In its true essence, meditation is the process by which you can reach the substratum of your mind. The hotbed of your often troubled existence; your samskaras.
In its purest, highest form, meditation happens to you. You don’t do it. It is not an action, but a state.
When you reach high levels of meditative absorption, your mind and senses shut down. You close the upper floors of your mind so that you can get into its lower, deeper, foundations. So that you can access the home of samskaras.
We often hear advice about focussing on an object of meditation. Do you know why they tell you to do so? To first pull away your mind and senses from every other place. To stop their outward escapades, their random, drunken scampering. We all know how our mind behaves ordinarily, no wonder it’s called the monkey mind. When you focus on an object, your extraneous thoughts stop, your senses stop their outward dance. You stop paying attention to sounds outside, to the heat, the cold, the mosquito. The senses effectively turn inward. No stream of unchecked thoughts and no response to external stimuli, just holding the object in your mind space.
Controlling your senses and thoughts is hardly an easy process, it takes tremendous amounts of practice and patience. The wild horse of our ‘stream of consciousness’ is a very difficult thing to control. Do you know why? Why are they so random and unconnected? Because they are your samskaras, your subtle, unmanifest impressions popping in and out of existence. Except for the times when you are concentrating on a task, you can barely catch your mind’s tail as it runs amok like a crazy elephant in a bazaar!
Your mind’s utter randomness is the play of samskaras popping in and out of existence!
Meditation is the tool to control your barely controllable samskaras, hence it is seems so difficult. However, once you can establish higher states of meditation in your being, you can not only control them but also kill them off. You succeed not only in roping and taming the wild beast, you can now finally behead it. Entasy, or samadhi is the peak meditative state which scorches these samskaras from the root. However, the trick is that you can deactivate all your samskaras only by activating samskaras which allow the process to happen. This means you have to use favourable samskaras to kill off the unfavourable ones, and finally all of them. The process of reaching the peak meditative state of samadhi, that scorching furnace, requires you to activate your favourable, good samskaras.
So what are good samskaras?
Samskaras that allow you to turn inward, that allow you to withdraw from the outside world. Samskaras that urge you to lessen your engagement with external phenomena. Ironically, this usually happens the hard way, it is not straight forward. We hanker after people/things/sensory experiences to fill us, to make us feel better. However, as we saw, this hankering ends in disappointment. Invariably. We are so unfulfilled and disappointed by the false promises of the outside world that we disengage in frustration. This is usually the way our desire and samskaras redirect, change their course.
You see, we humans learn the hard way. That is why suffering is important, to set our priorities straight, to help us separate the grain from the chaff. Of course there are some people who are born this way, already inward facing. But they are few and far in between and usually far ahead on the evolutionary curve towards becoming supra-human.
So you see, the first step to our real goal is to activate our discretion or ‘Buddhi’. The Yoga sutras of Patanjali also identify it as the intellect as true intelligence. An active Buddhi makes us realise that there is something more to living than what is visible. That engaging deeper with the outside world will not fulfil us more. Buddhi gives us an insight into what can be, it makes the yogic process a known-unknown. Where previously we were ignorant of a different type of existence, we now become aware of such a possibility.
That is the job of Buddhi, the true intellect, to bring us into that understanding, as a gentle ushering, or as an earth shattering drag-in. Intense, acute suffering is a sure shot activator of your Buddhi. So if it has come your way, try milking it.
Yes, milk your suffering. Sounds absurd, but it is the truth. The truth is hardly ever pleasant.
Meditating is the most effective ammunition in your armoury to battle with the samskaric army, but alone, in itself, will take a long, long time. It needs support and amplification to become a versatile killing machine. Cognitive restructuring and emotional processing are two such amplifiers, strong armies in their own might. Cognitive restructuring, as the name suggests, renovates the house of your psycho-mental complex; breaks it down to build it anew. Emotional processing attacks each samskaric monster, sapping away its emotional charge. Samskaras are active only till their emotional charge, positive or negative, strong or weak, pumps life into them. Enlivens them, animates them. Squeezing the charge out of them is a sure fire way to deactivate them.