Jargogled Impressions.

I have been trying my hand at meditation since the past few weeks. Nothing major, only a few intervals of spending time with my mind and my thoughts. Letting it go wild and then trying to tame it back to the breath. The app “Calm” has been helpful for the first 10 minutes and then I put on some music (Sigur Ros / Ravi Shankar) to equip my concentration.
The exercise has been positive. It has helped me bring out a peacefulness that is hard to match otherwise. Even cannabis has been lackluster when it comes to giving me that delicate balance that I have been striving for between the world and my mind.
Stoicism and meditation are one for me. While meditating shouldn’t serve no other purpose than to be one with yourself, for me, meditating has helped ward off influence from external agents and triggers. I am more aware and conscious of when I am in a state of losing the equanimity of my emotions and letting short-term drivers affect how I approach life.
I am willing to take on the 60-min for 60-day meditation challenge that has been circulating on mystic-Twitter for some time. While I have never sat alone with my thoughts for that long a period, I know, based on the 15-20 minutes I have been spending on this since the past few weeks, that it must be therapeutic and enabling. Hence the motivation.
It’s hard though to find that time in your daily schedule. But that, I think, is also part of the exercise. To prioritize this effort for 60 days requires a mental discipline and motivation that itself is reflective of the effort required to complete it in addition to the dedicated time alone.
From Vipassana to Shikantaza and to transcendentalism, Qigong to Daoist meditation – you can find as many meditative techniques and approaches as there exists maladies of the mind and soul. Indeed, meditation can never be a guided one. It can be taught sure, for simple instructions in understanding what we do, and think is essential for us to eliminate those and be one with our inner thought – the monkey mind.
Meditation, since the Vedic ages, have served many purposes. The simplicity and bare essential-ism of this practice helps steer it clear of the dangers of commercialism. Although with meditative apps climbing the charts in worldwide adoption, that has changed too. With apps like Mindspace, Calm, etc. the idea they are chasing is what Quibi is chasing with video content – bite-sized meditation classes to calm the anxious mind. Taking an hour out of your schedule to meditate may not work for everyone, but 10 minutes to spend with your innermost thoughts is doable and practical. The ubiquity of mobile means that anyone, anywhere, can sit down with their backs upright, their feet touching the ground, hands on their knees and eyes closed to take those deep breaths inside through your nose and out through the mouth. Anyone can do that!
The relevance and justified airtime being given to mental health issues is further driving adoption for these handy services that lets us take a breather in the middle of the day to focus on our breath, and observe how we can take agency with creating an induced state of being where our fluttering mind is kept in hold by our own willpower. Meditation can be crudely described as logical relaxation for the knowledge worker of modern times.
Further, meditation serves many purposes:
• Meditation as attentive presence
• Meditation as escape from stress
• Meditation as secular enlightenment
• Meditation for mental health problems
In many of these use cases, the technique (posture, props, chants, focus) and the environment (outdoors, guided, silent retreats) you create around yourself becomes important. In most practices though, the basic outcome people are striving for is a) a sense of tranquil presence and, b) a means to generate insights that are new and bereft of the bondage of ritualistic thinking. As in Jainism, Dhyana and vichaya offers the two broad ways in which meditation can help humans reflect on their existence and apply concentration to rid themselves of unwanted thoughts and noise from the external world.
As I sit here writing this post, outside my window there’s a construction worker sitting under the shade of a hemlock as he takes a breather (and a cigarette) from the modular town-homes being built since the past few months. His posture is relaxed and pensive while he has a diary lying open by his side. Its sunny outside, the kind of perfect weather that Seattle sometimes exhibits during the summer days. His meditations, as he sits down to relax, is a black box to me. His story, his journey right up to this moment of time hidden through the distance that separates us. No mobile, no method of taking himself away from the present moment to a far away world. Is that meditation? This seemingly effortless way to live?
Meditation isn’t necessarily a distinct exercise or a carved-out time to focus on the present, at least for me. The best way to meditate, it would appear, would be to hide it out in every action and every interaction we have with this world. Some liken meditation to be an exercise for the mind, for inflaming the muscles of the mind so that it is anti-fragile and hardened to take on whatever this world must throw on us. I differ. Meditation is what the ancient wise men professed – it’s a way of life versus something that you do.
Isn’t that enlightenment then? This ability to be mindful to the present, to meditate on our being and our inner thoughts on a continuous basis?

“You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall, seeing all its four feet, how it sticks to the wall, you have to watch it, and as you watch, you see all the movements, the delicacy of its movements.
So in the same way, watch your thinking, do not correct it, do not suppress it—do not say it is too hard—just watch it, now, this morning.”

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Watch your thinking. Not necessarily doubting your thoughts or second-guessing it, but really observing it passively in a non-judgmental way. Incorporate it as your default mode of being – of leading an examined life.