to meditate is a barrier to meditativeness.
Wherever there is a formal structure of meditation — an effort, a method, a technique — it is guaranteed that there can be no meditation there, not even by chance. Because now you have institutionalized, formalized, decreed that you are aiming towards peace. One lives in peace, one doesn’t aim towards peace.
Your efforts don’t further peace; peace furthers itself.
Whatever you do in peace reinforces the peace.
Whatever you do, believing in absence of peace only extends the apparent absence of peace.
Your friend is in your home, you believe he is not there. Since you believe he is not there, so you switch off all the lights, lock the house and go out looking for him. Now, what will happen? Will you ever find him? When you go out looking for that which is already in your home, you have guaranteed that you will continue searching.
So, never begin with a flawed assumption. Never.
That’s what all the meditators are doing — Locking up peace in the house, switching off all the lights, bolting from the outside, instructing the guard to shoot anyone who tries to go in or get out. And then they have gone all over the place looking for the friend. “Where is He? Where is He? God! God! We can’t get you, God! God the unreachable, God the unknowable, God the unthinkable, God the unnamable.”
He is sitting in your home. Go, open the door!
Jesus said, “Truth knocks,” here God is knocking from the inside. Jesus was joking when he said that “Knock and the door shall be opened.” You don’t have to knock; the Truth is knocking and that too from the inside. Open the bloody door! But you are busy meditating. You have come to Rishikesh, your friend is there in your home thousands of miles away, and you are searching for him here. How will you get him here?
A few years back I had joked and said that
‘The race was won by the one who did not run.’
This race, you can win only by not running.
If you move even an inch, you have lost the race.
This race only takes you away from yourself — don’t run it, don’t participate.
Excerpts from a ‘Shabd-Yoga’ session. Edited for clarity.
Watch the session: Acharya Prashant on Jesus: Do not meditate for peace, meditate in peace
Originally published at prashantadvait.com on December 17, 2016.
