Questioner:
What is the purpose of meditation? Why should we practice meditation?
Swami Premodaya:
Everything that you do amounts to meditation. Whatever you focus on, whatever you concentrate on, whatever you give your energy to, whatever you think about—is meditating upon it. Ordinarily, that is not the everyday understanding of meditation, but it is true.
Most people are meditating on their problems. Most people are meditating on what they like or do not like. Most people are meditating on how to be happy, how to have a better life, how to make more money, how to get sex—so do not be confused. What you give your attention to, is your meditation.
Formal meditation, the ‘practice’ of meditation, is an antidote for these involuntary meditations that people are always engaging in without realizing it. You get to focus on something different, something perhaps of your choosing.
Everybody is searching for happiness, but most people are meditating on unhappiness. Most people’s thoughts are concentrated, again and again throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout their lives, on what they do not like, on what is unsatisfactory in their lives, on what makes them unhappy. And then they wonder why things are the way they are, when they have been spending a lifetime meditating on unhappiness!—promoting thoughts and feelings and sensations of unhappiness, simply by dwelling on them, simply by anticipating, by imagining, by dwelling on, by focusing on—in the attempt to prevent or eradicate. But nevertheless, that is not the result. The result is: you experience what you meditate on, more and more. The more you meditate on it, the more you experience it, the more it comes to you. Because meditation, deep down, is an attraction mechanism. It is a magnet—operates like a magnet. Where your attention goes, operates magnetically.
Most people’s attention is on themselves, twenty-four hours a day: “What can I get?” “How should I feel?” “What do I want?” The attention is all “I.” It is all self-focus. So everyone, in that sense, becomes their own meditation. They are meditating on themselves.
But it is not a fruitful meditation. It is a meditation that only keeps a tiny focus—does not usually bring anything. You become what you meditate on; you become what your attention goes to. You become more and more imbued with what your attention is focused on. Magnetically, it surrounds you more and more, and even manifests more and more.
So this is why, in all spiritual traditions without any exception, there is at least some kind of emphasis on the thinking process, on how one handles one’s thoughts (whether that is the primary focus or not the primary focus). Every tradition has something to say about thoughts. Well, your thoughts are your meditation. It is for good reason that every tradition has something to say on that subject. And what most religions and most spiritual traditions say is: Nothing exists without a thought first. And there is no question that that is true.
If thought is the beginning of everything in this life, what kind of thoughts do you have? You have to ask yourself, “What am I meditating on? What is my pattern throughout the day, throughout the week, of my internal dialogue, of the thoughts that pass through me, of where my attention is centered?” You have to look with an honest eye at what you are meditating on. All the earnest meditation practices in the world will not take you far, if the rest of the time you are practicing negative meditation day in and day out.
…So you can do this in daily life. Every time you notice (and you notice many times in the day) how you are having a negative thought, how you are focused on something that is depressing, how you are saying something negative to yourself, that can become a cue to turn your thoughts to thoughts of joy—to taking just those few seconds of noticing and contacting joy within you, instead of going along with the problem thought, the negative thought, the unsatisfactory idea, the feeling of something not being right. You can immediately stop that feeling. You can immediately stop that thought in the moment, dead in its tracks, and replace it with a moment of contacting joy. That is changing your meditation in mid-stream—changing the negative habitual meditation, into a positive one.
It does not take any special ability, does not take a college degree, and does not take great skill as a meditator. It just takes the willingness to see how easy it is, and not let the mind sidetrack you into, “Oh, that is dumb,” or, “It is not natural,” or all the things the mind says to keep joy covered over. Because the more joy is around—the more it comes out in you—the less role the mind has in your life.