Some time back, I watched a movie titled "Shaitan". It is a movie about a black magician who takes control of a young girl through black magic and uses her to physically and emotionally hurt her parents and brother so that the parents may allow him to take that girl along with him to use her to strengthen his skills of black magic. The girl was hypnotized and would do anything at the command of the black magician right from slapping her parents to trying to kill his brother. I have also watched some of the magic shows where a person is hypnotized and starts following the commands of the magician and can do something of which he is not aware and when the hypnotism is over, he is surprised to see his behavior in the recorded video.
I often wonder how this brain can be commanded by someone else? In fact, a more important question that comes to my mind is "What if we are being slaves of our own social conditioning?". We all have different beliefs and mindsets, and by and large, these beliefs and mindsets are the product of the society we live in. An Israeli may feel that the people from Gaza are unjust and the same feeling may be carried by the people of Gaza in their minds against the people of Israel. Luckily for me, the civil services examination and all-India cadre provide an opportunity to come into contact with people belonging to different states of India and it is amazing to see the influence of culture on our mindset. Similarly, when we travel abroad and interact with the people of different countries at an informal level, it becomes all the more visible.
Probably, there is no problem with the mindsets and beliefs perse. They are definitely required for survival. We need to understand how different people in society think and behave, in order to live sanely. For example, if somebody comes from Europe to India and starts driving in India without knowing that in India people drive in the left lane, he is bound to meet an accident. However, if he starts believing that driving in the right lane if right and left is wrong and passes judgment against all the Indians for driving in the left lane, he would sound stupid. Thus, we need to realize that whatever beliefs and mindsets we have, are just the result of conditioning by society and they have a limited utility in a particular background or context. If the context or background changes, we need to relearn and reset our vantage point.
Meditation is not about analysis of the viewpoints or mindsets, rather it is the realization of the fact that all the mindsets and viewpoints are limited. In fact, the mind itself is quite limited and so are the thoughts that are the creation of the mind. In fact, all five elements have emerged from the consciousness: Prithvi, Agni, Jal, Vayu, and Aakash. Prithvi element, at the quantum level, manifests in the form of the nucleus of an atom, Agni in the form of photons, Jal in the form of electrons, Vayu in the form of electromagnetic energy, and Aakash in the form of thoughts. All these elements are put together from the entire universe and somehow we get fixated on certain thoughts that our brains have been conditioned with. I think that a magician or mentalist gets a better understanding of Aakash's elements and thereby controls the thoughts of different people.
Often we try to sit in meditation and our mind makes us dance from one thought to the other and at the end of the sitting. Meditation is not dancing to the tune of the mind, feeding some positive thoughts to the mind, or listening to some out-of-the-world lectures of some Baba or Guru. Meditation is not about feeding something to the mind rather it is about dropping the mind. Dropping fixation to all the elements. There is a continuous interaction among all the elements inside our body. We can experience everything in the domain of our mind. The interaction of the mind with different elements is reflected in the form of sensations. For example, the sensation of heaviness in certain parts of the body may reflect the interplay of Prithvi's element with the mind, while the sensation of heat or spark in some part of the body may reflect the interaction of Agni element with the mind, the sensation like waves may reflect the interaction of Vayu element with the mind, and a feeling of flow may represent the interaction of Jala element with the mind. The crucial aspect of meditation is witness mode wherein we can just observe the interplay rather than participating or getting fixated on that. Observation with mindfulness connects us to reality and we can see the interplay of all the five elements like different structures being created from Lego blocks. At the same time, we realize that all these structures are just a creation of the blocks and the building blocks of life (we may call consciousness) are capable of manifesting into infinite different structures.
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