Nowhere to Go, But In

Letter from New Delhi

During the virus pandemic…

In this lockdown when you cannot travel, cannot go out of your home, cannot party, cannot dance, how long can you read? Or watch TV? To counter inactivity and boredom, you can easily create a meditative situation for yourself and your friends, writes Swami Anand Kul Bhushan.

In this time of global lockdown, you can’t go out. So, go in. Yes, take a trip into your inner space and discover new galaxies of your soul. Just sit silently and if you like, play soft music and let your mind wander. It is like a naughty child.

This will take you to many places and people. Let it go but watch it carefully. Tell yourself, “Now my mind is talking about this person. OK.” Then your mind will come back to here and now.

Again, your mind travels to faraway places you have visited before. Monitor its travels and remind yourself, “Now my mind is visiting this place. Never mind, come back.” And play this game with yourself.

It is like watching a road crossing with traffic lights. In the morning rush hours, you see cars coming bumper to bumper at the traffic lights. There is hardly any distance between one car and the next. Once the rush hour is over, the cars are less and the distance between them is much more. Just replace the various cars of different makes and colours with your thoughts and the distance between them as a space, and you can get close to meditation. How? By focusing on that empty space when your mind is not. When you are in this no-thought period, you are in meditation.

From the Alone to the Alone

Now you are alone. With plenty of nothing all around you. And yet you are not lonely. You are very aware of yourself, your surroundings and your being. This thoughtless awareness is one of the definitions of meditation by the enlightened master, Osho. When you do this meditation regularly, you will find that you are more relaxed, more centered and more peaceful. With regular practice, it grows on you.

“The first thing to be remembered about meditation is that it is not something that can be done,” says Osho in his book, Flight of the Alone to the Alone, “Throughout the world people have the notion that meditation means doing something. It is not a doing, it is not an act, it is something that happens. It is not that YOU go to it; it comes to you and penetrates you. It destroys you in one way and recreates you in another. It is something so vital and so infinite that it cannot be a part of your doing. Then what is to be done? You can only create the situation in which it happens. All that you can do is to be vulnerable and open to existence from all sides.”

In this lockdown when you cannot travel, cannot go out of your home, cannot party, cannot dance, how long can you read? Or watch TV? To counter inactivity and boredom, you can easily create this meditative situation for yourself and your friends.

Just invite them on social media to join you in meditation, and set a time for meditation. Exchange a message, just an image that you are starting to meditate with music and then go inwards. After all, Osho has said that if his followers gather at 7 p. m. and sit silently to meditate, he will be present among them. Who knows, you too may get enlightened.

Kul Bhushan worked as a newspaper Editor in Nairobi for over three decades and now lives in New Delhi

* Published in print edition on 20 March 2020