Here Is What Happened After I Meditated For 49 Days! (Deep Meditation)
The following wonderful things will happen because of going deep in to meditation.
- You will get laid; a lot. If you don’t have a girlfriend, you will immediately get one and you will enjoy countless hours of ecstatic sex.
- You will be very successful and rich. If you are an industrialist running a sweatshop, meditation will enhance your productivity to make your employees work twice as hard and make a truckload of money.
- All your anxiety and social awkwardness will be gone forever. Say good bye to the silly life of a wallflower.
Sounds good, right. Actually none of these will happen with mediation. If it were the case there would be more meditation centers than bars and universities. But don’t worry, there is hope.
Asking what happens during meditation is a bit like asking what can I see when you drive from point A to point B. Well, it depends on where point A and point B are and how you are making the journey. If you are in a car, what you see will be different that when you are walking. But more importantly, whatever happens during the journey will not translate because your ultimate destination is the same no matter what you see or how you undertake the journey.
So what happens during meditation is not at all important. How it transforms you after the practice is the only thing that counts.
Let me explain with a real life example. It it important to understand this because meditation is one such rare process which is theoretically simple, but practically difficult.
I have a daughter who is currently in school and it was fun watching her grow from a cute little baby to a what can I say, cute little school-going girl. On the surface, the growth seems slow and steady. One day she starts using small words. First it was ma for mom and da for dad and then it turned in to two words and the sentences. One day she was crawling on the carpet, another day she walked with help and soon enough she was jumping from the couch. If you observe carefully, all these development happens in stage. When she is a very small baby, all she wanted was to be fed and to sleep. She was “all mouth” and the whole world is food. Then she started recognizing and relating to the people around her. Her world has now grown bigger it has food, bed, her tiny toys and mom and dad. It then grows bigger to include her grand parents, and then her cousins, then her friends and her teachers. Moving forward she will identify with the people in her city, state, country and so on and so forth. This is the stage concept of developmental psycholgy
With many people, this identification stops at some point. For example, you may identify yourself as a Presbyterian living in South Louisiana or you could be a Punjabi living in North Delhi and every one else may a look a bit “alien” to you.
This is the first thing that happens with meditation:
- You identify with every thing that is out there; and I mean everything.
You realize, experientially that your identification with anything objective was silly. What you thought of as a separate ego delving in the body of yours was absolutely false. It is a bit like trying to find darkness with a torchlight in your hand. You can’t find darkness because darkness isn’t real! It’s just absence of light.
When your ego vanishes, and your identity is widened, two interesting things happen. One, you stop suffering. The reason you suffer is not because of what happens outside you, but because of whats happening inside you. So meditation will not solve any of your problems, it will make you understand that you don’t really exist. If you don’t exist, who is suffering?
The second side-effect is that of compassion. There is a immense outpouring inside you to love and show compassion to innumerable beings out there who are suffering due to their false identities.
Now let’s get to the second thing that happens with meditation.
2. You are aware without any object of awareness.
Every time you become aware, there is some thing that is the center of awareness. It could be the person next to you. it could be this Quora answer or it could be breath if your are doing breathing awareness. But once this object is taken away, your awareness dissipates. It will get scattered across any thing and every thing.. You mind will get distracted and get in to the default mode of activity of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. With years of meditation practice, your awareness becomes stronger and stronger but without being intense. If hyperfocus is like sunlight at noon, meditative awareness is like cool moonlight. Some times this spills over throughout the day. Accomplished meditators can retain the awareness during their sleep as well.
That’s it. Noting more, nothing less. Everything else you heard is mumbo jumbo — Kundalini moving though your spine, astral projection and out of body experiences — none of this will help.
To end it, here is a little story from the yore.
One day during his travels, Buddha reached a village on the banks of Ganges. He was teaching Dharma to the villagers when some one came to visit.
“You say you are a full-enlightened person. I don’t trust any of that. Can you show this miracle and I will agree that you are a real Buddha”
Buddha kept his silence. The man then came close to the river, put his foot forward and started walking in to it. To every one’s surprise, he walked over the water without sinking and came back with look of a victor.
“How long did it take for your to master this” Buddha asked
“Twenty five years” asked the man
Buddha turned to the villagers.
“How much does the ferryman charge to take you across the river”
“Ten copper coins”
Buddha turned to the man.
“So you are saying you spend twenty five years of your life and to save ten copper coins”
Be wise.
