When all search ends

Apr 21, 2010, 12.00am IST

Sumit Paul.

Meditation is not a system, nor is it part of organised religion. It doesn't even require God as a reference point. Because, the state of self-immersion, called bekhudi by the Sufis, has no object to focus on.

Not to be able to meditate is not to be able to see the light, the shadows, the sparkling waters and the tender leaf. So few of us see these things. Meditation doesn't save you from pain. It makes things abundantly clear and simple; but to perceive this simplicity, the mind must free itself, without any cause or motive, from all the things it has gathered through cause and motive.

Meditation is purgation of the known. To pursue the known in different forms is a game of self-deception. The meditator is the master. The meditator can act only in the field of the known; he must cease to act for the unknown that is yet to be. The unknowable doesn't invite you, and you cannot invite it. It comes and goes as the wind, and you cannot capture it and store it away for your benefit, for your use. It has no utilitarian value, but without it life is infinitely empty.

The question is not how to meditate, what system to follow, but what is meditation? The 'how' can only produce what the method offers, but the very inquiry into what is meditation will open the door to meditation. The enquiry doesn't lie outside of the mind, but within the movement of the mind itself. In pursuing that enquiry, what becomes all-important is to understand the seeker himself, and not what he seeks. What he seeks is the projection of his own craving, of his own compulsions, desires. Then all searching ceases, which in itself is enormously significant. Then the mind is no longer grasping at something beyond itself, there's no outward movement; but when seeking has entirely stopped, there's a movement of the mind that is neither outward nor inward. Seeking doesn't come to an end by any act of will, or by a complex process of conclusions. To stop seeking demands great understanding. The ending of search is the beginning of a still mind. And a still mind's like a clean slate, anything can be written on it and can also be expunged whenever one wants to wipe it out, for, only a clean mind has no ripples and is most receptive as well as contemplative. Otherwise the mind’s perpetually in turmoil.

A mind that's capable of concentration is not necessarily able to meditate. Self-interest does bring about concentration, like any other interest, but such concentration implies a motive, a cause, conscious or unconscious; there's always a thing to be gained or set aside, an effort to comprehend, to get to the other shore. Attention with an aim is concerned with accumulation. The attention that comes with this movement towards or away from something is the attraction of pleasure or the repulsion of pain, but meditation is that extraordinary attention in which there's no maker of effort, no end or object to be gained. Effort's a part of the acquisitive process, it's the gathering of experience by the experiencer. The experiencer may concentrate, pay attention, be aware; but the craving of the experiencer for experience must wholly cease, for the experiencer is merely an accumulation of the known.

Meditation is pure metaphysics. And metaphysical cravings transcend even spiritual longings. Persian mystic Jami said: "Bekhudi is the intoxication of the soul and the inebriation of the self."