Meditations

In the past few months, I’ve had this conversation with a few friends, and they seem to resonate with this understanding. Someone suggested that I should write this down, so these are my thoughts:

I think meditation is one seemingly simple and yet profoundly potent way to change the hardwired self. And what feels right about it is that no one needs to sit me down and lecture me, fill my head with traditions, rules, do’s and don’ts, ideas of what is right and wrong. I can simply sit down, close my eyes, and try to quiet my mind. And in that very attempt, something begins to unfold. A kind of battle starts. I call this a ‘battle of self created illusions’.

In that battle, if I can stay with it honestly, it starts revealing things in a very clear manner- what is unsettled inside me, what is unresolved, what is noisy, what is still cooking beneath the surface. Things begin to come up one by one. Sometimes it’s an exposure to what I was otherwise sidelining. I become aware of things I have been carrying without fully seeing. And once it becomes visible, I can then choose to address it.

The next day, when I sit again, perhaps something else appears. Another layer, another issue, another knot. And over time, through that repeated process, it starts feeling possible that many parts of life can gradually be brought into better order—relationships, food habits, the kind of people I keep around me, the kind of information I consume, the kind of places and environments I am drawn toward. All this, simply because I chose to sit, close my eyes, and try to become still.

The enigma is, meditation seems simple on the surface, but to truly sit and settle into it, many parts of life begin to matter. If something is off, it often shows up in some form.

Let’s say I sit for meditation tonight, but my stomach feels heavy or uneasy and my attention keeps getting pulled there. That may make me more aware that what I fed my body today did not sit well with it. Maybe I ate something overly processed, excessive, or simply not right for me. And then I see, in a very direct way, that the state of my body affects the direction of my attention. So the next day, I will naturally feel more inclined to eat better—not because someone taught me, but because I felt the consequence.

The same happens in relationships. If I have an unresolved issue with a close friend or family member, when I sit quietly, that issue starts rising up. Not always in a clean or objective form, but enough for me to feel its weight. I begin to see my own part in it more honestly. I start to see where ego distorted my judgment. I begin to sense what a path forward could look like. And then I can choose to address it with more clarity than I had before.

The same is true, I think, for many lifestyle habits. Meditation starts making you aware of subtle consequences. It makes certain things harder to ignore. And because of that, you start making changes—not dramatic, performative changes, but small, precise, almost invisible ones. You change- your lifestyle choices, your food habits, your waking up pattern. You change who you spend time with, how you speak, how you react, how the chain of thought is triggered by stimuli and and how cause and effect work. And over time it becomes more and more subtle, more micro-level, and more refined.

And I think one deep thing meditation does is that it starts giving rise to virtues from within, not as borrowed ideas, but as direct consequences of seeing your own self honestly.

The first of these, I think, is humility. If someone believes they are mentally very strong, very capable, very disciplined, or that they can take on any challenge and conquer it, they should seriously give meditation a try. Because meditation can humble you very quickly, and almost embarrassingly so. You sit down thinking you are in control, and within moments you see that you cannot even control your own thoughts. You cannot stop them from appearing. You cannot easily hold attention steady. You cannot prevent the mind from wandering, fantasizing, resisting, getting sleepy, getting restless, getting distracted. And that realization lands deeply.

You begin to see that maybe you are not as ‘capable’ as you thought. Maybe the ego had built a picture of strength that had never really been tested. Meditation tests it immediately. And so humility starts to arise—not as some moral lesson someone gave you, but as a self-induced reality check.

And I think from there many other virtues can begin to emerge. You start seeing your laziness. You start seeing your lack of focus. You start seeing how easily desire takes over you, how quickly sleep overtakes intention, how fragile your attention really is, how little command you actually have over your subconscious thought patterns that govern your every waking moment. And even just becoming honest about that is already a major step, because most people don’t want to face their actual shortcomings. We often live at the level of abstractions, of flattering ideas about ourselves, and not at the level of direct observation. Meditation starts breaking that illusion.

And as one stays with it, it can slowly give rise to patience, because progress is not a step function. It can give rise to deep discipline, again because to see quality change in meditation, you have to fix a number of outward things and keep doing that daily. It can give rise to honesty, because the mind reveals what you were hiding from yourself. It can give rise to restraint, because you begin to see how compulsive your desires are. It can give rise to courage, because sitting still sometimes means facing what is uncomfortable, unresolved, or outright painful. It can give rise to compassion, because once you see how difficult it is to govern your own mind, you become less arrogant in judging others. It can give rise to responsibility, because you start seeing your direct participation in your inner state. And it can even give rise to a kind of quiet nobility, because you are no longer living only from impulse.

This doesn’t imply that meditation makes a person perfect. And not everything that comes up in meditation can be trusted either. Discernment is still needed since a lot of stuff is self created illusions.

But I still think that if one sincerely keeps sitting, keeps observing, keeps trying to still the mind without lying to themselves, many noble qualities can begin to emerge naturally. Not because someone preached to them or they learnt it from a youtube video. But because the reality of self, starts correcting the self from the inside.

To others, it may almost look as if you have adopted some strict yogic discipline, or as if someone taught you an entire code of living. But perhaps no one did. Perhaps it came from within—not as a fantasy, not as some big mystical claim, but from repeatedly seeing what helps clarity and what disturbs it. You begin to gather a kind of lived knowledge. Not borrowed knowledge. Not second-hand morality. Lived knowledge.

This is why I feel there is something almost hidden here. If a person just tries to quiet the mind, the attempt itself can begin teaching them. Not by handing them secrets to life, (well at least not immediately) but by making the consequences of their way of living more visible. In that sense, meditation can become a teacher without preaching. It does not always tell you exactly what is true, and it does not remove the need for discernment, but it can make it much harder to keep lying to yourself.

And this also makes me think about spiritual traditions. I feel that many of the disciplines, rituals, and ways of living that came from great contemplatives may have originally emerged from direct inner seeing—from deep meditation or revelation they experienced. They saw something real about how ‘the self’ works, about what disturbs it and what refines it, and then they expressed that outwardly in the form of teachings or disciplines.

But many of us become only attached to the outer ways as to the inner source. We inherit the ritual, the rule, the discipline, the exoteric shell—but forgot the actual cause to this effect.

Perhaps what I weigh on is this: one does not have to begin with a mountain of instruction about what is good or bad, pure or impure, right or wrong. Maybe one honest place to begin is much simpler. Sitting down. Closing eyes. And try to still the mind. Then watch what resists that quiet. It may begin changing much more about self than expected.