nerally, we live in the world of thoughts. If we close our eyes and think for a moment about who we are, all of us would get different answers. Our name, family, relationships, city where we live, home, job, properties, community, religion, belief system, thought process, and so on. Generally, a few of these things will come to our minds. All of them exist just in our minds. Just because it exists in the minds of all the people around us, it looks so real. For example, a movie in the picture hall looks more real because the lights are switched off and the walls are soundproof. We are cut off from the reality outside the hall. In the hall, everybody cries and laughs together, making it quite a realistic experience. As we get lost in the movie, it becomes increasingly difficult for our minds to remember that it's just a movie. That's why we get engrossed with the characters and feel highly emotive.
Isn't the same true about our name? Since childhood, we have been called the same name, and that's why we have become so used to it. Family also exists in our minds. It's strange to see that the same son, whose centre of existence was his parents before marriage, suddenly, after his marriage, doesn't even feature them in his concept of family. His sense of family is confined to his wife and children. The same holds true for many relationships. The same girlfriend or wife for whom one will sacrifice even his life becomes the biggest enemy if she cheats him. We have so many incidents where people murder or throw acid on the faces of their ex-girlfriends.
Our mind holds on to one or the other identity. Some identities are held very tightly, while others are held lightly. It varies from person to person. For one person, his identity with the religion may be very strong, while for another, his self-image may be stronger. Similarly, one may have the strongest identification with his self-image of being right, while another person may have a similar strong identification with his social image. Whatever we identify with, all identifications exist in the domain of thoughts.
We are so used to being in the world of thoughts that it is almost impossible for us to stay without thoughts, even for a few seconds. That's why most of the time, when we sit in meditation or practice spirituality, we just replace one thought with another. For most people, spirituality is all about some out-of-the-world experience. We get bored with the routine experience and want some thrill, and some Baba promises to make us experience ecstasy, and we become a blind follower. In most cases, these experiences are nothing but mental imagination or hallucination. It's just based on mass hypnosis. Just because so many people practice a technique together, and the Baba performs a dance or sings a song, and some of his followers experience a mental projection, others also get mesmerised, and the entire group feels some kind of "divine" experience. It's nothing more than a mental projection.
The problem is that if thoughts are "electrons" in motion and we have been used to living in the world of thoughts since childhood, how do we experience reality at a subtler level? Maybe at the level of sub-atomic particles like bosons and fermions? That seems impossible since the foundation of our cognition is laid on thoughts. We can't experience anything smaller than the electrons. It's because our entire cognition is based on the flow of these electrons. Modern-day quantum physicists have proved the existence of bosons and fermions through experiments at CERN (the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland), which are the fundamental particles of all subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. These experiments have also proved the existence of the Higgs field, where these little bosons and fermions emerge. How can our brain become conscious of reality at the level of the Higgs field? That's why meditation is not about thoughts. In fact, the first step in meditation is to move beyond the thoughts. However, quite often our brain keeps playing one trick after another in the name of meditation, keeping us engrossed in the world of thoughts. We feel as if we have had some blissful experience, the herd confirms the same, and we feel elated. In reality, rather than coming out of the dark well of our thoughts, we fall deeper into the same.
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