As the title very clearly points out, am gonna philosophize. So either you stick on reading and wise up or you run for your life. You make the choice now.
Alright, for those who decided to stick on... this is the story.
Now that Mausams is making a slow exit and leaving a gap of a few extra minutes a day in my life, I decided to go back and restart my pursuit of an enlightened and peaceful mind.
It all started with the book "The Autobiography of a Yogi", which to me, more than anything else, tells the story of how you can do whatever you want in life as long as you work for it. If you work on it with the due intensity and determination, never once giving up, you can even be in complete control of your mind. The book then goes off to say that with complete control of your mind, you can do even the most improbable things like time travel or levitation etc. But at the end of the day, all of it starts with the simple task of meditation.
I have always believed in the power of meditation. The fact that it is so damn hard to do in itself should mean that there is something pretty intriguing about it. To genuinely shut off all sounds and images for one's mind is pretty difficult for seconds, let alone minutes and hours. So being able to do that, I believe, would come with its due benefits including...the most important one for me...the ability to not get stressed out about anything.
Only issue - I never meditate. I used to as a child, I have had random bouts of wanting to get back to it (and with some reasonable success for a couple of days too) but never was successful in maintaining the habit.
About a year ago I signed up for the lessons on a particular meditation technique. This one is prescribed by the Self-Realization Fellowship established by Paramahansa Yogananda, the author of The Autobiography of a Yogi. The whole intent is to learn a very systematic way of meditating, something more scientific than religious.
So yes, I had signed up, got the lessons via mail and then happily ignored them. I did feel a pang of guilt every time I see the stack lying around in the house, but I simply did not have the interest or the determination to get working on it.
Until today. Today I decided that instead of reading The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest before I go to bed, I will read the SRF Lessons.
Which was a brilliant decision really.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first couple of chapters (the meditation lessons have not started yet and these are introductions). They basically re-emphasize the philosophy of if you want to, you can. In their case, they are talking more about how it is possible to elevate your mind over and above all the worldly pleasures and concerns if you indeed work on it with a steely steadfastness. It all boils down to will power, after all.
To cut a long story short, by the end of reading those chapters, I was feeling really good. Very positive. There are so many issues both at work and with the film still ahead waiting to be tackled, but somehow after reading those chapters, I felt that they are manageable. I had not even started to meditate, but I was already feeling that my mind has calmed down. I felt that these problems too, like everything else before them, would be solved one way or the other and there was no point in stressing over it. It was just a matter of keeping at it.
With that overwhelming feeling of faith and relief, I was ready to go to bed a very happy person.
Beautiful.
524 more to go.
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