When did you start to have a mind? At your birth? Or when you were six months old? No. You started to have a mind and consciousness right from the moment in which a sperm from your father fused with the ovum from your mother. Since that moment, you started to have an existence, aware of the happenings in the outside world. You heard sounds, shared the ecstasies and anxieties of your mother, and waited expectantly for the return of your father. When somebody threatened your mother, you were afraid.
When you were born, you could recognize the voices of your near and dear ones. Your consciousness was limited of course. The stored up memory made you smile or startle in your sleep. Your consciousness, like your body, was not grown up, but it existed.
When you grew up to adulthood, your unconscious mind, which was once independent and all-powerful, started to be influenced by the thoughts in the conscious mind. Your fears and worries, agonies and ecstasies, hopes and aspirations started troubling it. Your oneness with and absolute dependence on the Universal Consciousness, the Root Cause of All, began to waver. Your wisdom and intelligence, very limited and primitive in comparison with the unlimited vastness of the Universal Consciousness, started to influence the unconscious mind in taking decisions of vital importance, hitherto under the care and guidance of the Universal Consciousness. Your decisions always went wrong plunging you into misery and wretchedness. Your conscious mind troubled and toiled, always in the wrong direction. Happiness is an occasional incidence in the general drama of pain; you would occasionally quote Thomas Hardy.
The unconscious mind will fashion your life strictly in accordance with your own perception of the world. If you think the world a gloomy, dismal place full of wickedness, such a world is in store for you. If you imagine that the people you meet and interact with are invariably villains, you are likely to meet only villains in your life.
Nor is your mind free from thoughts, thoughts of the negative kind, during your sleep. During your sleep, you worry about the future, repent about the past and scheme for the present. Part of these thoughts appears to you as dreams.
If you somehow manage to free your mind of all thoughts, your unconscious mind will once again take charge of your life. You will henceforth meet the correct people, take the correct decisions and your life will be a happy and exciting chain of events.
Meditation, therefore, is the art and technique of emptying your mind of all thoughts. Sit in an erect position, preferably in Padmasan and close your eyes. Try to make your mind free of all thoughts. Breathe naturally and think only of the incoming and outgoing air and count your breaths. Before you reach ten breaths, you will be surprised to find that, in spite of your best precaution, you are thinking about something, most probably about the greatest worry in your life.
Drive out the thought and continue your meditation. Take care that you do not fall asleep during meditation. In a week, if you manage to count a hundred breaths, without any conscious thought entering your mind, you have made good progress.
Level of your consciousness will dramatically improve, and all your dreams will come true. Wherever you go, you will command respect and you will cease to view anybody with envy or grudge.
If you continue practising meditation for an hour everyday, the ultimate purpose and meaning of life will be revealed to you, and you will conquer the division of time as past, present and future.
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