Meditativeness, not meditation || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Questioner: Does meditation have something to do with attention?

Acharya Prashant: Meditation. What do you call as meditation? What do you mean by meditation?

Listener 1: Concentrating on something.

AP: So you mean some techniques that you may have read somewhere. They may be helpful but they are not the real things because all mediation and everything is stuff of your doing, it is coming from your mind. Mind wants to achieve something, so it starts doing something. But if that meditation can quieten your mind for a while then it’s worth it.

Then the question will be, ‘What do you want, the quietness for a while or the quietness of the entire day?’

Or do you want meditation to be something that is limited to 15 minutes a day and after that you are back to your old ways.

Meditation is not like exercising in a gym, that you go and exercise and you are done for the day.

Go for meditativeness, not mediation, because meditation is a confined, limited activity. Meditativeness is a way of life. Meditativeness means constant attention. Meditation is a tool, a technique of limited utility; not useless but of limited utility.

Meditativeness is, ‘*Wherever I am, whatever I am doing; walking, eating, sleeping, playing, in the classroom, in the playground, in my room, in the cinema hall, wherever I am, I am not lost, I am not unconscious*’, this is meditativeness. Meditativeness is not something serious, even while cracking jokes, I understand what is happening.

Meditativeness is joy. There is nothing serious about it.

Excerpted from a ‘Shabd-Yog’ session. Edited for clarity.

show_less