The Importance of Meditation
Why do people remain unfulfilled despite having all kinds of comforts and conveniences? Sadhguru explains that the significance of being human is in striving to transcend limitations, which is what makes meditation important in human life.
What Meditation Means
Meditation or dhyana means to go beyond the limitations of the physical body and the mind. Only when you transcend the limited perspective of the body and mind do you have a complete dimension of life within you.
Your body is just a heap of food you have eaten. Your mind is just a heap of impressions you have gathered from the outside.
When you are identified as the body, your whole perspective of life will be about survival. When you are identified as the mind, your whole perspective is enslaved to the social, religious, and family perspective. You cannot look beyond that. Only when you become free from the modifications of your own mind will you know the dimension of the beyond.
This body and this mind are not yours. They are something that you have accumulated over a period of time. Your body is just a heap of food you have eaten. Your mind is just a heap of impressions you have gathered from the outside.
What you have accumulated is your property. Like you have a home and a bank balance, you have a body and a mind. A good bank balance, a good body, and a good mind are needed to live a good life; but they are not sufficient. No human being will ever be fulfilled by these things. They will only make life comfortable and conducive. If you look at us as a generation, never before could another generation even dream of the kinds of conveniences and comforts we have. But we cannot claim we are the most joyful or loving generation on the planet.
Meditation - A Scientific Tool to Transcend the Body and Mind
Your instruments of the body and mind are okay for survival, but they will not fulfill you because the quality of a human being is to seek something more. If you do not know who you are, are you capable of knowing what the world is? You can experience the true quality of who you are only if you transcend the limitations of your body and mind. Yoga and meditation are scientific tools towards this.
Unless you go beyond the limitations of the body and mind, your life will not be fulfilled with just eating, sleeping, reproducing, and dying. All those things are needed in your life, but our life is not complete even if you have fulfilled all these things. This is because the quality of a human being has crossed a certain boundary of awareness. It has to seek something more, otherwise it will never be satisfied. It has to become unlimited—and dhyana or meditation is a way of moving into the unlimited dimension of who you are.
| Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, and visionary, and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet, and internationally renowned speaker, Sadhguru is the founder of Isha Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human wellbeing. (www.isha.sadhguru.org) |
Enjoyed reading Khabar magazine? Subscribe to Khabar and get a full digital copy of this Indian-American community magazine.
