Meditation ... Silencing the Mind's Activity

Meditation is the progressive quieting of the mind until it reaches its source in thought, the realm of pure consciousness. Today many people recognize that the most fundamental level of nature is what mathematicians and physicists call discontinuity. It’s the gap between vibrations, it’s the gap between thought, and it’s the gap between frequencies of information and energy. This is a realm of infinite possibilities, this is a realm of non-local correlation--everything is connected to everything else. This is a realm where the dynamic activity increases in the midst of uncertainty. This is a realm of infinite creativity. And this is the realm where intentions have infinite organizing power. It’s the consciousness behind our thoughts, which is also the consciousness behind all the intelligent activity of the universe. This realm of existence has three domains: personal, transpersonal or collective, and universal—the mystery that we call God.

There are many kinds of meditations, mantra meditation, Primordial Sound Meditation, Transcendental Meditation. These are all forms of mantra meditation which involve sound and the sense of hearing. But one can go to this level through any one of the five senses. One can meditate through the sense of sight using yantras. Yantras are geometric visual expressions of basic vibrations of the universe. One can also transcend through touch, through smell and even through taste. Meditation is the experience of going beyond space-time, matter, information, and cause and effect relationships, into the realm which is your source, your spirit.

At the Chopra Center we teach Primordial Sound Meditation which is a form of mantra meditation. The mantra is selected based on your Vedic astrology chart, but there are other valid ways of selecting a mantra also. A mantra is a sound which has no history; it’s a thought which has no history. And of course when you close your eyes doing nothing you have other thoughts which have a history. If I have a thought “I am Deepak” then there comes a history with that, karma with that thought. When you use a mantra or even a phrase like “I am” –if you close your eyes and just repeat “I am,”--you are using a meditation tool that allows you to bypass the mind’s history and patterns. Don’t repeat “I am Deepak” because that has a history, or anything that has a history. Just repeat “I am.”

Remember that when Moses went to the burning bush and asked God his name, God said “I am that I am,” or when Jesus answers “Before Abraham was, I am.” “I am” is always infinite possibilities. There is no baggage attached to it. This is the same concept as the word aham in Sanskrit.

There are many ways to do meditation. When you introduce a sound like that in your consciousness, it competes with other thoughts and gradually both thoughts and mantra become vague and abstract. Ultimately there is an experience called ‘no mantra and no thought.’ This is when you have arrived where you started from. As T.S. Eliot says: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started…and know the place for the first time.”

Meditation has many advantages: it is a stress relieving process, but it also allows you to get in touch with the source of all creativity. It allows you to get in touch with that field where intention is all-powerful, where you have insight, you have revelation, you have intuition, you have the power of imagination, and where you become co-creators with the mystery we call God. Meditation improves our physical being, our emotional being, and ultimately restores us back to our spirit. In another topic, I will talk about how meditation leads to higher states of consciousness.

The ability to think is a remarkable ability, but the ability to not think is even more remarkable. In the end we human beings are more than human thinkings, human feelings and human doings. Those are only the manifestations of that human being.

Written by Deepak Chopra